How to Sabotage Your Recruiting Efforts in Six Easy Steps
by
Brenden Wright
Jun 11, 2009, 5:58 am ET
I’m constantly quite amazed at the level of ignorance, and often arrogance,
which exists with some hiring supervisors.
Do you ever ask yourself how a person got into the position they occupy?
I know I do. I constantly hear the overplayed and overstated “people
are our most important asset” cliché — yet actions seldom
back up this widely accepted ideology.
Recruiting great talent, even in a down economy, isn’t easy, and we’re
not even going to talk about retaining them once they arrive. We make it
hard enough just to get candidates to take us seriously during the interview
process. Down economy or not, great people always have options.
So, for those of you who still need some help in figuring out how to completely
sabotage your recruitment efforts, I’ve compiled a quick guide of
six easy steps that will get you there faster then you ever thought possible.
Step #1: Beat up your recruiters about the lack of
“qualified” candidates and then decline candidates based on
your “gut” feeling about the resume.
Excuse me, but what does “overqualified” mean? Or, what does
“not the right fit” mean? Often, I’ve found that the term
“overqualified” means one of a few things. But usually it’s
either the hiring manager is afraid the candidate could take her job, or
she is discriminating based on some other assumption that lacks any evidence
whatsoever. “I just think this candidate would be bored here, so I’d
rather not talk to them.”
As your recruiter leaves your office, please disregard the pounding sound
on the wall outside your door. That’s just her head repeatedly meeting
the drywall.
Step #2: Once you finally find someone that passes
the “fit” test and set up an interview, don’t make yourself
available to interview.
I’m reminded of a recent example where a hiring manager had a very
difficult, highly specialized position that had been vacant for almost 11
months. Finally, a candidate surfaces who meets all the requirements and
is greatly interested in the opportunity. The catch is that this candidate
is on the market and other organizations are also aggressively pursing her.
Does your hiring manager care? Of course not! She’s not available,
and won’t do anything to make herself available, to see the candidate
for three weeks. And, despite your best efforts to convince her that she
needs to move quickly, she responds with, “well, if the person doesn’t
want to wait to see us, then he must not want to work here, so it’s
probably ‘not the right fit.’” I’m starting to hate
that line.
At this point, please remove all sharp objects from your recruiter’s
office.
Step #3:Be late for your scheduled interview time.
Or better yet, just don’t even show up. After all, if the candidate
doesn’t want to wait to see us, then he must not want to work here,
right?
It’s 10:00 a.m. and I’m standing outside the office of a vice
president with a director-level candidate. At 10:20 a.m., we decide that
we’ll just be early for the next person on the itinerary. What message
does this send to the candidate? We are disorganized; we don’t care
about how we are perceived; we aren’t interested in how top talent
views us; and we really don’t give a squat about the candidate’s
time. These incidents are usually followed by the explanation that some
blip in the matrix or wobble in the space-time continuum caused a random
IT error that removed the appointment from the VP’s calendar. You’d
be amazed at how many IT errors are responsible for missed interviews. I
wonder if IT realizes how much it gets blamed.
Scratch that — I’m sure it does.
Step #4: Don’t prepare for your interview. After
all, you have more important things to do — like the work of the employee
you are trying to hire.
How many times do we have to send you the resume? How many times do we have
to come to your office with the candidate only for you to tell us, in front
of the candidate, that you never received their information? How many times
do you need to embarrass yourself, your recruiter, and the organization
before you take just a few minutes to be responsible for yourself in the
recruitment process? Your lack of preparation for the interview speaks louder
than any words ever could about the level of importance you place on hiring
the best talent.
And your recruiter really enjoys forwarding you the e-mail he sent you last
week with the candidate’s information just to prove a point. We’re
passive-aggressive like that sometimes.
Step #5:Ask stupid questions.
Why is a manhole cover round? I’m sorry: are we dealing with manhole
covers in the Accounting department? If you ask any hiring manager whether
or not they consider themselves a good interviewer and predictor of talent
and success, most will sing their own praises from the mountaintops. Most
hiring managers have no formal training and, subsequently, not a really
good grasp on how to conduct a successful interview. Especially when you
ask questions like, “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you
be?”
I’d be an oak tree. And I would fall on you.
Step #6:Don’t make a decision.
It’s three weeks after your candidate’s final interview and
your hiring manager still needs to “get feedback” from the team.
Um, what? How is this possible? And then we are hit with the dreaded, “well,
if the candidate doesn’t want to wait to hear from us, he must not
really want to work here.”
Kill me now.
So, there you have it. Six sure-fire ways to ensure your organization never
hires the best and brightest talent and you continue to fill your ranks
with people who don’t care and just want a job. The best thing about
this instructional guide is that you only have to do just one of the six
steps to lose your top candidate. But, if you’d really like to make
sure you drive talent away from your organization like deer from a burning
forest, make sure you do them all.
