Question
People looking for jobs complain they keep getting rejected. I’ll tell you why: they’re applying for the wrong jobs. We face this every day. We keep rejecting one candidate after another for this simple reason. Every manager in my company will tell you a really good candidate is very hard to find. These applicants don’t even make it through the HR screening or skills testing. You headhunters supposedly have the magic. How can we change our recruiting to avoid losing the best candidates when it’s like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack? Help!
Nick’s Reply
The first thing you have to do is make your recruiting serious. Stop relying on HR prosthetics like auto-screening, robo-interviews and automated skills testing. In fact, take HR (and its A.I. prosthetics) out of the loop altogether! What does some personnel jockey know about injection molding, power distribution systems, marketing or logistics? Do you really believe an A.I.’s “evaluation” is valid and reliable? If any of this really worked you wouldn’t be asking me for answers!
Don’t send a clerk (or an A.I.) to do a manager’s job.
Even when an employer avoids the impersonal algorithms, leading-edge companies send human proxies — clerks — to impress leading-edge candidates in screening interviews. Personnel clerks who then must wait to get on the hiring manager’s agenda to review the candidate, while the candidate cools their heels. Guess what? The best candidates don’t cool their heels. They smell bureaucracy and walk away.
That’s how you — the hiring manager — wind up with candidates who aren’t qualified for anything except patiently playing the HR game of screening, testing and… waiting.
If your management team is too busy to get personally involved in serious recruiting and hiring, your company will lose the very candidates it needs most. Even in a tight job market, the best candidates are in demand, and while you’re trying to put them through your administrative process, a headhunter like me (or an aggressive hiring manager) will steal them.
Get serious. Put your managers in the game from the start.
No matter how you identify the candidates you want to pursue, never let anyone or any thing make first contact except the manager who would hire them. It tells the candidate you’re serious. It puts you ahead of other employers who send in the clowns first.
Make the candidate feel as important as the job you want them to fill. Never allow hiring to be represented as an automated administrative process. (I know, I know — “this how it’s done today!” That’s why you’re asking me for answers! See Tell A.I. robo-interviewer where to stick it.)
This turns good candidates right off. No one wants to think they were invited for an interview because the personnel department dragged some keywords out of a database. The candidate wants to know that something specific triggered the company’s interest. Preferably, someone the candidate knows recommended them to a manager that asked, and a manager — not a process — stimulated this encounter. (This latter point is a subject for another article and discussion.)
Make recruitment personal, make it important, make it a carefully orchestrated courtship designed to make the candidate feel special. Make your recruiting serious. Doing it like everybody else is not serious! You get one chance to create a first impression — and to entice the special candidate.
We’re all fed up with A.I. recruiting prosthetics and with the HR clerks that deploy them. What’s the worst you’ve encountered? When is the last time an actual hiring manager was the very first contact from an employer? What exemplary experiences have you had while being recruited and applying for a job?
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Let’s roll back to late 2009 when most everyone was digging out of a rather large financial fiasco.
Both my daughter (with a fresh JD) and I with decades of experience in my field became unemployed.
Both experienced “after hours” recruiting.
It was not unusual for us to roll in after quitting time, or on a Saturday for what was usually a stress-free interview.
No traffic, no time-constraint, no cover stories needed for our present employer (I had just taken a “survival position”).
As a hiring manager myself, I often did such interviews.
Usually productive for both sides.
I also remember a number quoted in this column as a percentage of a manager’s time that should be spent actively recruiting, though that number escapes my memory at present.
Screening is a skill that should be developed by the hiring manager–setting up the appointment is the only thing HR should do.
@Lighthouse: I’ve suggested managers should spend around 20% of their time recruiting in one way or another. I don’t know any manager that would say their team isn’t the #1 factor in their operation’s success. Unless they wash their hands with gloves on.
This is what I say to everyone I meet at job fairs or the unemployment line. Just had an online “argument” with a less than intelligent person who staunchly believes that because he is versed in ALL skills that he just needs to apply for every job on the boards……..5,000 plus is what the math comes to if they actually apply to 100-300 per day, their claim……My argument was this, find people that are hiring, talk with them, don’t just send out crap as it hurts more than it helps. In this persons case the law of averages should have kicked in…….
Myself, I am unable to get past the electronic wall that shuts out most of us, the companies have a problem, it is not just the problem they are trying to fix by hiring, the problem is companies cowed to the SJW side of things and started hiring “people” that can only “talk” via a digital interface. The older workers like myself that could evaluate resumes and applications have been forced out to make room for a “leaner and more diverse work force” which really means exploitable and willing to work for near nothing.
The days of active recruiting are gone, It is only the dwindling group of people like Nick that still pursue this highly effective strategy.
I can tell you that if this strategy was in use everywhere, people like me would never be unemployed.
( for 34 years I fixed the vehicles that make the economy run, now I don’t “fit” in the same job roles I once had)
HR should only be a representative of the company when it comes to hiring, put on the good face and talk the company up. All submissions should go to the manager, floor boss, team lead…….
After the person is hired THEN HR should come back in to process paperwork and such.
I am starting to think that companies are now afraid of their own HR department…
@Dennis: I’ll take it a step further – I don’t think most boards of directors have any idea what their HR department is doing. They don’t want to know. “Ewwww…”
HR used to tell me, “let us sift through the candidates and give you the best”. I would respond “you send me every resume that comes in and I will personally review each one to determine who we will interview”. They would respond ” you are too busy and important as a VP to waste time doing this”. I would respond “These employees are too important to my success to not do this work”. If a new employee is needed with certain skills then that became my top priority. Find and hire them fast. Skip the weeks on end of dragging out the hiring process and if possible, make them the offer on the day of the interview assuming they pass any drug or security clearances.
@Dan: Where do managers like you work?
Readers: Print or copy Dan’s post, show it to anyone you interview with for a job (HR or recruiter or hiring manager) and ask what they think of Dan’s hiring method. Then decide whether you want a job there.
@Dan: Thanks for proving that I’m right when I say managers like you really do exist.
@Dan Dieckmann: What you described is exactly how one of my former bosses used to hire. She demanded that HR send her every résumé they received, and she’d be the one who decided who to interview and hire. After she retired, the next two deans decided to let HR do everything, then complained when they didn’t get the candidates they expected or wanted, yet they derided the former dean’s methods as being “old school” and not the way things should be done in the 21st century.
The old dean was right. HR often excluded candidates that she wanted, despite carefully crafting job descriptions, etc., and she knew that HR hadn’t a clue what skills were necessary for library jobs. The old dean also used to go back to HR and tell them that she was expecting a résumé from an applicant, only to learn that HR’s computer system had rejected that person. She used to insist on HR sending her that résumé anyways….and they did.
The next two deans never pushed back when HR did this. So I think the old dean handled things correctly. There is a role for HR–make sure the onboarding goes smoothly for whomever is hired, make sure that people get paid and their benefits accrue. Otherwise, let the deans (or hiring managers) or whoever is running the department with the vacancy handle the hiring, including deciding whom to interview.
This was before AI, so I imagine things are only worse now.
HR was at its best when they were Salary and Benefits. They kept the pay envelopes filled on Friday and kept the insurance paid.
Letting them do anything else was and is corporate suicide.
I was always taught that hiring is the manager’s most important job.
“Hire slow, fire fast” sounds crass, but that used to be the corporate mantra.