Here’s one thing about recruiting that does my head in.
Posted by Mitch on 30th July 2015
I’m going to try to get through this blog entry without a) being long-winded and b) swearing.
One of the things about recruitment that can make it so compelling is its unpredictability. This is especially true for younger agency recruiters – but this unpredictability tends to become less attractive the older and smarter they get.
It doesn’t matter how good you get at recruiting – there are just so many variables (i.e. human beings) that when things sometimes (and inevitably) don’t go as planned, your work falls apart and you’re made to look stupid.
This is particularly relevant for internal and retained recruiters, who have more access to these variables and, theoretically at least, better placed to control them.
Things going wrong sometimes happens to even the best recruitment practitioners and is just the nature of hiring. There are just so many moving parts.
One of those moving parts are Hiring Managers and/or Company Directors.
These types of people generally hate having to find new staff. The part many seem to hate the most is meeting candidates.
I only work with SMEs and start-ups and many of these Hiring Managers/Directors tend to be ‘High-D’ types.
High-D types are characterised by being very highly driven, goal orientated and quite impatient.
They tend to prefer brief summations rather than detailed explanations and don’t always have great people skills.
And so spending hours sitting across a desk from potential new employees listening to them talk about their lives/jobs/careers is about as appealing to the High-D as a homophobe sitting through an Alan Carr show.
In short, they dislike interviewing and avoid doing them whenever possible.
It’s one of the reasons why many of them are more likely to be suggestible to the agency recruiter who calls them with “a hot candidate”. They tend to buy-in to anything that will mean they don’t have to spend time in the recruitment process.
And so, most Hiring Managers and Company Directors tend to do one of two things.
They either hire the first half-decent person they meet and hope they turn out to be OK or they just keep turning away CVs because they’re holding out for that mythical perfect candidate and end-up interviewing hardly anyone.
The end result being that they hire a lemon and then blame the recruiter. Or their job goes unfilled for about 6 months.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s a fucking nightmare.
I lied about the ‘no swearing’ thing. Sorry.