“Liz, do you know where I can find a good Social Media Manager?” asked an HR colleague, Nina. “I know a few,” I said. “Why are you having trouble filling that job? I thought everyone was dying to work in social media.”
“It’s our company policy that’s making it hard,” said Nina. “I’ve interviewed six really good candidates. We could have hired any of them, but we don’t allow people to work from home.” “All six of them wanted to do the job virtually?” I asked. “They all wanted to spend at least part of the workday out of the office,” Nina said. “They all said ‘It’s social media. Your company is going to have to understand that the world is changing.’ Long story short, my company doesn’t understand any of that, so we’re looking for the rare Social Media Manager who’s willing to sit at a desk all day.”
“And in Denver, to boot, where five or six snowstorms a year make the morning commute impossible,” I added. “You got it,” said Nina. “So anyway — got any candidates for me?”
I didn’t. Nina was discouraged, but not surprised. She knows that more often than not, an employer’s failure to bring in great employees has more to do with the employer’s own process and cultural failings than any breakdown in the educational system. Corporate recruiting (and I don’t exclude smaller employers, mind you) is broken, period.
What’s broken about it? For starters, with close to nine percent unemployment, employers are complaining that they can’t find good people. They mean “we can’t find the comic-book superheroes we specify in exhaustive detail in our delusional job specs.” They can’t find people who not only walk on water but also play the trombone, tap-dance, speak Greek and have a taxi-driver’s license, willing to work for thirty-six thousand dollars a year. Yes, I grant you, those people are in regrettably short supply.
Real people — smart, committed, creative, hard-working people — are everywhere. They’re ready to work, and they can do what we need them to do. We can find them and get them on board, if we employers can get our heads out of the sand long enough to realize that the people we most badly need are people who won’t put up with bureaucratic and insulting hiring systems.
Here’s our list of the top ten ways employers miss the boat in their hiring:
Employers write ridiculous job specs that don’t bear any resemblance to actual, living people, job-hunting or otherwise. We can begin renovating the recruiting system by throwing out those endless, antiquated job specs. In place of the lists of requirements, employers should open the kimono and tell us what the job is all about.
The next place employers fall down is in the writing of the job ad. Why would we ever talk past the job candidate by saying “The selected candidate will possess..” as though the person reading the ad at this moment couldn’t possibly be The Selected Candidate, himself? It’s insulting. We should market to the talent population, not past it.
The third way employers hamstring themselves in hiring is in their use of bureaucratic, automated Black Hole recruiting systems. You really think you’re going to evaluate talent by comparing keywords in an application to keywords in a job spec? Really?
Employers go wrong when they set up auto-responders to communicate with job-seekers, instead of living humans. I don’t know about you, but I won’t do business with organizations that insult their customers, and I don’t let clients and friends of mine interview with employers that insult job-seekers. If they don’t respect you during the interview process, when will they ever respect you.
Another problem is the shoddy way so many HR departments treat talent. If a week has gone by and an employer hasn’t been in touch with any candidate in the pipeline, it’s time for that candidate to bail. There are employers that will value his or her time more highly — and don’t we all deserve to work for people like that?
When it comes to the interviewing stage, employers blow it again. Instead of sitting down for a substantial, let’s-get-to-know-one-another meeting of the minds, they turn an interview into a one-sided Q & A geared squarely toward answering the question “Is this person suitable for employment at Lofty, Inc.?” If we insist on treating job applicants like ants, we’d better be ready to artificially depress the IQ and talent levels in our organizations, too.
The seventh way employers go wrong is in the way they handle the people in their selection pipeline. Just this week, my friend Lisa was told by an HR VP, “Did you know we had 100 applicants for this job?” At that point, Lisa had already received an offer from the hiring manager. Why did the VP need to make that point about the 100 applicants — to knock Lisa down a peg? She did more than that. She got Lisa to back out of the deal altogether. “When you get a signal like that, you have to bail,” Lisa told me. “People who are hung up on the power of their position don’t make good co-workers.”
Employers flub the salary issue, losing more candidates and settling for people who are thrilled to get whatever salary the organization is offering. It’s especially galling when a candidate goes all the way through the process, only to be offered a job at far less than the numbers thrown around during the interview process. “I figured that you knew we’re a startup,” one hiring manager said to my friend Carter. “I knew that, and I also read that you got $22M in venture capital,” said Carter. My message to job-seekers is this: if they don’t value you, don’t go to work there.
The next-to-last item on our list is the pre-offer selling process, which tends to be nonexistent. “I was turned off by the fact that I’m moving across the state, selling one house and buying another one, and the hiring manager didn’t bother to return my calls,” said my ex-workmate Gerry. “I had substantive questions about dates and logistics, and he was too busy to call me back. I’m supposed to work for someone who thinks so little of the needs of the person he’s trying to recruit? Forget it!” If managers aren’t willing to sell candidates throughout the process, they should outsource their department’s work and be done with it.
Finally, employers goof up in showing the love after a job offer’s been accepted. They forget that taking a new job is a major event in a working person’s life. They forget, in fact, that they’re dealing with human beings and not moving pawns around on a chessboard. There’s one silver lining to all this recruiting disarray, however: great employers, the ones that value talent and aren’t afraid to show it, will scoop up the best people.
Isn’t that an encouraging thought?