In 20 years of being in, on, around, over, and under the recruiting industry, recruiting services, recruiting technology, and recruiters and their recruiting processes, there typically comes a point where I ask each of them a simple question, the answer to which is universally the same: do you want quality candidates, or do you want a LOT of candidates?
The answer is inevitable: “Both”. The first thought that comes to mind when I hear this is also inevitable. As my father used to tell me when I wanted to borrow the car so me and my friends could loiter and cause general disconcern among shopping patrons of the nearest mall, “People in hell want ice water, too, son.”
Dad was never one to mince words.
Whatever a client’s seemingly incongruous wishes might be, however, it’s not to say they can’t fill hundreds, even thousands, of openings with quality employees, some of whom may be the best in the world at what they do. But I caution them not to expect to interview fifteen of these types for every opening. DO be prepared to interview only one or two.
That last point seems to be where most clients get stuck. They “get” the concept that quality and quantity tend to be like oil and water, and “agree” in principle, but where the problems come in are from their customers: the hiring managers (an evil lot upon whom recruiters, including me, cast countless aspersions, blaming them for everything from their endless delays in our finely honed process, to swine flu and global warming). “They” expect “more.” Always more.
It’s not entirely their fault, of course, but who hasn’t worked for a hiring manager that if they’d had an open req for “Founding Father” and you’d submitted only the resume of George Washington himself, wouldn’t ask to see a dozen others? We know the type. We all do.
Yet when we survey hiring managers during the course of process audits, we discover a trend. There is an ongoing conflict that one would be tempted to say is both illogical and irreconcilable, but which we maintain is a false choice, one which they’ve created for themselves — quality or quantity.
When we look at managers that had unusually large numbers of job openings that involved difficult-to-find critical skill sets, there was a disproportionate criticism of their assigned recruiting support that maintained they didn’t get to see enough candidates. In other words, they wanted more. The fact that “more” was virtually impossible to come by given the skill sets they required didn’t matter. They wanted to see more. If you could find one left-handed, Mandarin-speaking, purple squirrel with a PhD in confectionery science, than surely there were more.
Likewise, when we looked at managers whose open requisitions consisted of mostly “typical” types of jobs that involve commonly held skill sets, their criticism of recruiting support fell in the realm of “quality”. They wanted more “quality” (however that was defined).
As most managers fell in the middle, with a mix of both hard to fill and easy to fill job reqs, we expected that critiques of recruiter support would moderate, or fall along the lines of either quality concerns, or quantity concerns. Instead, we found their criticism was universal: they weren’t seeing enough resumes, and the resumes they were seeing weren’t of sufficient quality, regardless of the difficulty of recruiting for a particular position.
In other words, if you were a recruiter for a manager that had a variety of openings, some of which were “easy” and others of which were “hard” to recruit for, you took a double hit on the effectiveness rating. All of which, of course, merely confirmed what everyone who’s spent more than a week in a corporate recruiting environment already knows: hiring managers are entirely unreasonable creatures. But it explains why all of our processes, our tools, and our methodologies focus - almost to the exclusion of everything else - on the concept of “more.”
More candidates, better candidates, faster. Oh, and for less money, please. “More” operates in context, however — a context that makes the whole quality/quantity choice even more absurd. Supported by the virtual recruiting DOGMA that somewhere, there is in fact such a thing as a “perfect” candidate for every job opening, and the myth that with more candidates, you have a better chance of finding that perfect employee, recruiters are all but destined to “fail” in the eyes of their customers (”fail” being a relative word here, that speaks more to the attitude of the hiring manager towards the recruiters as a valuable partner in the hiring process than anything else).
Despite these dichotomies, virtually every new fad for recruiters to come along seeks to redefine “success” along the same lines - better, faster, cheaper. More for less.
We would argue that much of what has been established orthodoxy in recruiting circles is in fact self-defeating, and that a clean-sheet approach with a focus on candidate quality (not quantity) is long overdue. We need to develop real JIT recruiting. We need to cease engaging in activities that provide no demonstrable ROI, but which may be “fashionable” at the moment (Twitter????). We need to jettison the baggage of a “personnel department” past, a social media obsessed present, and the siren songs of an automated future, none of which will lead us where we need to be as one of the most valuable strategic assets a CEO has at his or her disposal to grow and transform their organization.
We intend to explore that concept next, and I hope you’ll follow along and join the conversation!
I can safely hide behind the cautionary language of “may” or “could be”, but the reality was I thought companies would outsource a significant part of their efforts in order to keep some semblance of hiring capability if for no other reason than to replace workers who hadn’t been temporarily or permanently furloughed. Instead, despite every consultant’s pleadings, including our own, most organizations ran for the exits like rats off a sinking ship, and their scorched-earth policies when it came to laying people off and destroying internal infrastructure in the name of cost control resembled nothing less than theater-goers reaction to the fire alarm. In other words, panic.
