The 3 Core Evils of Hiring and Recruiting
Why so many critical posts about recruitment on LinkedIn? Are they fair? Well, yes and no.
No, because there are an awful lot of great recruiters doing great things. Working their asses off to place the right people in the right company. I know a good many of them. They do a fantastic job and need to be recognised.
Yes, because there are things about hiring and recruitment that suck. Really suck. Really, really suck. Some are industry related. Some hiring manager related. But they all generate pain.
If you drill through the noise, there seem to be three core evils that are causing 99% of the pain.
1: Battery Farm Recruitment
Good recruiters have to honestly recognise that there are many awful recruiters employing terrible practices that cause the whole industry's reputation to suffer.
You all know of the banks of desks staffed by junior recruiters tasked to make x number of cold calls a day. The big scoreboard at the the end of the room displaying how many calls everybody has made. Illustrating who is on target and who isn't. The bell that rings when somebody places a candidate. The enforced round of applause from his colleagues.
You might not know that extreme incentive-target based performance pretty much guarantees bad practice. Look at Wells Fargo. All the fake selling to hit artificially imposed and randomly designed targets. Selling people accounts and moving money without telling them. The calls to family and friends to look like call targets are being met.
Are we saying this won't happen in this recruitment battery farms? Nobody does things like posting fake job ads to find possible recruits for as yet unavailable positions. Or sends CVs to hiring managers without asking the candidate if it's OK.
Because it would be a unique target-focused industry if it didn't happen.
Until these practices, rooted in 19th century management theory, disappear from the field, recruitment will have a bad reputation. It's impossible for it not to. The sheer volume of bad experiences such centres generate will undermine any good the great recruiters try to do.
This battery farm model also tends to be utilised by low barrier recruitment firms just entering the industry. Cold call and targets, but by inexperienced people. Not a pretty thing!
2: The Awful Experience of Job Hunting
Recruiters also need to recognise that, for many, the process of trying to find a job is mind-blowingly awful. It requires hour after hour searching through job boards, rewriting resumes and composing cover letters. Many times, just to match keywords so the ATS doesn't automatically reject the application.
It's incredibly, painfully time-consuming. The pain is then intensified by the auto-reject replies. It's impersonal, alienating and depressing. The candidate feels he's been treated inhumanely and lashes out on social media in response.
For many, finding a job and recruitment has become a never-ending slog of data processing and number crunching. It's like online dating, but worse. There's no promise of a happy ending. It's pretty much the most soulless activity you can do. So, anger and frustration will surface.
Somehow, the industry has to shift away from impersonal data and towards experiential interactions. In which the process of looking for a job has more to do with showing what you can actually do instead of matching keywords. Until it does, expect the vitriol to grow.
It's going to be a tough task as management is becoming infatuated by this type of searchable data. But it is achievable. At least in part.
3: The Practice of Hiring
There's a real issue with how companies hire. They have two considerations. The skill set match. And culture fit.
The above two sections illustrate what tends to get done around the skill search element. Keeping your LinkedIn profile updated. Rewriting resumes. Drafting cover letters. Even crafting out pain letters.
The reason for this intense focus? Probably fear. The hiring manager has to be absolutely sure the new hire can do exactly the same job as the person he's replacing. So the skill set and experience must match perfectly. Then, if the hire fails, the hiring manager is protected.
He can say, "look, the previous guy had exactly the same background and he was great. This isn't my fault. This hire just didn't fit."
Which takes us to cultural fit.This is where the serious, serious problem lies. If the hiring manager can protect himself via skill set and experience matching, the HR team can get blamed if the hire fails. So they have to cover themselves. Hence, culture fit.
But it's done so, so badly. There is genuine and good research behind the notion of cultural-fit, organisational-fit and job-fit. It's from the same research disciplines that inform employee engagement. It's really interesting stuff.
I've barely met anybody in the space who's read any of it!
Consequently, they rely on pseudoscientific personality tests, somewhat un-robust cognitive tests, and the gut feeling they get about you from an hour long interview. So, even if you match the experience and skill set profile, for no fault of your own, you might get rejected.
Just because of the fear of finding the wrong person! That the company could be organised and managed so such a thing isn't an issue? Unthinkable. Even though there's evidence that complex, pluralistic environments are far higher performing than those focused on strong culture and how to fit it.
What Can Recruiters Do?
Here are six suggestions that might help you better handle these three evils.
- Don't get defensive if you get criticised. Understand the pain of the job hunting process. And take the frustrated lashing out on the chin. It's not personal. If you show some empathy about the experience, chances are you'll have potential candidates wanting to have a better relationship with you.
- Consider employing models that have higher basic and lower commissions. It might sound counter-intuitive, but evidence across multiple industries shows you'll get a better performance from your team.
- Try to personalise your interactions. Do anything you can to eliminate bog-standard responses. That immediately lifts you from the crowd and lessens the pain of being rejected. Difficult if you are a battery farm recruiter, but not if you have some personal control of your processes.
- Spend time on your copy. If a job ad just asks for skills and experience, it requires the keyword matching pain during application. If it illustrates the benefit of the job for the employee, all kinds of interesting things might happen. Talk to Mitch Sullivan. He's a past master of designing engaging job ads.
- Learn about culture-fit and engagement theories. Then you can at least try to push the hiring company into considering different profiles. It might not be an easy conversation to have, but if you can persuade them, you'll almost certainly produce a wider range of quality candidates.
- Try to see potential candidates in experiential settings. Go to post-work Meetups and Hangouts. You'll quickly see who offers value in real-world situations.
NB: I've only been examining the practices of recruiting and hiring for about five weeks now.
My advantage is that my previous research has given me deep grounding in the foundational theories of cultural-fit, employee engagement, and organisational fear and anxiety. Not many people in the worlds of management, hiring or recruiting have this kind of background.
My disadvantage is I'm light on data on the actual day-to-day practices of recruitment. While I have spoken in depth to a number of people, I've done no observational research. So, if I've made any mistakes in these areas, please forgive me. I will do my best to rectify them in the future.
In my work and research, I look for gaps or absurdities in popular or academic thought about leadership, management, and organisation. Things that can harm the organisation or individuals involved. I help people move beyond blind faith in these supposed 'best practices' and develop ideas and models that fully suit the unique requirements of their company.
If you are as passionate and serious about rethinking organisations as I am, please send a connection request. Thanks.
I fully appreciate any likes, shares or comments. I always do my very best to reply to any comments posted.
Corporate Solutions Trainer at Dale Carnegie & High Performance Coach
8 年Dr. Richard Claydon – you raise some very important points here. We all know that blaming people won’t solve anything, as the old saying goes “any fool can criticize and most fools do”. So now we all have a platform here to contribute some possible solutions to what is a problem that affects all of us. If companies can hire and retain the right people, the we all get better products and services. Hiring great people is a process, designed, owned and operated by people. Every company connects with other companies or directly to their clients. There is a chain from suppliers to clients to end users. If the link between companies and the link to the end users is weak then problems arise. Now using this model, job seekers, recruitment firms and the companies looking to hire need to have a seamless connection where information flows in both directions. This is a process and must be properly designed and have people that are trained to make it work. We have the problems that Richard has identified because we have neither well designed processes and there is minimal training for recruiters, hiring managers and job seekers. HR professionals and hiring managers need to see recruiters as partners and as part of their team. If they treat recruiters the same way they treat their clients that will be a much better relationship and recruiters need to treat candidates the same way they treat their clients. If recruitment firms want to be treated by their clients in that way, then they must do more to invest in their people so that they have the right skills and attitude to deliver the results. HR professionals need to select those companies that can prove that the recruiters know how to act as career advisors to candidates and as hiring experts to their clients. That's a big task but the good news is that the Mitch Sullivan's of this world are ready to do just that.
var challenge = response.accepted;
8 年Richard, that's a really well written article on one of the points I've myself encountered when recruiting and job hunting myself. Got a follow here and looking forwards to what else comes from your neck of the woods. p.s. i whole heartedly agree with every single point you're making in this article!
Using my proven knowledge/expertise in Administration to the advantage of a Great Employer. Unfluencer??
8 年It might help the recruiting industry if they actually took the courage to say to clients "This job advert is bad" or "you will not be able to get the person you want based on those specifications" and then told them why.
Founder, Owner / Managing Director - PASSIONATE ACTIVIST. The Really Caring 60+ Recruitment Company.
8 年@VV - WATCH THIS SPACE ............... !
Hospitality Leader - Author
8 年Here's the thing about recruiting, customer service, management, or really any human interaction anywhere; we have tendencies to remember and report the bad. It is easy for a recruiter to complain about the worst candidate, a customer service rep to remember the customer that screamed at them, for an employee to remember the bad manager. But, typically (I know it's a generalization), most things go just fine. And often, they go really well because people are trained and good at what they do. But we take those ok and great moments for granted. They set our expectations for the future so when someone doesn't live up to those, we get jarred. We are a complacent and spoiled society. These are really first world problems.