The recruitment problem chain
Everyone thinks they have it the hardest. If you speak to a hiring manager in any business, they’ll complain about talent attraction, interview process and recruiters. How they’re not supported enough and no one understands the needs of their team. If you speak to anyone in HR, they’re understandably angry at being under-resourced and spend a lot of time complaining about recruiters, recruitment agencies and every recruiting process any recruiter has ever talked to them about. So basically, recruiters. If you’re speaking to candidates, they’ll tell you about bad experience, employer branding and how hard it is to find the right culture, or even the right recruiter to represent them. Speak to recruiters and it’s as if they’ve got the weight of the world on their shoulders and they tell you all about the skills gap, late nights in the office, demanding clients, unrealistic pay expectations, the leaderboard and I could go on and on.
Every stakeholder in the recruitment game, in fact anyone who’s ever had to attract and retain talented individuals for their business, believes they have the biggest struggles or the hardest job. It’s like an exhausting, never-ending game of ‘my life is harder than yours’. As if each group is fighting to win the ‘worst-off’ award. Amidst all the yelling and shouting about who really does have it the hardest, I’m sitting here wondering how anyone has the energy to spare because the truth is, if you’re in the talent game at all, you’ve got a tough job, regardless of where you sit in the recruitment chain. It’s rough out there and the heydays of yesteryear when all you had to do was pick up the yellow pages and have a quick chat before shipping candidate off to a company are long gone my friends. It’s over. Everything has become more complex and candidates, client or CEO, they each have their own set of problems and these things are relative, so comparing them is honestly a futile exercise. Not to mention a waste of everyone’s time, and I know we all have better sh!t to be doing. I definitely have.
Which is why I love challenger brands so much. They’ve realised the problems are big at every stage and focusing on one isn’t going to fix the other. Instead, they take a step back and look at the entire problem chain and figure out how to fix the links along the way. For example, providing a solution for employer branding without fixing your interview process is only going to get you so far before the chain starts to break down. An unbiased, total overview is what’s needed here, not a niche solution to finding the best candidates. You might get them, but if nothing else in your talent journey works, then those great candidates are going to walk in your front door and straight out the other end.
Not to mention that each stakeholder has been pitted against the other for so long now, we barely know how to talk to each other anymore without having an argument. Like some strange recruitment reflex action that’s been deeply rooted in us. Which is why I’m fighting against it every day and trying to create a recruitment chain in which every segment of it works together as an entire team to create an unrivaled experience for candidates, companies and recruiters. There’s got to be some kind of end to the war on talent, because that war has had us fighting each other for years now. I’m more interested in working with HR, the hiring managers and candidates to create a recruitment process so beautiful that people run towards it, instead of away from it. We’re all tired of running, it’s time to take a load off.
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