Intelligent Search

Recruiting is a funny business. While there is nothing technically complex about hiring people, there is very definitely a method and talent to hiring the right people. If you picked up this book and are beginning with Part I, Company Search, you are most likely someone who works in a hiring capacity in your company. Like most hiring managers, you are also probably frustrated from time to time with the lack of effectiveness of your own hiring methods. Although few companies would claim that they hire successfully and in a timely fashion every time, unfortunately, there are many companies for whom hiring is more like a roll of the dice than a precise business process. Why is that? Someone just starting out in the recruiting business once asked me, "How hard can it be? You call, schedule, interview, and make an offer." Sounds pretty simple, right? Then why do so many people complain about how poorly it works in their company? These complaints vary but generally they include the fact that it takes too long to fill a position, the cost of hiring is too high, the overall dissatisfaction with the eventual hire, or a lack of retention after a long drawn out search. What causes these fairly common complaints?

The first answer is that while most people believe hiring should be simple, in reality, most of them do not do it for a living. It is a secondary, or even tertiary responsibility to the other duties involved in their position. While some of these managers have excellent business judgment, they lack the instinctive hiring judgment that can only be developed through experience and through a career whose primary responsibility is interviewing and hiring. It is this experience that makes a professional recruiter just that...a professional. Unless you have interviewed hundreds or thousands of candidates every year for many years, you haven’t experienced enough successes and failures to have a solid hiring track record. To assume that any person can be as successful as any recruiter, is to assume that any recruiter can the job of managers with years of experience behind them.

A common reason that companies are less successful at hiring than they’d like to be is that very few managers want to admit that they do not have the required skills. For some strange reason, recruiting, interviewing and hiring is something everyone assumes they know how to do even before they’ve ever done it. They feel insulted at the suggestion that they may not innately know what to do. This is unfortunate because it is almost impossible to teach the instincts that come from years of recruiting, most managers can be taught some key steps of what it takes if they are receptive to advice. Ask any hiring manager if they were ever given a class on what to look for in an interview before they ever interviewed and very few of them will say yes beyond being told basic legal regulations.

Along with these causes is the clear fact that recruiting has changed significantly over the years. It is no longer a question of finding resumes. Companies have more resume sources than ever and in most cases have resume databases that contain thousands of resumes. Recruiting has become a matter of how well those resumes are used, screened, interviewed, treated, and eventually invited into an organization.

Intelligent Search is a better strategy for attracting and retaining employees. It begins with an admission that we are not doing this very well. At the very least, we are not doing it as well as we would like. It takes an open ear and a willingness to absorb the ideas that career recruiters learn over time. It also requires a clear understanding of your own company, the hiring practices being used, and the short- and long-term goals of your company beyond filling any one specific position, as the most effective course of action will vary depending on those goals. While most companies will say that hiring the right talent is critical to their company success, most of them regard their recruiting process much like the scene in the Wizard of Oz where they are told "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Recruiting is somewhat of a mystery to them.

Let’s start with detailed example. Consider Company A, a large, bureaucratic Fortune 500. They are a fully developed, multinational company with over 50 years of business success. This success can breed a complacency that business will continue as usual whether or not the position gets filled in a timely way. While it may be an inconvenience to others on the staff to leave this position empty, the company stock price does not plummet because of the inefficiency. Company B, on the other hand, is a small business, perhaps a dot-com startup. This company may fail or succeed based on how well and how quickly they move to find the right person. Filling a position in Company B has an entirely different sense of urgency. That open position can cost the company a significant amount of revenue. However, Company B is also in a different financial situation and is less likely to be able to spend an undetermined amount of money on filling the position and is restricted by their available funds. How these two companies hire are probably very different. How these two companies hire should be very different.

Looking more closely at these examples, let’s review how they are probably structured and the reality of each situation. Company A, the large corporate conglomerate, most likely does nothing to fill this position until they have a position description that details the position level, to whom it reports, grade of the position, salary range, position title, and all of the position responsibilities. This description may have been defined by the hiring manager or by a representative of the Human Resources (HR) department. While this is a critical component to success, the time involved in putting this description together may be days or even weeks. Until this step is completed, no efforts are made to begin a search.

In Company B, this loss of time would be unacceptable. In Company B, there are fewer people involved in the job definition. It may be clear or vague, but guaranteed, it is not yet in writing anywhere. Ever. Company B has a good idea of what they need but will verbally communicate those instructions without ever setting them in writing. Company B often does not have defined salary ranges, position titles, or for that matter, any idea of more than some of the responsibilities that will be expected of this new position. Small companies and start-ups need candidates who are willing and able to wear as many hats as possible.

Is one more right than the other? Not necessarily. Each situation requires its own process. Company A, while they will describe the position as needing to be filled "yesterday," has the luxury of time that Company B simply does not have. This drives two very different behaviors each with its own problems.