The #1 Most Common Recruiting Strategy! And why it can't deliver!
Written by Jonathan Schultz on May 10th 2023
How do I know if my sourcing strategy isn’t working? I ask myself these three questions:
▪ When I have an open position on my team, and I post a job online, am I overwhelmed with an abundance of highly qualified applicants?
▪ If I have an overabundance of applicants and I apply an efficient and accurate screening process to weed out the average, am I left with a slate of top talent from which I interview, offer and hire all within a brief, efficient interview cycle?
▪ Do either of these two scenarios describe my team’s recent hiring experience?
If you’re like most of my clients, you’re wondering if anyone ever answers “yes”.
When I talk to corporate recruiters, I typically get the impression that they don’t see hiring problems the same way their managers do. However, when I speak with hiring managers, most express frustration that the process produces massive quantities of unqualified applicants which typically translate into considerable wasted effort. They describe other problems that exacerbate the challenge of hiring great people onto their team, but for simplicity, I’ll hold off on describing secondary issues at this point.
The data would suggest that there is not currently, nor has there ever been, an abundance of highly qualified people submitting applications for a given open position. We could, therefore, logically conclude that there is NOT a surplus of highly qualified candidates for every open position, but rather the opposite is true. As a general rule we have a dearth of highly qualified talent.
The reason most companies and managers struggle with effective, efficient, timely recruiting is.. because they are employing a “market surplus” strategy when a “market scarcity” situation exists.
The reason most companies and most managers struggle with effective, efficient, timely recruiting is.. because they are using a “market surplus” strategy when a “market scarcity” situation exists.
Let me restate this a different way. If your main recruiting strategy is built on the presupposition that there are plenty of highly qualified candidates available and actively looking for a job that looks just like the one you have open, frustration will always be the result. This is simply not reality.
This reminds me of the lyrics from an old song, “I really don’t mind the rain, and a smile can hide all the pain, but your down when you’re riding the train, that’s taking the long way.
Using the wrong strategy, doing the wrong things and expecting good results is like finding you’ve not just got on the train taking the long way, but you may very well be on the train going the wrong way.
I would fall woefully short of the mark if I pointed to the "post-and-wait" sourcing strategy as the main source of most hiring frustration. The frustration comes from depending solely or heavily on this strategy instead of using a more diverse set of sourcing tools.
As you might guess, I get a load of push back when I make statements like this, but I think we both know it’s because there are times in life when stating the obvious, and facing the truth isn’t comfortable.
I believe that I’ve heard nearly every plausible counter argument to this statement. I suspect that a few might be going through your mind right now. In order to not be exhaustive, I'll just choose one. The most common.
"Yes, we use advertising to create a candidate pipeline for our open jobs, but we also employ numerous external agencies to generate an additional pipeline of passive candidates. So, I have to disagree, we are not depending completely on a “post-and-wait” strategy that generates only 'active' applicants."
Sounds logical, right? It was, 20-30 years ago, when the vast majority of agency recruiters were in the habit of performing aggressive outbound search engagements. However, these days very few agency recruiters have any experience mounting an effective outbound search. Instead, their business model is based on generating resumes (using mainly advertising, spam email and job posts) and then presenting them to their client base without much more than a cursory phone screen prior to submittal.
Worse, some hire 3-4 of these firms and pit them against each other in a race to fill a position not realizing they're doing themselves a tragic disservice. What you end up with is almost exclusively unvetted active candidates sourced via job ads.
Why, because if I tell an agency, non-verbally, that SPEED is the highest priority, and I do this repeatedly, then I'm training them to deliver “fast” and put “accurate” in the back seat. In order to get FAST, you need ACTIVE candidates. So, what you end up with is paying agency fees for candidates you could have reached yourself if you wrote more creative and compelling job descriptions.
Ok, a quick disclaimer, yes, there are exceptions to this rule. There are boutique agencies that actually source candidates and perform effective outbound recruiting, but they are on the endangered list, and getting harder and harder to find.
Want to end to hiring frustration, stop putting the bulk of your recruiting dollars into advertising that only generates active candidates. And go out and find better sources.
Jonathan Schultz
is a recruiting consultant to the Software Industry based in Austin, Texas. He helps leaders eliminate defective process/poor results. Hiring transforms via focus on objective deliverables accurate assessment methods and conversational interview techniques.
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