The paradox of choice – and why all the best jobs and candidates are taken.
No this isn’t about online dating. Although you can see similarities with candidates, job boards and “swiping right”.
There’s been a surge of activity in cost-cutting since the GFC…unfortunately Talent Acquisition didn’t escape. There’s a huge amount of work that has been conducted on the cost of a bad hire (about 30% of that individual's take-home earnings is the general idea but according to a study by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), it could cost up to five times a bad hire’s annual salary)
There are a couple of questions here:
What’s going on?
How do I stop it?
Firstly, there's a suggestion that while managers understand the importance of hiring star players, recruiters simply aren’t doing a good job of finding them. This can point fingers at internal teams but also bad agency recruiters. It shows why we seem to be potentially moving towards candidate screening which won’t involve a human being.
From an analytics perspective, you can guarantee with low employment rates, to receive a plethora of applications if you post a position online. This does not guarantee you success in finding the right person.
You can assume here that if you rely on job boards and online applications to fill your roles, then the chances of you finding the ideal person are slim. To put things further into perspective; there were 3.6 million job openings at the end of 2012. About 80% of available jobs are never advertised.
Right so we can safely assume that our obsession with cost cutting and reliance on job boards, combined with poor recruitment strategies would lead to bad hires.
Secondly, how do I stop this?
This isn’t as easy as the diagnosis. Essentially it’s achieved by using better recruiting practices. Making sure you use a good recruiter and ensuring you do more than just advertising – 5% of our successful hires came from an advertisement. You would expect that top performers are well rewarded and looked after by a company – you wouldn’t want to lose your best assets so you’d make sure they were happy and not looking elsewhere, right? Just as if you’re in a relationship you’d hope they’re not signing up to online dating sites.
Finding the right person
This is where the art of search comes in, the network, the “headhunt call” and the enticing of the top performer.
Obviously we’ll advocate how important it is to use a specialist, successful recruiter for your next hire! You can, of course, do it yourself…just don’t rely on purely advertisements to get the desired result. That's insane.
Finding the right job
If you’re looking for a job, you want to make sure you’re not only looking at 20% of the market.
There are two main avenues to get access to these roles
Be well-networked (not the easiest thing to do)
Speak to the people who know about these jobs (people who are well networked) and pick the right people/recruiters.
It seems logical that if 80% of jobs don’t get advertised, then 80% of successful hires don’t apply to these positions…which means chances are you won’t find your ideal job or candidate online.