Resourcing

5 simple ways to make recruitment better

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I’m a supporter of the Good Recruitment Campaign and will often help out my friends at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation by going and speaking on the value of good recruitment. I do it simply because I believe it matters.

I wouldn’t mind betting that all of us have been through a recruitment process that completely sucks. And yet, we don’t do enough as professionals to strive to improve the overall quality of the recruitment experience.

When I call this out, the pushback I hear is, “I don’t have the time” or “I don’t have the resource”. Which frankly is just a pitiful excuse for inaction.

Here’s five things you can do tomorrow that don’t take any time or resource but make a hell of a difference;

  1. Commit to a timeline – tell candidates how the process will work, when you’ll communicate to them and stick to your commitments.
  2. Set the standards – be clear what you’re looking for, how candidates will be assessed and what success looks like.
  3. Get personal – refer to candidates by name, not “candidate” or “sir/madam”. Remember they’re a human being with human emotions too!
  4. Give and receive – depending on how much effort you’re asking the candidate put in, give the same back when it comes to feedback. And don’t forget to ask what you could have done better too.
  5. Be realistic – about your requirements and what you can expect from candidates both in terms of their skills and experience and how much time they can put in to the process. After all, you’re not the only recruiter in town.

I know it sounds simple, but that’s because it is. Ask candidates and you’ll hear that time and time again these simple steps don’t happen. It wouldn’t take much for us to improve our overall performance, so why don’t we even try?

The feedback paradox

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In HR we absolutely LOVE feedback. We talk about it, write about it and tell everyone that they need to do it.

Until it comes to unsuccessful job candidates. And then we will do absolutely anything to avoid it.

Take any group of recruiters or HR people and ask them about giving feedback to unsuccessful candidates and you’ll hear a range of opinions. But you’ll rarely hear anyone espouse that we should be giving feedback to everyone.

And normally the excuse is we don’t have time.

But the truth is that we don’t see the value. We’re only interested in the hire, not the potential hire. We don’t want to improve the talent pool, we want to take from it. We’re not interested in helping people, we’re only interested in them helping us.

If we do give feedback it tends to be generic, unhelpful and unactionable and (I’d suggest) in most cases dodges the real reasons that a candidate didn’t make it through. Don’t believe me? Ask any recruitment consultant what their major gripes with HR professionals are and not providing decent feedback will come up in the top three. Guaranteed.

We can do more.

Giving good feedback, however you manage it, could make a real difference to a candidate going forward. It could be the difference between them getting a job or not. It doesn’t take that long and it feels like it should be a common courtesy and it won’t do your employer brand any harm at all.

So what are we all so scared of?

Ten reasons we don’t care about candidate experience

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We love talking about candidate experience. I hear time and time again how important it is, yet the reality is that most of us are pretty dreadful at it regardless of whether we are HR or recruitment professionals.

The fact is that most recruiters don’t care about candidate experience, and here’s why:

1) We build dodgy website experiences – Most online application processes make getting in to Berghain look like a piece of cake. At a recent event I was at a roundtable of recruiters roundly condemned every single major ATS. And yes, whilst we can be a whiny bunch, there’s some truth in it. If these were e-commerce sites, we’d be losing money.

2) We don’t have time to give feedback – This is probably the defining question that sets out where you are on candidate experience. People tell me they just don’t have time, and I’ve got sympathy with that. But then don’t say you care about candidate experience, because you don’t.

3) We create mystery processes – Would you order something without a delivery time? Enter a competition without any rules? Our single-minded focus on making sure people don’t know how to get a job with us is something to behold. I mean, if people knew, they might hold us to account? And we’re too busy making sure they have a good experience to deal with that.

4) We don’t understand our own biases – I’ve heard too many recruiters….I could actually stop the sentence there and it would be enough…but let’s indulge…I’ve heard too many recruiters say, “I would never consider someone who xxxxx”. Bias? Who knows, but the chance is yes, absolutely. Get yourself here. Now.

5) We allow indefensible criteria – “The manager wants to only see people who can hold eleven marshmallows in their mouth and still hum the national anthem. Apparently the last two job holders could do that and they were both top performers”.

6) We value operational efficiency over optimal pathway – Every process redesign I have ever seen in recruitment has been to make things easier for the recruiter and the line manager. Not once have I seen people take on more work to make the candidate’s life easier. Not once.

7) We want to separate recruitment out from the employee cycle – Centres of excellence, outsourced solutions, service centres. Can you imagine setting up your business so that you sold a product without actually being aware of the quality of the build, design and the delivery times? No, me neither so how can we give candidates a great experience if we don’t know what’s going to happen when they’re hired?

8) We STILL use social media to sell – Even the companies lauded for using social media well are way, way, way behind the customer service functions of most businesses. Candidate experience? Don’t ask us questions and we won’t need to respond. See our FAQ and in the meantime, click this link. Thanks.

9) We work office hours – People enter the recruitment process when they’re not at work. For example, we’ve been using the awesome HireVue technology now for nearly three years. Our data shows that over 50% of people use the system outside of 9-5 and the most popular day is…..Sunday. We know this as a profession, but want to speak to a recruiter out of hours? We’re in the pub. But, don’t let that worry you, just enjoy the experience.

10) We serve the business not the candidate – I’m not saying this is wrong, it’s a thing, it just is. Every time we will put a line manager before a candidate because simply we care more about their experience. I know. I’m not wrong.

Don’t believe me? The REC have just launched the results of their research in to candidate experience, you can get it here.  And whilst you’re at it, join up to the Good Recruitment Campaign here.

Let’s stop talking the talk.

Demand a little more from recruiters, and yourselves.

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I should know by now that attending anything vaguely resembling an “HR roundtable” is only likely to result in my blood pressure going in one direction. The coming together of HR professionals can result in one of two things,

1) Creative thinking, challenging conversations, original solutions.

2) Dumbing down, group think, collective moaning.

You know which one is the predominant outcome, because you’ve been at these sessions too. But that’s not my point. This particular session was discussing recruitment, recruitment providers and the future recruitment market.

As I ate, what was an undeniably good meal, and listened I heard suppliers complain about procurers and procurers complain about suppliers. I heard,

“We want”, “We need”, “We don’t get”, “We expect”.

From both sides.

What I was hearing was the inability of the demand side (HRDs) and supply side (recruiters) to express the value that they wanted and provided. HR generalists are notoriously feckless and lazy when it comes to recruitment. They place vacancies with recruiters (at all levels) because they can’t be bothered to work out what they want, why they want it, or how they might achieve it.

Third party recruiters have, over time, been happy to accept this, make money from it and exploit the relatively soft market. Providing diminishing returns for increasingly unrealistic fees. They accept vacancies without question, see it as income generation and are target orientated.

Where is the definition of value? Can recruiters really define the value add? And do HRDs know the value they want the supplier to provide and demand it from them?

I can’t help thinking that so many of our issues with suppliers are down to our own poor management and laziness. Our inability to reflect, define and demand. Our tendency to act, react and take the path of least resistance.

Successful markets require good supply and demand. We can’t control the supply, but we sure as hell can be more in charge of our demand.