One of my favourite ways to kickstart conversation at a dinner party is to utter the word, “recruiting” and then sit back. The chances, these days, are pretty good that at least one guest is looking for work or has recently landed, and nearly all of the guests will be eager to contribute their hideous recruiting experiences.
Let me put it out there that I know recruiting is a tough game. Whether you’re an HR manager trying to fill roles on your own or you’re a corporate recruiter working with a four-line job description; even if you’re with one of those fancy headhunting firms, this is not a pretty industry and candidates are hard to find on a good day. I get that.
I also know that candidates resent spending hours on the phone with recruiters, filling in forms, recording videos, selecting their favourite skills from this handy list of 5,000 possible competencies and generally doing the hokey pokey that is a job search to have it all end with utter silence.
Given that good people are looking for work, and good jobs are sitting unfilled, I think we can agree that something is not working here, and I think marketers need to start paying attention because there is significant collateral damage to their brands.
I can’t think of a business transaction where the stakes are much higher than in recruitment. Both sides are taking a big risk, both are investing a bunch of time, and both are ultimately relying on a mixture of trust, hope and luck that it all works in the end. Yet, we’ve fallen into the habit of treating this transaction as something much less worthy of our scrutiny than, say, selling a pack of bungee cords or troubleshooting an ERP implementation.
Recruiting websites are, mostly, afterthoughts. They’re reskinned, white-label candidate grinders, front-ended with a page or two about values and missions and people in matching shirts planting trees. The same marketers who obsess about every click, every abandoned form, every downloaded coupon or ebook barely glance at the Neolithic user experience on their recruiting pages.
The marketers who have mapped every inch of their funnel, defined every minute of the customer lifecycle and carefully crafted the communication touchpoints are blind to the random, cryptic, dehumanizing talent mashing going on just up the hall.
Bad Recruiting Erodes Brands
How is it we can create automated, transparent, accountable and often pleasant online experiences for our customers, but our future colleagues get something out of a correctional services playbook?
The reason, I think, is that we haven’t included talent in the brand value calculation. Marketers understand that brands are about aligning expectation and experience for customers and prospective customers, but we’ve completely missed the boat when it comes to employees. Employees and candidates who are not having a nice time are eroding our brand value just as significantly as a lousy customer experience or unreliable products.
It’s easy to blame the recruiters for this rote cruelty, and it’s easy to suggest that the sheer volume of applicants for any role is simply too much to be nice to all of them. But let’s call BS on that. Never, not once, has a marketer ever said that demand for their product is so great that it excuses rudeness and neglect. It’s not acceptable for people trading their money for your products, and it’s not acceptable for people trading their time for your value creation.
If we look at hiring as the exchange of time and talent for salary and opportunity, then it seems to me that we need marketing right up in there. Marketers are good at persuading people to part with things they value; we’re good at identifying the right people to bring into the transaction, we’re getting pretty good at landing our offer on the person’s line of sight with SEO and SEM and social and all the other tricks and tools. We have personas, segmentation tools, journey mapping, UX design and dozens of other proven tools for pulling off end-to-end transactions.
Sorting Hats and Circles of Recruiting Hell
And yet, recruiting sites are a fourth circle of hell, good candidates are streamed into the trash by Sorting Hat alogrithms, there is zero transparency about the state of the transaction, wholly unqualified candidates are making it as far as the screeners, hiring managers are furious about the time it’s taking to fill roles, 86% of tech managers can’t fill their roles and more than half admit to hiring a marginal candidate because it’s better than nobody at all.
This is broken. HR people know it, recruiters know it, managers know it, candidates know it. If fixing your recruiting systems is on your to-do list this year, may I suggest you get someone from your marketing department on that project. If you are that marketing person, please, please, please take this seriously, bring your whole box of tricks and understand the brand risk of continuing to get this wrong. If you are the marketing executive who’s about to look at this and say you don’t have any resources and there’s no revenue in it, may I suggest you go to your website and attempt to apply for a job with your company. Now go to your competitor’s website and do the same. Then tell me you don’t think it’s worth your time.