Recruiting is Broke
One of the things I hated the most at Leads360 and pretty much every other company I’ve worked at was recruiting. First off, I suck at it. It’s a total pain in the ass. You can spend ½ your time combing resumes, having phone interviews, meeting people and so on to end up hiring someone that is a cultural disaster or just a wrong fit from a skill set altogether. Most of the time I feel pretty good about who I hire; I’m thinking, yeah, I got a superhero here… but then, I’m frequently not happy in the end.
I’ve actually made some amazing hires in my time. But what’s interesting is that those hires happened in a totally different way than all the others. I didn’t post a job. I didn’t get resumes. I didn’t do interviews or all that. I already knew the person from somewhere. I had a relationship with them somehow already. That’s the key; I knew what they were all about and I knew how they would fit in my organization.
I bet most of the best hires in history have come this way. You worked with someone for months or years at a partner company and then you hired them. Or maybe they worked for a friends company and you go to know them in a social setting. Whatever.
That brings me to my thoughts on the future of recruiting; it’s “nurturing” not “recruiting”. Once you realize you need to fill a role, it’s too late. If you don’t already know who the perfect candidate to fill that role is, forget about it. It’s about nurturing candidates when you don’t need them so when you do, you have a relationship. They know what you’re all about, what your company culture is, what type of projects you do and it’s just a matter of negotiating terms then.
Frankly, this approach is as good or even better from the employee’s perspective. It’s even more costly from that end for mis-hires; so giving them a place to connect, learn about, get to know and “nurture” companies is just as useful.
I was recently at a Fortune 500 company that is pretty much recruiting 365 days per year. The head of HR was telling me about their strategy to identify and build relationships with top talent long before they reach out with an offer for a position. In some cases this might be months or years. It’s almost like nurturing sales leads; any sales person worth his salt knows that one-call-closes are about as rare as soft TP at a startup. So to be successful you need to nurture leads until they’re ready to close. There’s a whole business category around this function, it’s called “marketing automation” and companies like Eloqua and Marketo do it all day long for big bucks.
There really isn’t a platform for nurturing recruiting right now. I think it’s a huge opportunity.
