Is Your Company Screening Out The Best Candidates? (Answer: Yes!)

It is a wonderful and very unusual thing when an organization can get out of its own way long enough to hire someone smart and capable. Most recruiting systems, even in small organizations, are designed to hire not the best candidate but the most pliable, docile and obedient one.

If your organization can tell the truth about that sad reality, then you can win in the talent marketplace and win against your competitors, too. To do that, you'll have to tell more truth than many leadership teams can handle, however!

The traditional, broken recruiting process starts with a fundamental mistake -- the design of a job description based on tasks and duties rather than the answer to the question "What business problem will the arrival of our new employee solve?," and it only devolves from there.

We write insulting, bureaucratic job ads that drive the best candidates away and then we advertise our job openings on the side of a barn, as the old expression goes.

The only reason Applicant Tracking Systems exist is because recruiting and HR departments suck at marketing. If we understood that recruiting is a sales and marketing function (something many external but few internal recruiters comprehend -- or perhaps they understand it but are not allowed to act on that knowledge) we wouldn't be overwhelmed with applications.

If we really cared about talent, we would  never have come up with the idiotic idea of screening out candidates based on keywords. That's a business atrocity that can only help your competitors.

If you care about talent, you'd never force job-seekers to fill out online application forms. Do you make your customers populate their own Salesforce records?

You wouldn't dream of doing that, but perhaps your leaders like most leaders have drunk enough toxic lemonade that they believe that prospective customers are Very Important People while job-seekers are scum.

If you aren't sure how your company feels about the relative value of prospective customers versus prospective employees, you can find out very easily! Just try applying for a job at your company and you'll know the truth.

If we cared more about talent than we do, we wouldn't respond to a job-seeker's painstakingly completed online application form by sending them a terse auto-response message, or by ignoring their application completely.

Recruiting practices in most organizations do a better job of driving talent away than inviting talented people in!

The smartest employers have figured this out and rectified the problem. Maybe they use an Applicant Tracking System, but if they do they use it for the sensible purpose of managing applications once they are in-house.

They don't make their applicants complete online forms as though they were applying for a building permit to put an addition on their house. Smart companies go after great candidates and sell them on their opportunities. It isn't hard to do. I did it for years and my colleagues did, too, and we never had trouble filling job openings.

In over two decades as an HR leader I never attended a meeting to talk about talent shortages or to wring my hands along with my fellow managers over the difficulty of finding good people. Talent shortages are imaginary. Every organization has the same talent pool to draw from.

It's called the human race!

You'd fire your Purchasing people if they spec'd imaginary raw materials. When hiring managers create job specs with unrealistic requirements, it is an HR person's job to bring that hiring manager back to earth.

To hire great people, we only have to be smart enough to see that when you create a fun and uplifting environment, you will never worry about finding talent. When you create a great culture, your reputation will spread. Smart people will find you.

If you care about talent, you'll treat job applicants like gold once you've got them into your pipeline. You'll make recruiting for open positions your highest priority. How could it be otherwise?

If the absence of a critical person isn't costing your company time and money, then there's no reason to fill the job opening. If the lack of that person is costing you time and money, then what are you waiting for? -- Hire someone, fast!

Every leadership team gets the culture it deserves. Every organization gets the talent it deserves.

Mother Nature is the best teacher, but her lessons can be tough to take on board.

We have to look inward and see how our own fears and doubts are hurting us before her lessons will sink in.

Only when we can give up the conceit "We are the employer, and therefore job-seekers should bow down to us!" will we realize how simple, how fun and how profitable it is to recruit with a human voice. Who will get the message first: your firm, or the competitors who want to put you out of business?