Hiring Right – Recruiting Has Changed
Publié le 22 October 2019
Over the course of my career, I have seen many changes in the world of recruitment. In recent years, however, those changes have become seismic. The biggest development—and one which is at the heart of this book—is the power shift that has taken place.
The Balance of Power Has Shifted
When I began my career, employers held all the cards. People tended to stay in jobs for a long time, which restricted the “supply” of opportunities. It was the candidate who first had to convince a company to interview them and then had to convince the interviewer to hire them. It was hard for candidates to find out about the best roles, hard for them to find out about the company they hoped to work for, and hard for them to compare what they were offered to what others in the market were getting.
That world is gone. Today’s candidates are better prepared than any that have come before, and the best of them are in high demand. They come to interview knowing more about the company than many interviewers, with detailed knowledge of what they should be offered (and often with their own ideas and expectations of what it will take to entice them to accept a job), and with a seemingly uncanny understanding of what it’s like to work for the company—both the good and the bad.
Recruitment Needs Champions
If you are involved in recruiting in any way, you need to adapt to this new world. You cannot afford to ignore the changes, and you cannot simply go on doing what you have always done. With growing competition for the best candidates, attracting, closing, and retaining talent has become a critical success factor for organizations, and it can make the difference between a company that survives and thrives, and one that does not.
And yet, hiring managers do not receive the proper hiring training and support they require, recruiters continue to act as though nothing has changed, and both insist on treating candidates as though they are fortunate the company is even considering them.
Few organizations make recruiting the strategic priority it needs to be.
Companies that spend millions creating a customer-facing brand neglect the message they are presenting in the employment market—their employer brand—and create candidate experiences that jar with the customer experience they have often invested heavily to create.
The result?
Disengaged candidates who will literally run from the building to get away and would rather work anywhere else but there, poor hiring decisions that bring the wrong person into the organization, and stressed recruiters juggling unrealistic requests from clueless hiring managers.
Recruitment goes far beyond sourcing and selecting new employees. The impact of bad hires can be toxic to the teams they join, but it also has very real effects on the bottom line of the organization. A poor recruiting process that creates a negative candidate experience can hurt the employer brand, and overt time that can damage the company’s consumer brand.
The Future of Recruitment
Correcting hiring mistakes is usually a difficult, expensive, and lengthy process during which work is not getting done and team and organizational effectiveness suffer.
Connecting Individuals is a Critical Factor
Going forward, the critical factor for recruitment will be connecting to individuals. We have access to a vast pool of talent for every position. Technology makes it possible for us to identify, find, and engage the best candidates wherever in the world they may be—in ways that were impossible just a few years ago.
Organizations Need to Become Proactive
So, organizations need to become more proactive in approaching potential employees. Recruitment is still a very transactional and reactive function. Most organizations wait until a position becomes open before they start to think about how to fill it, rather than planning and taking the time to understand who they will need to attract in the future and creating relationships with those people in advance.
Learn More About Proactive Recruitment
Recruitment Needs Flexibility
Recruitment also needs to break free of the shackles of the job description. Candidates are hardly ever a 100% match for a these, and hiring managers struggle to compare strong candidates who inevitably have different gaps in their skills and experience and usually have unique strengths and potentials that aren’t captured in the job description.
Successful organizations of the future will stop letting the job description dictate who they hire and who they reject, and instead focus on finding great talent and designing jobs to leverage the assets an individual can bring to the role, the team, and the organization as a whole.
A Massive Opportunity
The good news for you is that every organization—including your competitors—are facing the same challenges. That creates a massive opportunity: the first organization in a market or industry to adapt to those challenges and changes will create a commanding competitive advantage over other employers.
Getting your recruitment processes right doesn’t just mean you attract the best job seekers for your open positions. It also puts you in a position to seek out the best candidates in the market—even ones who are already employed—engage them in an ongoing conversation, and bring them into your workforce when the opportunity arises. That, in turn, means you’ll be able to hire the best people before your competitors have even found out they were open to changing jobs.
In a world where many organizations emptily proclaim that people are their greatest asset, this new way of recruiting will allow you to turn those platitudes into reality.
