Are recruitment conveyor belts properly processing applicants or are the best people passing you by?
Greg is close to the end of his financial tether. He has been unemployed for 18 months. He has no income and his mortgage payments and the tuition fees for his children weigh on his mind.
He never thought it would come to this. He worked for the same organization for 20 years, during which he delivered exceptional value (made and saved millions) and then lost his job as a result of an internal political row.
Georgina built a great career in the world of advertising, eventually making it to executive vice-president. A single mother, she gave full-time to her kids while still supporting her clients and helping to build the agency. The young executive she reported to had difficulties with her emotional strength and asserted wisdom. Georgina is now an unemployed single mother.
I have met a lot of Gregs and Georginas in the past two years. Greg and Georgina are, astonishingly, persona non grata in the marketplace. For a variety of reasons — age, office politics, life choices — recruiters mostly ignore them and they find few if any leads on Workopolis or Monster.
And yet, if their former employers can do without them, I would love to meet the stellar lot they chose to keep on the payroll. There is something wrong here. More than wrong, it is weird and counter-intuitive.
We all know that the managerial and professional talent pools are in sharp decline thanks to demographic shifts, social changes and 30 years of succession planning and employee development neglect. We know that a relatively small generation of bright kids now graduating is less inclined to enter traditional commercial careers.
We talk about this problem ad nauseum. Google searches generate a tsunami of literature about impending leadership shortages going back 20 years, which suggests that the problem is not ignorance.
Could it be that North American organizations suffer some form of bipolar disorder? Even as there are good people on the street keen to work and with much to offer, the level of stress and burnout due to overwork among the currently employed is going up.
When I call a friendly soul for a no-sweat lunch and get a date seven weeks away, I know that something is not right in his world. Or ours.
Part of the problem is a recruiting process that was founded in a simpler time and endures, unimproved, to our collective loss. A modern, flexible recruiting process based on organizational needs would long since have put mature people like Georgina and Greg back to work.
In many organizations and within the headhunter community, recruitment has become a transactional, formulaic, short-term process that often fails to identify real organizational needs. Recruiters cling to the known and comfortable and use selection protocols biased to mediocrity.
Organizations routinely fail to identify fundamental HR priorities and ignore changing needs. Executives and recruitment decision-makers think “replacement” rather than “enhancement.”
Executives dread spending the time associated with a critical search and selection. And many, to their credit, admit their limited competence with the process. So they call a headhunter and offload the problem. These executives want and need known, comfortable patterns, as we all do.
But a good headhunter will challenge the comfortable patterns, dig for the real needs and employ some creativity in the search for a replacement that is a good fit for the organization. Alas, good headhunters are uncommon. The recruiting business is known for its self-serving conservatism, traditional views and short-term focus.
Within the trade (and it is more a trade than a profession as commonly practiced) there are some excellent, truly professional recruiters. Most are sole practitioners or members of small partnerships. Within the big firms with their big ads and big, international databases there are a few stalwarts doing great work despite being yelled at for insufficient billing and lack of new business activity.
If HR’s needs-identification is superficial — and it is — and the search process is a linear, transactional exercise — and it usually is — then the selection-integration mating dance completes the triangle.
Organizations cling to a process that has more in common with sorority and fraternity “rushing” and hazing than it does to reasonable, social business behaviour.
The late great Yogi Berra lamented to the hapless New York Mets he managed in the early years of the franchise, “Does anybody here know how to play this game?” When it comes to selection of scarce, needed talent, many organizations play like the Mets of old.
Consider some facts about today’s recruitment and selection realities.
First, the interview receives overwhelming weight in selection decision-making, despite the fact that this subjective process deserves about 15 per cent of the weight. Worse, many interviewers are less than skilled.
Next, too much emphasis is placed on affiliation and common experience. Sometimes, it is the old “school tie” connection. More often, it has to do with potentially destructive conservatism whereby business leaders find comfort in “one of us” thinking. “We simply can’t consider a candidate who hasn’t managed a social service organization before. It is so different.”
Psychological assessment and the use of favourite selection tools attain disproportionate influence. Assessment by a skilled organizational psychologist with deep organizational knowledge and armed with clearly articulated, validated needs can offer a powerful positive contribution to the selection process. But psychologists are not sorcerers or magicians.
Reference evaluations are usually perfunctory. These essential investigations are commonly done in five-minute telephone conversations or brief e-mails. They typically take place after the hiring decision is made. Mostly, it is comfort-seeking. (Somebody who buys a BMW, for instance, will read BMW ads with great care after their purchase to confirm that the $75,000 was indeed well spent.)
A lot of reference checking works this way. Other processes have some deliberation about them and occur before the decision has been made but often consist of scripted questions asked by people who have never met the candidates. I can tolerate the former because there is some opportunity for discussion. I hate the latter and will not engage in them any longer because these sterile exercises guarantee that I will inadvertently misinform and perhaps do harm.
Few organizations challenge candidates to show their stuff. If I wanted to hire someone to do theme analyses on a bunch of papers or interviews and produce tight, lucid summaries, I would assign candidates some real tasks, assert deadlines and assess the results.
And I would pay them the going rate for their efforts. Along the way, I would discover which ones I could get on with in a working relationship. In the end, I would still have a decision to make but I would not be relying on interview insights, resume palaver or abstractions derived from telephone calls.
Could employers not benefit from this method in making critically important hires? Unfortunately, the old, linear and abstracted process has its comforts.
The recruiting process is not making the needed contribution. Greg and Georgina are unable to get into the hiring game, let alone get a hopeful at-bat despite their great records of success and their extensive skills. Lamentably, I personally know many like them and so there must be thousands more in the same damnable Catch-22 situation.
They remain cheerful, energetic and willing to “do windows” if necessary, which advertises an attitude that should make them attractive to beleaguered organizations everywhere. But it doesn’t.
So we’re left in a situation in which the talent pool is eroding, and employed professionals and executives are working at a level of intensity that is simply wearing many of them out.
And all the while, there are talented people like Georgina and Greg who are ready, willing and able to pitch in, full time, part time or whatever at reasonable cost because they need paid work, like to contribute, enjoy the give-and-take found in a social organization and need to be useful.
In time, some organization that has taken the time to really look at them and what they have to offer will likely realize Greg and Georgina can make invaluable contributions. For now, both can put some new words in their resumes, words like “resilient,” “tough” and “optimistic.”
Meanwhile, can I suggest that the power and future of any organization depend on the capabilities and sensibilities of the good people involved and the ability to attract more good people willing to pitch in? But we know all of this already.
Bob Evans coaches senior managers and executives. He is the author of Moral Leadership – Facing Canada’s Leadership Crisis (McGraw-Hill, 1997). He can be reached at (416) 927-1638.
He never thought it would come to this. He worked for the same organization for 20 years, during which he delivered exceptional value (made and saved millions) and then lost his job as a result of an internal political row.
Georgina built a great career in the world of advertising, eventually making it to executive vice-president. A single mother, she gave full-time to her kids while still supporting her clients and helping to build the agency. The young executive she reported to had difficulties with her emotional strength and asserted wisdom. Georgina is now an unemployed single mother.
I have met a lot of Gregs and Georginas in the past two years. Greg and Georgina are, astonishingly, persona non grata in the marketplace. For a variety of reasons — age, office politics, life choices — recruiters mostly ignore them and they find few if any leads on Workopolis or Monster.
And yet, if their former employers can do without them, I would love to meet the stellar lot they chose to keep on the payroll. There is something wrong here. More than wrong, it is weird and counter-intuitive.
We all know that the managerial and professional talent pools are in sharp decline thanks to demographic shifts, social changes and 30 years of succession planning and employee development neglect. We know that a relatively small generation of bright kids now graduating is less inclined to enter traditional commercial careers.
We talk about this problem ad nauseum. Google searches generate a tsunami of literature about impending leadership shortages going back 20 years, which suggests that the problem is not ignorance.
Could it be that North American organizations suffer some form of bipolar disorder? Even as there are good people on the street keen to work and with much to offer, the level of stress and burnout due to overwork among the currently employed is going up.
When I call a friendly soul for a no-sweat lunch and get a date seven weeks away, I know that something is not right in his world. Or ours.
Part of the problem is a recruiting process that was founded in a simpler time and endures, unimproved, to our collective loss. A modern, flexible recruiting process based on organizational needs would long since have put mature people like Georgina and Greg back to work.
In many organizations and within the headhunter community, recruitment has become a transactional, formulaic, short-term process that often fails to identify real organizational needs. Recruiters cling to the known and comfortable and use selection protocols biased to mediocrity.
Organizations routinely fail to identify fundamental HR priorities and ignore changing needs. Executives and recruitment decision-makers think “replacement” rather than “enhancement.”
Executives dread spending the time associated with a critical search and selection. And many, to their credit, admit their limited competence with the process. So they call a headhunter and offload the problem. These executives want and need known, comfortable patterns, as we all do.
But a good headhunter will challenge the comfortable patterns, dig for the real needs and employ some creativity in the search for a replacement that is a good fit for the organization. Alas, good headhunters are uncommon. The recruiting business is known for its self-serving conservatism, traditional views and short-term focus.
Within the trade (and it is more a trade than a profession as commonly practiced) there are some excellent, truly professional recruiters. Most are sole practitioners or members of small partnerships. Within the big firms with their big ads and big, international databases there are a few stalwarts doing great work despite being yelled at for insufficient billing and lack of new business activity.
If HR’s needs-identification is superficial — and it is — and the search process is a linear, transactional exercise — and it usually is — then the selection-integration mating dance completes the triangle.
Organizations cling to a process that has more in common with sorority and fraternity “rushing” and hazing than it does to reasonable, social business behaviour.
The late great Yogi Berra lamented to the hapless New York Mets he managed in the early years of the franchise, “Does anybody here know how to play this game?” When it comes to selection of scarce, needed talent, many organizations play like the Mets of old.
Consider some facts about today’s recruitment and selection realities.
First, the interview receives overwhelming weight in selection decision-making, despite the fact that this subjective process deserves about 15 per cent of the weight. Worse, many interviewers are less than skilled.
Next, too much emphasis is placed on affiliation and common experience. Sometimes, it is the old “school tie” connection. More often, it has to do with potentially destructive conservatism whereby business leaders find comfort in “one of us” thinking. “We simply can’t consider a candidate who hasn’t managed a social service organization before. It is so different.”
Psychological assessment and the use of favourite selection tools attain disproportionate influence. Assessment by a skilled organizational psychologist with deep organizational knowledge and armed with clearly articulated, validated needs can offer a powerful positive contribution to the selection process. But psychologists are not sorcerers or magicians.
Reference evaluations are usually perfunctory. These essential investigations are commonly done in five-minute telephone conversations or brief e-mails. They typically take place after the hiring decision is made. Mostly, it is comfort-seeking. (Somebody who buys a BMW, for instance, will read BMW ads with great care after their purchase to confirm that the $75,000 was indeed well spent.)
A lot of reference checking works this way. Other processes have some deliberation about them and occur before the decision has been made but often consist of scripted questions asked by people who have never met the candidates. I can tolerate the former because there is some opportunity for discussion. I hate the latter and will not engage in them any longer because these sterile exercises guarantee that I will inadvertently misinform and perhaps do harm.
Few organizations challenge candidates to show their stuff. If I wanted to hire someone to do theme analyses on a bunch of papers or interviews and produce tight, lucid summaries, I would assign candidates some real tasks, assert deadlines and assess the results.
And I would pay them the going rate for their efforts. Along the way, I would discover which ones I could get on with in a working relationship. In the end, I would still have a decision to make but I would not be relying on interview insights, resume palaver or abstractions derived from telephone calls.
Could employers not benefit from this method in making critically important hires? Unfortunately, the old, linear and abstracted process has its comforts.
The recruiting process is not making the needed contribution. Greg and Georgina are unable to get into the hiring game, let alone get a hopeful at-bat despite their great records of success and their extensive skills. Lamentably, I personally know many like them and so there must be thousands more in the same damnable Catch-22 situation.
They remain cheerful, energetic and willing to “do windows” if necessary, which advertises an attitude that should make them attractive to beleaguered organizations everywhere. But it doesn’t.
So we’re left in a situation in which the talent pool is eroding, and employed professionals and executives are working at a level of intensity that is simply wearing many of them out.
And all the while, there are talented people like Georgina and Greg who are ready, willing and able to pitch in, full time, part time or whatever at reasonable cost because they need paid work, like to contribute, enjoy the give-and-take found in a social organization and need to be useful.
In time, some organization that has taken the time to really look at them and what they have to offer will likely realize Greg and Georgina can make invaluable contributions. For now, both can put some new words in their resumes, words like “resilient,” “tough” and “optimistic.”
Meanwhile, can I suggest that the power and future of any organization depend on the capabilities and sensibilities of the good people involved and the ability to attract more good people willing to pitch in? But we know all of this already.
Bob Evans coaches senior managers and executives. He is the author of Moral Leadership – Facing Canada’s Leadership Crisis (McGraw-Hill, 1997). He can be reached at (416) 927-1638.
