Hiring Right

How to Turn Recruiting Into Your Competitive Advantage

Simon Parkin

• Publisher: TalentCo Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781988179445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Hiring Right is for anyone who interviews and hires for their organization – Hiring Managers, Business Leaders, HR Professionals and Recruiters. What you learn by reading Hiring Right will make it easier to hire great talent. This book presents a model for finding, engaging, closing, and retaining the top candidates and high performers in your market. In a world where many organizations emptily proclaim that people are their greatest asset, this book speaks to the new way of recruiting and hiring great talent that will allow you to turn those platitudes into reality.

None of Hiring Right is theory or blue-sky thinking. Throughout the book you’ll see examples—some inspirational, others cautionary—drawn from daily life at organizations from around the globe Simon Parkin and his team have worked with. Simon’s hope is that you will find yourself thinking “a-ha!” at various points, nodding in recognition at others, and highlighting, underlining, and scribbling notes in the margin in every chapter.

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. The good news for you is that every organization – including your competitors – is 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.

Over the course of Simon’s career, he has seen many changes in the world of recruitment. In recent years, however, those changes have become seismic. 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.

PART ONE

Trends

 

 

 

Chapter 1

Why Hiring Is Getting Harder

Organizations face a growing number of common challenges, and recruiters are under more pressure than ever. Never before has an organization had such broad reach and open access to candidates and the opportunity, in effect, to approach anyone they want.

Not so long ago, if you needed to fill an open position you had two options. Either you put an ad in the newspaper—a model of recruitment I call ‘post and pray’—or you hired a head hunter who had company lists, and they would call into organizations the old-fashioned way and ask to speak to “the marketing manager” (or whatever role you were hiring).

If you were lucky, your posting would attract 10-15 applications and the recruiter’s job was to talk to those candidates and identify the best among them. Today, a job posting is more likely to attract 100-200 applications, but organizations haven’t increased their recruiter headcount to match. And recruiters aren’t just dealing with more applicants; they’re also having to handle more roles. In our 2016 Talent Acquisition Practices Study, The Talent Company interviewed over 300 Recruitment and HR leaders from 155 organizations across the United States and Canada. We found that the average recruiter is now working on 30 to 40 open opportunities at any given time.

Because of those two changes, recruiters don’t have time to talk with every candidate face-to-face. Indeed, most of them can do little more than manage the flow of candidates through the company’s applicant tracking system.

Organizations haven’t adjusted to this new world because of budget constraints and lack of prioritization. A recent study by PwC found that 63% of CEOs worry that the availability of key skills will undermine their strategies and plans for growth, and 93% of CEOs recognize the need to change their strategy for attracting and retaining talent¹. That means that recruiters—and the organizations they work for—need to adapt to the changes in their world. Unfortunately, the reality is that the Recruitment function in most organizations is not seen as a strategic priority, so it’s often under-funded and starved of resources.

Recruitment has always been low on the totem pole within HR, and historically many organizations have seen it as an entry level HR job for new graduates. That is finally changing, and recruiter salaries are now among the highest in HR. You can’t hire a recruiter for $40,000 a year anymore, and recruiters with more than a couple of years’ experience typically command salaries of at least double that. Unfortunately, that also means that growing the Recruitment function requires more investment.

Why Is It So Hard to Find Good Candidates?

Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have no problem attracting hundreds of candidates for every open position. Many of the organizations I work with also have a great employer or consumer brand, and people want to work for them. But the good people get lost in the volume.

When you have three or four hundred applicants for every role, and your recruiters are working on 30 or 40 requisitions, there’s a high probability that your recruiters are having to trawl through résumés as quickly as they can and they can’t focus on any individual requisition. If you’re lucky, the recruiter understands each role and the most critical criteria for it, but out of 400 applicants they may only have time to look at the first 50. So, if the best applicant happens to be #51, they may not even get seen.

In addition to investing in recruitment talent, organizations also need to invest in systems to support the Recruitment function, like candidate tracking tools, sourcing systems, and licenses for online platforms. Unfortunately, investing in talent acquisition technology isn’t enough. Technology alone does not make the Recruitment function more effective, because more tools simply means access to more candidates. Unless you also have more recruiters to manage the increased candidate flow, that just makes the situation worse.

The real challenge is that more candidates doesn’t always mean more good candidates, so it actually becomes much harder to find which of those hundreds of applicants are the right fit for the opportunity. You can no longer afford to treat recruitment as a numbers game. Organizations used to brag about how many applicants they got for each new job opening. But quantity does not equal quality, and if your Recruitment function is under-staffed and under-financed, they have no hope of identifying the needles in an ever-growing haystack.

When I joined American Express, I’d never been exposed to the high-volume recruiting that is typical in call centers. I came from Accenture, where high-quality applicants are the norm and there were robust hiring processes in place. American Express was the exact opposite. The company would pick from whoever applied, hire them, and train them to an acceptable standard. As a result, the attrition rate was astronomical—50% staff turnover every year—and a lot of money was being spent training people who weren’t expected to make it through the first few months. I spent my initial weeks on the job questioning why we didn’t just hire people with experience. Over time, I was able to switch the recruiting team’s mindset to looking for candidates who matched a profile of the ideal hire and putting them through a rigorous recruitment process.

Within six months, attrition dropped to 15%, customer satisfaction with the call center went up, and the new hires were more comfortable upselling and cross-selling—an essential part of the business model—which fed straight to the bottom line. The training department was happy, and so was the business. It was an easy win, but it set the context for my career at the company: with a significant quantifiable success in such a short period of time, Recruitment was the golden child and it was easier for me to ask for more investment.

Great on Paper

Another major challenge for recruiters is that the best-looking résumés don’t always belong to the best candidates, and the best candidates don’t necessarily have the best-looking résumés. Many great candidates have terrible résumés, and until a recruiter speaks to them and engages them in dialog, it’s hard to know what they are truly like.

How Job Search Has Changed for Candidates

Just as the job search landscape has changed for organizations and recruiters, it has also changed for the candidates. I remember the first job fair I attended at university. I walked into a hall filled with booths: over a hundred organizations were represented, half of which were household name consumer brands and the other half you had never heard of. Students back then didn’t leave college with the level of specialization that you see today, and we certainly didn’t have a detailed plan of what our life and career would look like. You turned up for the job fair in your best suit, and the mindset was I need a job. I need to start my career somewhere. Today, students are already specializing in their first degree or diploma, and they have a far better idea of where they want to work and in what role.

Technology has made it easier for companies to find great candidates. There’s a high probability that anyone you might want to hire has an online presence, and tools such as LinkedIn and ZoomInfo allow you to map the talent inside an organization without having to resort to subterfuge.

The flip side of that, however is that those same technological advances have given candidates access to more opportunities and choices than ever before. They have greater insight into organizations and can make better decisions about whether they even want to work for a company before they sit down with an interviewer.

That increased access and information means candidates are better prepared than ever for their interview, with in-depth knowledge of the company and perhaps even the interviewer, and they can use a broad range of apps and tools to prepare in advance. They come with more confidence than ever, and a certain bravado. They know much more about the company than past candidates ever did, and they expect recruiters and hiring managers to be as well-informed about what is happening to the company as they are. In addition, sites like Glassdoor give them insights into the organization that an interviewer may not have, because the candidate is getting the employee perspective about working for the company.

On the whole, today’s candidates are also smarter when it comes to preparing for “traditional” interview questions. They know the most common behavioral questions they are likely to be asked, and they have their responses worked out in advance—even if those responses aren’t always 100% true. They go into an interview ready to sell themselves and pitch to the interviewer why they should be hired.

At the same time, managers and recruiters need to be prepared for candidates asking very different questions. Twenty years ago, candidates mostly asked about the same basic things: salary, vacation, and benefits. Today’s candidates ask far more in-depth questions. They want to know what a day in the role will look like. They want to know what the next career step will be if they get the job. They want to know about onboarding, and training opportunities. Many of them want to know about the community initiatives and charitable work the company organizes. Every candidate has a different perspective on what’s important to them, and they aren’t afraid to ask.

From an organizational perspective, that creates another headache: it’s much harder to weed out the applicants who may not be the best fit for your company when you’re looking at a group of people who are better informed than you are and can use that knowledge to sound like they’re a better fit than they really are.

The best candidates—and even average ones—need to be wooed; they need to feel that the organization wants them as much as they want the organization. In many ways, it represents the shift from looking for a career for life with the same organization to a more self-aware and self-centered approach that acknowledges the fact that the candidate may not be working for you five years from now, so they need to take care of themselves and their career in a way that past generations of job seekers did not.

Technology Isn’t the Solution

As we’ll see later in the book, many organizations have turned to technology to manage and automate the recruitment process in the hope that systems would help them deal with the volume. When you talk to candidates, however, it’s clear that those systems aren’t helping.

One of our clients, an online education platform, engaged us because they were losing too many good candidates as they went through their recruitment process. It was clear that the process was broken, but they couldn’t figure out where or how. The problem, it turned out, was simple and it was right at the start: when someone applied for a role there was no acknowledgment. Later, if a recruiter looked at their submission and decided they were suitable, the first contact the candidate would have was a generic system-generated email informing them that the next step was an obligatory two-hour assessment.

Think about that from the candidate’s perspective. They saw a job advertised and they have applied for it. They’re not even sure their application was received because they didn’t get a response. They’re not engaged yet, but out of the blue, a few days or a week later, with no prior human contact from the company, they get a cold email telling them they must take a test in order to proceed.

It’s not the most engaging candidate experience, and the company was paying the price: other employers, with better ways of engaging the candidate, were stealing their best applicants. Worse still, the company was recruiting from a small community of technical experts, and news was already circulating among that group that it wasn’t worth wasting your time applying to them.

That company is, sadly, not unique. In fact, 64% of all job applicants never hear back from an employer after submitting their résumé: we call it “the résumé black hole.” The problem is, if every company in a market is doing it (and, let’s face it, they are), that encourages candidates to apply to any and every opportunity they see. That means more applicants for every post, and because they don’t know whether they’ll get a response, candidates aren’t being picky: they apply for any job available, whether it’s a good fit or not.

The result is a situation where the wrong candidates are applying for your job, and the right candidates are applying for the wrong jobs. Some organizations have responded by abandoning job postings altogether. Instead, they hope their employer brand is strong enough that candidates will submit a résumé on spec. When an application comes in, the recruiter follows up, has an actual conversation, and evaluates where in the organization that person would be a good fit.

Eventually, however, even those companies hit the same road block: the sheer volume those recruiters are faced with makes it physically impossible to talk to every candidate. At that...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• PART 2
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• PART 3
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Conclusion
• Reader Resources