So you think this is recruitment?

Employers, what are you doing? You cannot automate everything. Talent management does not become a process. Talent is about people. Take a look at this tweet I saw a couple of weeks ago daft recruitment, it is typical of the processes that there are out there today. Many of you employers don't even have the good grace to reply to highly qualified candidates who have just spent 45 minutes filling out your application form and telling you about their career aspirations. Football has every single statistic about performance going, and yet humans are still heavily involved in recruitment at every level. We all know that the fees gained by their agents are outrageous, but that is because they recognise the importance of human intervention. And yet you all want to recruit the very best in the business, you tell me you do. But you rely on systems that look at people's social media profiles, Twitter feeds and LinkedIn entries and make a judgement about them. You ask them a series of connected, difficult questions and reject those who don't quite get it right. You hold assessment centres two days before the end of March (yes it happens surprisingly often) and then exclude those sales managers who can't make it. Would you want to recruit a sales manager who could make the end of March? And then after that you give most of them no feedback, and if you offer them a job it takes two weeks often to get anything on paper (or email) down. Two weeks? At which point another, more switched on group has taken them out of the market. Would you let your sales team take 14 days to send out an order form? It is time to get back to the human, I don't care what science tells you about a better way of recruiting, you can use it as a useful aid, but do not use it as your main means of filtering.  You are so scared of making the wrong hire, you don’t make any. In footballing terms you are so scared of missing, you don’t shoot. Apart from anything else, there are people out there who know how to play the game and they tend to attract the best people. Want to subscribe to this blog? click here.