Recruiting Isn't Broken, It's Just Hard.

March 27, 2015 at 12:18 PM by Rob Stevenson

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Recruiting is broken.

So claims the opening slide for every recruiting tech vendor powerpoint since the dawn of Software-as-a-Service. You hear this over and over again, and each
time you look around, surrounded by a room full of recruiters, or you switch tabs away from your slideshare to your Careers page, or you look out your window and see buildings full of companies growing and hiring, and you think to yourself, "Is it?".

In short, no. In long, absolutely unequivocally unmistakably not. Despite these constant claims that recruiters are merely making noise, and that there's a general sense of dis-ease on the part of talent towards all recruiters, roles are still being filled. Companies are growing. Unemployment in the States is at it's lowest in almost 7 years. For a broken industry, things appear to be humming along just fine.

And not only are there open jobs to be had and willing professionals like you, dear reader, working tirelessly to fill them. Companies are beginning to take strides to make talent selection more inclusive, fair, and representative. The long overdue admission of the issue of diversity in the workplace led to several tech giants releasing data on their workforce. In just one example of the strides now in place to ameliorate this disparity, Google introduced a swath of Employee Resource Groups aimed at supporting their lesser represented communities. Another bold, innovative and brilliant company with a fantastic blog also introduced a Diversity product to help recruiters source from under-represented groups.

Google DiversitySo who exactly is it promulgating the misalignment and near death of recruitment? It's not just the vendors whose pitch for you needing their product necessitates a broken industry. Search "recruiting is broken" and you'll find an unending torrent of soothsayers decrying the mismatch between supply and demand in the market, the saturation of recruitment messaging which has transformed it to mere noise, and the perpetual bad taste left in the mouth of talent as a result of poor candidate experience.

Is recruitment messaging saturated? Only in the case of bad messages. Try more exciting subject lines, try picking up the phone, try learning intimately about the role you're filling so you can find someone for whom the job makes sense.

Does talent innately hate recruiters? Some do. But they don't hate all recruiters. They hate the ones who know nothing about their skillset, who reach out under an obvious template, and who offer a role that truly makes no sense for them to take. This problem is not unique to recruiters; car salesmen, insurance brokers, and lawyers suffer the same generalizations. I'm guessing many of you still buy life insurance. You don't swear off cars because one person got pushy with you, you just find a better salesman.

Is there a lack of supply for crucial roles? Yes, and, honestly, that's good. Having more jobs than people is a problem every country wishes it had. This all serves to demonstrate one single point: recruiting isn't broken, it's just hard.

I've been fortunate enough over the past few years to meet many great recruiters, and I've yet to hear any of these truly talented folks make the tired claim that the industry is in dire straits. All of them have this in common: they're too busy filling roles with undaunted resolution to claim that their profession is falling down around them.  

That said, a professional of any persuasion can always improve, hence the utility of the earlier mentioned vendors. Positioning themselves as the only remedy for a doomed trade is a touch dramatic, perhaps purposefully so, yet many of them do solve a real need. Putting the candidate first and making the hiring cycle as personal, smooth, convenient, and valid in terms of evaluation ought to be in the forefront of any talent pro's mind, and luckily we are in an era where there is a proliferation of tools to help you do so. Demo these tools and try them all with equal gusto and aplomb, knowing there is the very real possibility that they will make you better at your job. But they aren't going to save anyone so dismissive as to throw their hands up when Inmail response rates plummet.

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