The hard sell won't work in recruiting
Nic Paton, writing on the Management-Issues web site reports on a survey by HR consultancy Development Dimensions International. That firm surveyed 600 job seekers and 1870 HR people from around the world. The biggest finding of the study was that there's a gap between what candidates think is important and what employers think.
The article says that the HR people think they have to "sell" jobs to candidates. HR professionals will have to act "more like their marketing colleagues" according to this view of the future.
If that's true, then the HR people that were surveyed are in some deep trouble. Consider this finding.
"Nearly three quarters of job seekers believed it was important to work for an organization of which they could be proud. Yet only half of staffing directors considered this an important issue for candidates."
If there's selling to be done, then it makes sense to understand what your prospects want. It should not be a surprise that people want to work for a company they can be proud of.
This is a bit like the old hard-sell used car salesperson approach. Think plaid jackets and a pushy, obnoxious manner. "What will it take to get you come on board with us today, Mr. Candidate?"
This kind of "sell the idiot on our company" approach is doomed to frustrating and expensive failure. A third of the candidates polled said they were looking for a new job within six months of landing the last one. That could be because they were "sold" on joining the company.
If your "selling" generates that kind of turnover, it's going to cost you big time. Various estimates put the cost of replacing a person at two to three times annual salary.
The hard sell will be counterproductive, but solid consultative selling might work. Consultative selling would emphasize identifying a prospect's needs and expectations, then coming to a mutually beneficial decision about what will happen next. For that to work, though, recruiters need to recognize a few truths.
Truth number one: money isn't everything. It's a lot of things.
Money has an economic value. To quote Homer Simpson: "Money can buy goods and services." But money can also be used like a scorecard telling a candidate how he or she is doing compared to peers. Or like a flashing sign indicating what skills a potential employer values most highly.
And not all money is money. There's also the benefit package. People value specific benefits differently, depending on their situation. That includes non-monetary benefits like flexible work hours. In today's time-starved, rapid-paced world, they might be worth more than straight dollars to some candidates.
When people are making enough and doing interesting work with people they like, they're likely to become what we call "engaged." They pitch in enthusiastically. They work hard and share ideas about how to do things better. They treat customers well. They stay for a long time and they build your profits while they do.
But here's an important point. Not everybody is going to be a good fit with every job or company. In fact, the companies with the strongest cultures, like Nordstrom or Southwest Airlines, have constructed rigorous hiring and intake processes that assure they'll get as many talented people who fit with their culture as possible The point of consultative selling in recruiting is to get the good fit that can lead to engagement and long tenure.
In the coming years, as the Boomers hit the exits, recruiters may need to sell their companies to prospects. But they'll do a lot better if it's a consultative sell and not the old hard sell.
Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.
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Evil Marketing Man once accepted a job (found through a headhunter, so there were easily quantifiable costs to his hiring) after being promised the moon.
First day on the job, they told him that everything that had been described in the job interviews was not going to happen. And, by the way, due to cost cutting measures he couldn't have his own stapler. There was a central one to be shared.
He lasted less than a year. Moved to a company that believed people were more important than $5 staplers.
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This is precisely what I used to tell people that did the interviewing at the Fortune 500 petrochemical company where I was an HR manager. Interviews should be a two-way street where the goal is to be sure that the candidate wants to work for the company as much as the company wants the candidate. This can't be accomplished if the company isn't honest about it's culture and real needs. Example: when I started working for this company they wanted to hire only right-out-of-school ChE's with the highest GPAs, from the best Chemical Engineering schools. This was for plant jobs; primarily process optimization. We paid high salaries, had absolutely great benefits and good working conditions, but our turnover rates were high and a huge concern for management. They couldn't understand why. It was obvious to me that we were hiring the wrong people, primarily by not telling them what we really expected of them, but rather "blinding" them with the money and benefits. It took years of convincing to make them see the light, but it finally got done and we began a very differnt kind of interviewing and looking at experienced engineers. We had to interview many more candidates, but out turnover rate went way down. In fact, our best hires were often people with 2 to 4 years of experience with other companies that hadn't been honest about their expectations.
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Excellent points and example, Mike
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I read Evil and Mike's examples, but herein comes the conundrum... they both recognize that people can end up at companies that, well, lie to candidates. Yet it's also axiomatic for job coaching gurus (and all HR people I've talked to) to never, ever, EVER say anything bad about a former employer. This flies in the face of reality with surveys showing about 85% of people leaving bad bosses rather than bad jobs. Yet every HR person says that if you actually tell the truth about this then you're a "complainer" who "might be hard to get along with". This is of course straight out of HR's biggest problem IMHO, rampant magical thinking. In HR, you can choose any trait, from a spot on a shirt to credit report to eye color to being unemployed for more than 6 months, and pontificate that it means person X will be (some bad trait) on the job, with no peer-reviewed, double-blind, statistically significant published article to back it up.
It's funny that I've listened to successful business people like Nolan Bushnell (behind Atari and Chuck E Cheese) be asked about what makes a good employee (in Bushnell's case, a good engineer) and they'll start rattling off
traits (not academic courses and not negative traits). In fact, Bushnell asks all prospective engineers to explain how to change a wall socket, as he finds so many people with no practical knowledge. Now when talking with HR people, their first instinct seems to always be a list of negative "indicators" to avoid, or highly specific requirements, but never a picture of a good fit for the type of work being discussed or any indication they can generalize the good qualities exhibited in specific examples of candidate achievement and relate it to the job in question. It's like the old joke about how to carve a status of an elephant: start with a block of marble and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
I think it underscores that HR recruiters are being asked to screen candidates for jobs they've never actually performed and really aren't qualified to judge. When one is dealing with decision making without requisite background information, you'll see all sorts of patterns being observed and extrapolated from minimal data (it's human nature to see patterns). You'll also never know about the good ones that got away, only about the bad ones that got in (hence part of the emphasis on extrapolating to try to perceive bad traits). I've dreamed of a study for quite some time, even working on a protocol, that would really determine if your average HR recruiter has the ability to actually select the best talent, particularly if they employ all of these unproven "rules of thumb". We've got too little science in management science, but more "old wives' tales" than you find in horse race handicapping. At least in handicapping these tales are tested at the betting window. There's little accountability for screening out good people in HR.
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Thanks for that long and thoughtful post, Joseph. I think you've hit an issue that's important. How well do you need to know a position in order to recruit/interview to fill it?
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