I read job ads in my spare time. People send me especially
ridiculous ones just to make me laugh.
The recruiting process is broken, and if we need evidence we only
have to look at any job listing.
Here's how a typical recruiting ad begins: "Bidii Farm has an immediate
need for..." Really — Bidii Farm has a need?
If we want to hire sharp people in our organizations, we need to market to
them. We can't assume they'll happily crawl over whatever piles of broken glass
we put in front of them (online honesty tests, writing tests, three-week
Silence zones, terse project assignments, and the like) in order to work for us. We
have to be willing to woo as well as vet them. And we have to put a human voice
into our horribly bureaucratic, robotic job listings.
Here's another one: "The Selected Candidate will possess nine years of
experience in tax accounting." The Selected Candidate will possess? Now
we're marketing to the talent community by talking right past them. This ad all
but says "Yeah, the Selected Candidate will have this and we'll interview
that guy — not YOUR sorry ass." It's insulting to address job-seekers this
way. Who's ever seen commercial that describes its customers in the third
person, as though the viewer couldn't possibly be in the target audience? This
is the opposite of marketing.
Unfortunately, too many HR chiefs and hiring managers labor under the
delusion that sharp and switched-on people are dying to apply for their jobs,
even when they're not. Every day, a CEO tells me that it's hard to find talent.
They say that the only people they see in interviews are non-creative thinkers
and yes-men (and -women). These executives don't see their role in the
dysfunctional-recruitment soap opera, which is keeping the smartest and
sparkiest people away.
In the e-commerce world, marketers pay close attention to the abandonment
rate for online shopping carts. When you start to make a purchase online and
then drop out before the deal is done, that's an abandoned cart. Corporate
leaders should be paying just as close attention to the abandonment of
applications on the company's website portal. When job-seekers start the
process and then drop out, that's a failure for the employer. If we knew how
badly our employer branding (the kind that prospective job applicants see) was
hurting us in the talent acquisition arena,
we might spend more time
and energy writing genuine, human job ads in plain English and rethinking the
whole red-tape-laden hiring process.
Until we do that, we can keep venting about how hard it is to find talent,
but we can only delude ourselves for so long. Eventually, we're going to have
to look in the mirror and see that we've created the talent shortages we
complain about, by driving the best candidates — the ones with the most options
in the talent marketplace, that is — away with a stick. There's time to bring
them back, if we act fast. Is your organization up to it?