Pinpoint’s CEO, Tom Hacquoil, is changing the recruitment industry. Here, he talks about why companies need to completely evolve their approach to recruitment.
I’m sure you’ve been wondering why recruitment has become so hard recently. Why is it your competitors seem to be attracting all the good people and you’re left with the candidates they rejected? What you’re offering in terms of benefits is probably identical – you’re just not selling yourself right.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in meetings with recruitment or HR teams that tell me they’re spending hundreds of thousands of pounds a year on recruitment agencies for “ok” candidates; but they still haven’t worked out why they’re struggling to attract good direct applicants. Then even with a simple solution sitting in front of them, changing their ways is too daunting, or not what their peers are doing; so they carry on with what they know … stick with the status quo. But there’s software out there that can make their lives much easier.
The recruitment world has changed, the way people think about work has changed, but what hasn’t changed is the way that in-house recruitment teams are approaching recruitment. I consistently see global organizations struggling to attract top talent but failing to see what they need to change in order to fix this.
According to the office of national statistics, in December 2018 there was a record high of 812,000 open vacancies in the UK, with it taking an average of 52 days to fill a vacancy. The main reason for all of these jobs not being filled? Not enough of the right people applying for the right jobs. But trust me when I say that it isn’t because the right people aren’t out there.
Here’s the problem
Most likely your recruitment problems will boil down to one or more of the following:
- Not getting the right roles in front of the right candidates in the right way
- Offering an outdated candidate experience
- An allergy to change
But these issues are easily fixable with the right knowledge and support.
The biggest challenge in attracting the best candidates is usually a lack of in-house understanding of how to get the right opportunities in front of the right people. This results in a lack of quality applicants, an assumption that it’s not possible to get quality direct applicants, and defaulting to seeking help from a third-party recruiter. Recruitment marketing that results in a good choice of high-quality direct applicants is a specialist skill that HR teams, in-house recruiters, and even most marketing teams, can’t be expected to have. Posting on your LinkedIn page isn’t going to have the best CVs flooding your inbox.
To attract the best, your recruitment process needs to be an experience; one that leaves a positive lasting impression on the candidates you’re engaging with from start to finish. Every step of the journey needs to be seamless, or you risk losing them along the way.
CEOs and business owners need to understand that in order to overcome their recruitment issues, they need to make some changes. Is there someone stopping that change in your team? If you think there’s nothing wrong with your current approach, or someone’s telling you there isn’t anything wrong, can you tell me why you aren’t attracting the right candidates (without telling me they don’t exist)?
So why treat hiring any differently?
If you’re presenting a list of skills and demands to your prospective candidates without telling them what they’re getting in return, you’re setting yourself up to lose.
The same goes for your application process. There’s no longer an excuse to make applying difficult. Candidates should be able to apply without answering never-ending, irrelevant questions, and they should be able to do it quickly from anywhere, on any device.
Go and have a look at your recruitment advertising, job descriptions, your careers website, your application process and tell me if you’d be interested in your company if you were a sought after candidate? Are you packaging your roles in a way that’s appealing? Are you providing a hassle-free candidate experience?
The future of the industry
Once upon a time, recruiters had to shuffle through a mountain of CVs; wait… we still do that! If you’re not in a position to move away from this style of recruiting in the next 5 years, you’ll never be able to hire the candidates that you want, or any candidates for that matter and slowly, your business will cease to remain competitive. Complacency is killing so many organizations. It’s insane if you think about how far we have come in other areas of business, yet not in recruitment.
