An Open Letter To Hiring Managers

Dear Hiring Managers,

How are you?

I feel for you, I genuinely do.

It’s been quite a 12-month period, hasn’t it?

From lockdown at one end to the great reshuffle to talent shortages now, you and your colleagues responsible for attracting and leading teams will have ridden all the highs and lows of pandemic work life.?It has been tough on all of us.

But we have a shared challenge right now in 2022 and I need your help.?Despite constant talk of record vacancies, a talent crunch, and a lack of available human resources I still know plenty of high-quality people across the world who have been on the job market for an extended period and remain there.?They were often in the wrong place at the wrong time during 2021, left without a seat when the music stopped, and are now struggling to access the demand in the hiring market.

“How can this be?” you might ask, "It doesn't make sense if companies need people and these people need jobs - how can we be getting it so wrong?" I know right?! Well, we will get into that throughout the contents of this letter but ultimately, we exist in a hiring system that is broken.?Worse still as well as being broken a lot of standard recruitment practices are actually pretty damaging for people too. Frankly, we all need to take responsibility for doing a lot better and getting out of our own way.

I am one of the lucky ones who has benefited from the changing world of work and the chaos caused by the pandemic.?Having formed Executive Career Jump a few years ago we now have the privileged position of talking to people about their working lives and job search experiences at scale, every, single day.?This means we get unique insights into what people are feeling and experiencing whilst on the job market and what they are looking for in a new employer. I want to share some of those insights with you today.

This letter forms part of our work as the LinkedIn Changemaker for Careers and Unemployment and is part of our commitment to paying it forward for the job search communities we represent. It is worth noting up front that I firmly believe that what is good for jobseekers is actually what is good for companies too.

There is some good news amongst all of this, and that is that there are things we can all do, for free to fix the broken hiring equation. Imagine a world whereby you can find people quicker, are less overworked and add value to all the candidates involved in the hiring process - it can be done.

To start to drive the required change the two key concepts I want to share in this letter for you to consider are "Qualifying People In, Not Out", and "Getting the Human back into Human Resources". This will only take you another 5 minutes to read so stick with me as the impact could be big.

1. Qualify People In, Not Out.

The overall problem here is that most of you are hiring based on past performance rather than future predictors of success. This is nuts if you take time to think about it as the world is changing at such a pace that past experience can no longer be the main predictor of future performance. If you make this mindset shift you can start to access wider, more diverse pools of candidates and get out of the loop of hiring based on a CV but ultimately firing people based on behaviors.

Instead, let's see available people as an opportunity and qualify them in - this starts with the job advert and should continue throughout the hiring process.

On the topic of job adverts have you actually looked through the job advert sections recently? Most of the job adverts I see are a complete shambles. Many are just lazily copied and pasted from previous or have a list of requirements that only a bionic human would possess. They are not inclusive at all and seem to be trying as hard as possible to put people off from applying. Bearing in mind the research on how women struggle to qualify themselves in for roles when they don't meet all of the advertised requirements this really is a counterproductive error. So once you finish this letter please review every job advert that is out there with your brand on it and work out how you can make it more widely appealing and try to ensure your teams put more thought into this process in the future to set everyone up for success.

The other great opportunity to qualify more people into your organisation and get out of your own way is at the interview stage. Now, I fully appreciate you have been badly burnt with hires who let you down in the past and as an ex MD I know all too well the pain that causes. But at the interview, you are acting like someone who has been cheated on and who is now afraid to fall in love again. You are adopting an interrogation mode, trying to find threats, trying to catch people out, and expecting full disclosure from the candidate whilst often overselling the job! Stop.

Set up an environment that puts the candidate at ease at the interview instead. Put a business problem on the table and solve it together, let them interview you and judge them on their questions, get a feel for their strengths and whether they would add to your culture. Qualify them in.

When you adopt this approach of "qualifying in" you create advocates and can often find people to be a solution in some way even if it is not for the original requirement. Of course, you are under no obligation to hire anyone, but you do have an obligation to give people a chance to present themselves in the most positive light possible and are unlikely to make the number of hires you are going to need in 2022 if you don't.

2. Get the “Human” back into Human Resources

If you have read this far then thank you and I want to share the other major shift we are asking for support with. As well as "qualifying in" the other thing we simply have to do across the industry is recognise that we are dealing with people throughout the hiring process. Actual human beings like you, your family, your friends, or your neighbour Dave.

Somewhere amidst the fog of ATS machines, CV's, portals, and our digital lives we have let our empathy and compassion slip. We started turning our cameras off during video interviews, turning up to interviews distracted, avoiding giving actionable feedback, or ducking and diving to dodge candidates' follow-up calls.

Job searching is tough, I am sure you know that from your own experiences but like many are perhaps just too quick to forget once you are back in a role. I observe the journey of those who get made redundant daily and can only describe it as a grieving process.

So please work out how you can get more human into your human resources processes. Be present, try and help others, be transparent, and remember behind every resume is a story. The interview you are conducting today is just another business meeting but for the other person in the room, it is potentially the biggest thing in their world right now.

I know you want to get better and thank you for your consideration. Even if the moral arguments in this letter don't resonate then the business argument should, as no amount of employer branding will ever fix a terrible candidate experience.

Together we can fix the broken hiring equation and deliver better outcomes for both jobseekers and businesses.

Thanks in advance for your support and let's get to work!

Yours Sincerely,

Andrew MacAskill - LinkedIn Changemaker for Unemployment and Careers

This article was written as part of the LinkedIn #Changemakers campaign – a campaign shining a spotlight on individuals using LinkedIn to drive genuine change in the world of work. To find out more about the partnership, read more?here . And if you want to join the conversation, share the one thing you’d like to change about the world of work in a post on LinkedIn with the hashtag?#ConversationsForChange .