The 10 minute talent rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 minute talent rant is our ongoing series. Where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space, maybe even pitch a solution or two. And before we dig in all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. Side note, I think we’re finally changing the domain. So it’s hirewell.com/talent-insights, but hasn’t quite happened yet.
All right. We’ll get there. The copy stays the same then. Yeah. This week’s topic, Episode 89, “Recruiting Is Not The Goal, Hiring Is.” It seems very duh. Yeah, it seems duh. It’s actually going to be more of a metrics conversation. I’ll start with a confession. As you guys all know, I’m a content nerd. I spend a lot of time writing blogs, LinkedIn posts, doing these dumb videos with my good buddy Jeff. And any chance I can, I always like to pull in numbers, data, metrics. It could be economic reports, job reports. A lot of times our own kind of data we use.
I think that numbers do a great job of providing context, especially to subjects where people might not have any context. But oftentimes they’re bullshit. And I don’t mean that in an intentional, like I’ve been misleading anyone any way. I just mean in general, if and when you misunderstand what numbers are telling you, and you will 100 percent do this, everyone does at some point, it can also lead to reaffirming a wrong conclusion. And this goes for running a business. This goes from running processes, which ultimately leads to bad decisions, pointless busy work, wasted time, bad behavior, all that kind of stuff. And the term I heard fairly recently that I really like, managing by spreadsheet, is one of my new terms. I mean, it just sounds terrible. Like, who the fuck wants to do that?
Yeah, it gives hives. And when you manage things entirely by spreadsheets and numbers and metrics, it’s really easy to get disconnected from the real life processes and people that produce those numbers and how to change those numbers. Anyways, I digress.
Yeah, numbers are can affirm lots of different things, either positively or negatively for the purposes of the conversation recruiting is essentially equal to finding people and hiring is equal to getting them in the door and actually part of the org making a difference.
The biggest issue in all of this is hiring leaders, you know, those that are proud of their organization and think, you know, rightfully that everyone would want to work there. You know, they basically look at everything in through the lens of, hey, it’s just a recruiting problem. So, you know, get folks into process.
Everything else will fall into place. Like, this is the main crux of the fallacy. Part of it is also because when they recruited those early term people, like the 1st cohort of individuals that push the company forward, these are referrals and well known individuals, industry professionals that again, known resources.
It’s so much easier to hire those people than later on when you’re a more mature organization and the ideal candidate profile has much higher expectations. So in reality, finding people is by and large, super easy. Convincing them that, you know, they should talk to you and then ultimately walk through your door is the far more difficult part.
Yeah. So in the spirit of focusing on hiring metrics, hiring and metrics that matter, we want to look at six that we’ve identified that are either total nonsense or they have value, but they’re misunderstood and kind of applied the wrong way. And I’ll kick this off. I might have actually talked about this in a previous rant.
I know I talked about this on LinkedIn, but like time to fill. I’ve definitely talked about this before at some point in time, but I want to bring this one back up. This is like the lowest hanging fruit. It sounds important. The time it takes to fill a job. It is important. It’s an important hiring metric, not an important recruiting metric. It measures ultimately like the speed and effectiveness of your entire hiring process front to back. And there’s two major things that drag this down. One is just a slow process where it takes you forever to like get one interview to the next interview, to do the debriefs, to make a decision, to talk to more candidates.
A good example of this is I like a candidate and we’re going to schedule an interview 10 days from now. Yeah, that’s why your time to fill sucks. Yes. And the second one is declined offers. Anytime you have to start all over from scratch again, that just potentially doubles the amount of time you have to do.
And that’s why knowing like, who’s actually interested and does this person want to accept before you go down the road too much with them is really important. It usually gets lumped in with top of the funnel metrics. I hear this in so many kinds of initial calls, like what’s your time to fill with like a new client? And my go to answer is well, five days plus the length of your interview process. Like, I don’t know what you tell me. Like, what’s your time to fill? As our good friend, Kelly Hrivnak pointed out on LinkedIn, when I was talking about this one time, like the real metric, as the solve here, is time to source.
How long it takes to find that first slate of candidates to find them, then vet them to get them in process. Both are important, but you just have to remember they’re not the same. And if you’re trying to reduce time to fill, but keep harping on finding candidates, you are going nowhere. Totally counterintuitive.
All right. Next one. We’re going to get on some new stuff here. So what’s the next one, Jeff? Number of submissions. So, it’s the same. What’s the right number here? One? One sounds great. Yeah, every recruiter would agree that that’s like the ideal scenario. You literally can’t beat that efficiency. What if you want a broad perspective of the market, though?
Which is 99 of 100 customers. Is it 10 profile? Is it 20? Bear in mind, those numbers take a lot of human effort and a lot of time. What invariably happens is it bounces back to this 5 to 7 range, which, why? The point here is no matter what, any of those numbers are arbitrary. It all comes down to how well do you know the skill that you are hiring for?
This is why it’s difficult for us to answer the question, how many qualified submissions should I expect to see? And it’s exactly why we discuss the topic openly, us with our customers, to potential, you know, buyers of what we do before signing on the dotted line. Like we need to know what that expectation is from your end before we start saying, “Oh, you’re going to see 20 candidates. There may not even be 20 candidates in the pipeline to look at if it’s that niche.
Next one. Size of the Rolodex of candidates. “Rolodex.” Our favorite one. Yeah, shout out to anyone who knows what a Rolex is. Double shout out. If you’ve actually owned one at some point in time, or still use one. Although if you’re still using one, you’re probably not watching the show.
For reference, it’s one of those physical card sorters that people would, you know, use to alphabetically organize the business cards they got. You have to keep in mind that anyone, Gen Z literally probably has no idea what that is. Yeah, they have no idea what that is.
Anyways, the reason why this comes up and I mostly blame like the really crappy staffing salespeople for continuing to peddle this like narrative and usually goes like this. The client, I’m talking to the client now, like I need to hire for XYZ skillset. And then like the sales hack on the other side says, yeah, I’ve got 10 of those guys. No problem. Or worse. They just send profiles of people that are actually without their consent and just said, “Hey, this person’s available.” So it gets really shitty real quick. Even worse. Yeah. Yeah.
The whole point is to present this illusion that, “Hey, the search is already done before it started,” uncanny. Amazing. Newsflash, in reality, look, every recruiting firm and frankly, everyone more broadly has a massive database to source from nowadays, whatever you’re looking for.
We’re overloaded with public data sources. Damn near everyone in the entire world can be found and contacted within a day. Just having someone’s name and number and contact details, it doesn’t make them a valid candidate. They have to be available at that moment and they also have to want the job, which gets-
Huge. Huge parts. They have to want your job at your company. Huge caveat. And absolutely no one can promise you that without going through the entire recruitment process first. Anyways. Right. And they have to be recruited. It’s why AI will never take our jobs by the way. I could know 15 Python full stack engineers right now that fit your job requirement, Mr. And Mrs. Customer. But guess what? 14 of them love their job and they aren’t moving. So there goes my whole “Rolodex.” Like what you really need to gauge is someone’s ability to build that list quickly. A quick build. Are they agile enough to go to market and tell you things instead of who do you know, the question should be, how well do you know the markets that we’re going to potentially be looking in?
And if you don’t know those markets, how do you plan on learning them real time? Secondly, ask the recruiting firm, what data are they going to provide? What resources are they going to provide? And how is that going to translate to a successful hire? Those are much more interesting insights than, “Oh, you know, 15 people.” Everyone knows 15 people, right? Correct.
Next one, source of candidates. Literally, who cares? It’s so stupid. It’s so, so stupid. If you are worried about where the perfect candidate comes from versus getting the perfect candidate to accept, we- with all due respect, have nothing for you. Right? And when he says where they come from, it doesn’t mean what company they’re working at.
He means specifically like how they got found and how they came to your doorstep. Anyway, correct.
Correct. You know this “Are you only finding candidates that you post a job for?” Well, no, but if the candidate comes from that, it’s okay if they’re the perfect candidate. This desire to know where folks come from is good for a firm like ours to know, like what works.
But the concern from, you know, our org is the stigma around too many candidates who come from job posting specifically because they’re in essence looked at is like the easy low hanging fruit that companies could do on their own. And everyone’s just missing the point that it just takes a lot of work to source all of those different sorts of candidates on the front end.
Yeah, we’re going to go way over today. So I’m going to side rant on the rant here. Let’s just talk about job postings for a second because there’s three misconceptions about this because every company thinks if they just post a job, they’ll get the exact same results that their recruiting firm or some other company will get because for whatever reason. That is false for three reasons.
The first, anyone who’s going to find us, will find us is flawed logic. Unless you have an incredibly powerful brand. No one knows who you are. I’m sorry, like literally nobody. Yeah. If you’re Google, that’s probably true. If you’re not Google, like you’re just XYZ, like you’re some company that says no one’s heard of, you’re not going to get the traffic you think you’re going to get, you’re certainly not getting all the traffic.
Number two, job ads are not job descriptions. Shout out once again to Mitch Sullivan, who has beaten this point. We’ve made a career editing this point over the head. Job descriptions are boring, company centric, HR compliance driven word salads that convince absolutely no one why they should work for a company.
In fact, when they probably read it, they’re bored to death, they don’t even apply. Yup. Job ads are punchy, candidate centric, persuasive summaries of why someone should join and why your company and your job is better than the one they have. It’s an ad. That’s the whole point. It gets a candidate to say, like, let’s give this a shot. Let’s go. Yes.
And lastly, like so many job postings and so many that companies put up are flooded with respondents. And you all know what I’m talking about. Like so many internal recruiters that talk to you, they get a hundred, 200, 300 people applying for a job. Once again, thank you LinkedIn easy apply for making everyone’s life harder.
It breaks the entire vetting process. Companies literally do not have the time to actually screen everybody because there’s no efficient way of doing it. And it’s mind boggling to me how many times companies like end up hiring somebody who applied to them like maybe three or four months ago or a year ago but didn’t get back to them then or maybe they’ve got great people in the pipeline that like, “Oh, yeah I applied to that place. So I guess I can’t go there again.” The black hole exists because it’s just volume is just too much going on, but-
it’s insane to think that internal recruiter may have just gotten to that candidate literally 4 months later because the volume of applicants was so high that they literally just got there.
But it’s literally our a job to do that. So just throwing that out there. If you want to work with us, we will make sure nothing slips between the cracks. Continue.
All right. Another silly one. Percentage of candidates currently employed. This one hits home for us. So problematic for two reasons. Number one, in seriousness, we should not have a bias against people who aren’t working, especially now, ever. Now, specifically. Definitely for another day for another rant.
There are plenty of folks that are out looking that want work. Especially in our circles, like you go, you can still doom scroll on LinkedIn. It’s a real thing. Not considering this pool of candidates because of some throwaway notion, it’s insane. So stop doing that.
Number two, people who are working always, almost without exception, want more money and it’s usually a higher percentage bump than those actively seeking work. When I say no one, I literally almost mean no one, takes lateral or marginal increases to move job, unless it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, like curing cancer or like something really, really altruistic.
It goes back to your previous point. Every company is selling how cool their opportunity is to passive candidate pools. I trust you. I know all of you think that your thing is special. You should, it’s your company. Candidates don’t know that because every other company is saying the exact same thing.
It’s just not part of the decision making process. You have to pony up to make this work for candidates that are passive. And at scale, it’s just not practical, unfortunately.
All right. Last one, we’re going to go on. And then we actually have a few fixes. Interview to hire ratio. I like the idea, or just the idea of evaluating targeting based on interview to hire metrics.
I get why it seems appealing, but it gets skewed to hell really for two reasons. So first searches where the requirements change or refined, as the process goes on. So sometimes often, everyone learns things throughout their recruitment process, which means you have to actually change the parameters of the search.
It can be slightly, it can be dramatically, honestly, that’s okay, but every time you do that, it completely throws like the amount of people you need to interview to make a hire completely out the window, makes the entire thing irrelevant.
Yeah, and there’s like this really weird “need” and I put quotes around the need, for some organizations to always talk to a specific set of, sometimes it’s four, sometimes it’s seven, sometimes it’s two.
I need to talk to four candidates to make this decision. Why? Like, where’s the why in that? In practice, like, there’s no way of knowing how many folks you’ll have to see before you make a hire for the role, we said it before, it’s knowing what you’re looking for and acting on it in a time sensitive fashion when you meet that person.
Awesome, we’re going long. I don’t care. What’s the takeaways? We actually had three metrics we like better. And maybe people should start thinking about using. So Jeff, go with the first one.
It’s really easy. Change, you know, your percentage of whatever you’re using now and just say percentage of the candidates that make it through maybe two steps of your interview process.
They get past that first internal gatekeeping session. What that signifies is you’re aligned with your recruiting partner or your internal recruiters, and you’re at least finding like the cultural mix that works. Now it’s just about refining skills.
Second one, historic tenure by source. So internally at your company, how long employees at your firm lasted and where they came from what the sources were, meaning employee referrals versus job posting versus external recruiters versus you found them randomly at a networking event.
It’s not the end all and there’s a lot of things that can skew it, but if you’re looking at it in terms of large numbers, going through your past activity and like where the best sources were for long term, it can actually be a very interesting exercise to figure out where you should spend more time to be more likely to find more long term fits. Not saying you shouldn’t ignore the other sources, but you’ll get a better idea of what actually worked over time.
Yeah. And then finally for all of us agency dorks, repeat business with, you know, with clients. That, you know, you delivered satisfactorily with, it’s just going to be a recipe for success.
Yeah. The better firms have way more repeat business from more repeat clients. Simple as that. We are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning in the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insight Series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com as well as YouTube, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon.
Jeff, thanks again, as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
