I’ve got your talent, right here.
Posted by Mitch on 5th June 2015
Sometimes I think the one big safety-pin that’s holding the 3rd party recruitment industry together is the widely-held belief that the best candidates (aka “talent”) are currently doing the same job for a similar company.
Lets be honest here – what’s really attractive about candidates already doing the same job somewhere else is that they’re seen as potential employees who won’t really need to be assessed, trained or managed.
They sometimes go by the term passive candidates.
Hiring someone who doesn’t need to be assessed, trained or managed seems to have become the holy grail for many risk averse managers and if recruitment agencies have one skill, it’s knowing how to feed the insecurities of their target market.
Whenever a candidate is described as “talent”, invariably one of the people involved in that conversation is a hiring manager. The other is an agency recruiter.
If they’re a hiring manager working for a large corporate and they weren’t already lazy or naive, then the chances are they’ve become imbued with a disease that inflicts all very large businesses eventually.
This disease is called institutional arrogance.
Institutional arrogance manifests itself when a hiring manager believes that they don’t have to sell their employment opportunities. That just by having a job vacancy, they’re doing the world a favour.
Agency recruiters buy into it because they think the job will be easier to sell, like in this completely made-up phone exchange:
Recruiter: “Hi, I have a role I think you’ll be interested in at Starbucks.”
Candidate: “Why do you think I’ll be interested in it?”
Recruiter: “Because it’s with Starbucks.”
For some reason, a lot of hiring managers seem incapable of putting themselves in the prospective candidate’s shoes. You just need to look at 90% of job ads for evidence of this.
These are the kinds of hiring managers who, when asked why someone would quit their job and work for them, take on the facial expression of a dog that’s just been shown a card trick.
They struggle to see that genuinely talented people don’t often look to make a sideways move into a company they don’t know, unless the money on offer is obscenely high, their current employer is in some kind of trouble or the new employer genuinely offers better learning opportunities.
The primary exception is when someone has been made (or is under the threat of) redundancy. Then, all that person wants to do is maintain their lifestyle by getting another job as similar to the last one as possible.
However, recruiters have a tendency to think that anyone who’s been made redundant is somehow inferior to someone who’s in a job. That them being made redundant is somehow a reflection of their ability, which as we all know deep down, isn’t often true.
The world is littered with “star performers” at one company who become at best average performers at their next company. Or to borrow a phrase from my friend Marcus Cauchi, candidates who act like James Bond at the interview and Mr Bean when they start work.
In my experience, the people that do tend to become star performers are those for whom the new job represents logical career progression – or a change of direction.
They tend to work harder because they’ve got something to prove. And people who work harder have a habit of becoming star performers.
But, the problem with these types of candidates is they’re tougher to spot because they’re often doing different jobs with different job titles.
If companies ever stop believing the bullshit that “talent” is defined as someone already currently doing the same job, then the 3rd party recruitment industry would have to have a serious rethink about the kind of “talent” they themselves employ to work for them.
Because then, recruiters would have to start getting good at candidate assessment and less good at keyword bombing.
And that would be one long hard road for some – especially those who have yet to work out who they are, let alone who anyone else is.
So there we have it.
Talent.
A word more abused than an immigrant at a UKIP rally.
Comments
By Charles on Friday, 05 June 2015Good blog- this is particularly prevalent unsurprisingly in the recruitment industry- Agency A wants someone to grow an A+F desk for them, thus they look for someone doing A+F somewhere else, totally ignoring why, if that person is doing remotely well, they would up sticks and move to somewhere and abandon all the work they’ve been doing.
I remember one staggering example from my time as a rec2rec- an agency wanting to set up a London based NHS desk (contract) that wanted someone who had done the exact same job, billing £200k+ to come and join them. Basic salary? £23k. When I asked why on earth anyone that met there spec would move for what would likely be a sizable cut in earnings I was told they needed to ‘see the opportunity.’
By Michail Tzouvelekis on Friday, 05 June 2015
Mitch,
My attempts to post this comment on LinkedIn have failed. Anyway.
I have lost count of the times that agency recruiters have contacted me about an opportunity with the exact same title as my current or immediately previous job, for a company that is a direct competitor of my current or immediately previous employer.
I used to think that this was a sign of their lack of imagination and/or laziness; now I understand that they were just fulfilling their brief!
My question to the hiring managers or internal recruiters who commission such activity is: what does it say about a candidate, if they are willing to cross from your competitor over to you, without getting a promotion or a pay rise in the process? Are they good at what they do? Are they valued? Are they loyal? Are they desperate to leave?
And finally, what does it say about you, the hiring manager or internal recruiter, that you need to pay a fee to get access to this “talent”, instead of doing a simple Google or LinkedIn search? Exceptions exist, of course.
By Mitch on Friday, 05 June 2015
Michail, LinkedIn’s loss is my gain.
Thanks for your comment, most of which I agree with.
By Mitch on Friday, 05 June 2015
Charles, that’s why you getting out of R2R was a very wise career move.
Maybe recruitment agencies have caught the disease from some of their customers?
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