The Recruiting Frontier: Targeting the Right Candidates
What is your job posting communicating to job seekers?
A job seeker reading a job posting is the first step of the recruiting dance whereby job seekers and companies ‘sort’ themselves into groups for mutual evaluation. Sorting can be efficient or inefficient based on the quality of the information that job seekers and companies have about each other. Inefficient sorting hurts companies and job seekers alike by increasing the time and costs for finding a match. The goal for any job posting is to provide the highest quality information to job seekers so that they can efficiently decide whether or not apply.
Most job postings contain a generic company blurb, a list of job responsibilities, followed by a laundry list of skills and experience requirements. This has the following deleterious effects on the pool of applicants that will apply for any job:
1) The company description and job responsibilities offer no information on what type of person should want to work at this company on this team beyond what they can already read about on the home page or in the media. The result is that job seekers can’t differentiate between opportunities, and are likely to apply to numerous jobs indiscriminately.
2) A laundry list of skills and experience requirements discourages hungry and motivated job seekers from applying because they believe they are unqualified. You will get applicants that check all your boxes, but you will miss out on candidates that would be motivated and thrive in a stretch role.
To sum up the problems with the average job description today, companies are casting too wide a net with regard to the character of person they are looking to hire, and they are narrowing their pool to stringently around skills and experience. This results in applicant populations with a low average potential for culture fit and higher probability of being overqualified and under-motivated.
Redefine what you are looking for in a job candidate
First, define a Minimum Viable Skillset for the position you are hiring for. Do not circulate a list of requirements and allow people to add what they think it necessary. This is what I call the Christmas tree approach. Everyone hangs an ornament, and before you know it you have defined a set of skills and experience that rivals most heads of state.
Instead, ask a few people to think about someone who was highly successful in this role, and have them identify one skill or qualification that they believe most contributed to their success. There should not be more than a handful of bullet points that result from this process, and that’s the goal. The same way you target a Minimum Viable Product before launching, a Minimum Viable Skillset is all you need (and want) for a new hire.
To understand why the Minimum Viable Skillset works, it helps to think about the trajectory of an ideal new hire. Often the most motivated individuals are the ones who have the most to learn from a role. They are individuals at the beginning of a steep learning curve. They are not individuals who check every box and are already perfectly qualified to do a job. When you list a daunting number of requirements in your job posting, it can deter some of the best candidates from applying.
The second step to attracting the right candidates is to get very concrete about the character of the person who does well on your team. We’ll call this the Maximum Possible Culture Fit. With skills, there are benefits to compromising on the exact requirements because skills can be learned. With character, compromise leads to poor culture fit and high turnover.
Communicating clearly what values define your team is an essential part of a job posting, and should be incorporated into the company and job description. Shared characteristics are your team’s values, they define how your team operates day-to-day. What mission unites employees at your company? Who does well on your team and who doesn’t? What priorities allow you to accomplish your team’s objectives?
Without this critical information job seekers have only the most generic information about a company and role. The goal is to attract a focused group of individuals to apply and to deter people who aren’t a good fit. You want to communicate insight into what it is like to work on your team in this company. If anyone with access to Google could have written your company and job description, you are doing it wrong.
Quality vs. Quantity
Too often recruiting feels like a trade-off between quality and quantity. When quantity goes up, quality goes down. At Pomello, we know that finding the right balance between quality and quantity in your applicant pool means relaxing skills requirements while being picky about values.
