What are you looking for? 🔭📡👁️🗨️
Hiring's biggest problems is that hiring managers don't know the answer to that question.
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“So, what are you looking for?”
This is the question that derails so many talent searches, not because it’s a bad question, but because it reveals how much or how little thought the hiring manager has put into this role.
It tells you if you’re about to go hunting (a hard enough process, to be sure) or fishing (but without a pole, bait, or a sense where the best fish might swim).
One of the biggest challenges in hiring is that hiring managers are very often fishing. They don’t actually know what they want. They can’t describe what a great hire requires or what experience is necessary for success.
It’s not that they don’t “know,” it’s they are terrified to define what they want for fear that they get it wrong. So they default to things that aren’t specific enough to help you go hunting. They say the job needs a degree (does it?) or eight years of experience (why eight? why not seven and a half?) or must be able to work in fast-paced and collaborative environment (show me the company that doesn’t think about or describe itself this way that isn’t funded by the state or federal government).
No wonder all job posting read the same and say nothing.
Not knowing what they want shifts the burden from the hiring manager to the recruiter, which is patently unfair.
If a hiring manager isn’t willing to do the hard work of thinking about where their business is going, what their team needs, what experiences would make a new hire exceptionally useful, and how they will deliver value, the recruiter is forced to guess, to stay conservative, ignore people with unusual backgrounds or approaches because they don’t “look right” or “aren’t what the hiring manager would expect” (which is nuts because the hiring manager has no idea what they want).
It’s funny because sometimes what keeps a hiring manager from getting specific is a fear of allowing their own biases to creep in, so they build a search brief which forces a recruiter to only bring back “safe” candidates instead of outliers who might be amazing at the role.
The Cheshire Cat underlines this when it says, “If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.”
Recruiters and branders: Hiring managers will not change on their own. We need to help them see that the best talent can be had, provided that they are willing to get specific about what they want.
Last call! If you’re a specialist or relatively new to employer branding and want to hone your skills, impress your leadership and get that promotion/new job, join my upcoming Employer Brand Group Therapy. 5 weeks of solving each other’s problems. No questions are too scary. $250. Interested? Reply to this email. I’m capping the group at no more than 10 people, so act now!
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🏛️ All 2,300+ articles from this newsletter are in a searchable archive. Go get ‘em!
Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of Ogilvy UK, a TED speaker, and author of Alchemy, and I guarantee he will change how you see your world. I got the chance to talk to him about the weird world of talent acquisition, recruiting and employer branding and he didn't disappoint. This is appointment viewing, so strap in!
Quick.
🧲 What's the value of increasing your outreach conversion by 10%?
🤝 Or having 20% more of your offers accepted?
💰 Or lowering your RPO/agency spend by 15%?
I bet it’s worth a whole lot more than just $1,500 a month.
Learn how you can make those kinds of impact through employer brand as a service.
***This Newsletter Contains No ChatGPT***
-James Ellis [LinkedIn] [Website]
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