All right, everybody, welcome to the 10 Minute Talent Rant, episode 100. We did it Jeff. Century mark. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith. We are on the clock. That 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we breakdown things are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found at talentinsights.hirewell.com. Again, episode 100, the best and worst of the 10 Minute Talent Rant. Any great artists for their compilation pieces, will always include some extra track. So this one might be the 20 minute rant. We’ll see. Yeah. We’ll see how long we, I think we have a hard stop at about 16 minutes here.
So we’ll see how far we get. Anyways. We went through our whole catalog and we found maybe eight takes we thought were a little underrated- I think is what we nailed. We probably had 20 some, we tried to narrow them down and then we had five where we completely botched and missed the mark entirely, which is probably maybe the highlight of the show here.
We’ll just, we’ll just go. We’ll just rip into this. I agree. Number one, VMS systems are a pyramid scheme. December 16th, 2020. I stand by this. I don’t think there’s a better example for vendor management systems. Those who are not familiar, like these are what large companies would use.
This shows the disconnect. Go ahead Jeff. We just went through literally a couple of RNP processes were literally like, there was some live stuff where it was just like, okay well, they’re obviously looking for the lowest price. Yeah. It’s basically the disconnect between the suits who have nothing to do with hiring and where hiring meets the rubber. The idea that hey, let’s just put everyone on software.
We’ll have an internal marketplace. We’ll have all these vendors compete. It’ll be faster. It’ll be cheaper. We’ll even cut off access to hiring managers. There’s no like shenanigans of people playing favorites. I mean, that should work, right? I mean, reality is that it just gives you the lowest possible quality service.
There’s no such thing as a rate card. Market rates for an individual determined by what they’re seeing, not what you want rates and pay rates to be. It’s just the amount of providers cutting your rates and cutting corners to do whatever they can to actually try to do this.
They got junior recruiters who don’t know what they’re doing. You got good recruiters doing business elsewhere entirely. It’s just this massive disconnect between the hiring manager, what the hiring managers want, and what’s actually being discussed with the candidates. Because apparently they need to be on the same page and talk to each other, but that’s really cut out in most of these processes.
So candidate experience in the toilet, all in the name of saving money. We nailed that one. Number 2, getting older at work shouldn’t have to suck. This was our 11th episode back in 2021. There’s a ton of bias in the world and terminology like high motor and go getter, relentless, et cetera, like these are often code words for companies so that they can go and find cheaper, younger talent.
So, we have seen like a big increase in a request from customers for these attributes and it just further confirms that there’s a disproportionate effect on applicants that have grown a little long in the tooth. Most of this stuff is unconscious. I’m not like, there’s no nefarious intent for the most part.
Companies want folks who will work hard and produce. All good. We’re on that boat too. It’s when companies insist that employees make work the center of their lives where things go totally off the rails. So aging shouldn’t stink, especially at work. The experience of folks with years of exposure to a craft is literally invaluable.
Why fail fast when you don’t have to fail at all? That’s when an experience hire matters. I would just like, just because folks, you know, older folks can get more done with less because of those experience, it doesn’t mean that they’re lazy. It doesn’t mean they won’t run through the brick wall. It just means they’re more efficient.
Case closed. There’s also been a million studies done. People who are older tend to have longer tenures at companies they’re at. Just this idea that- anyways. Moving on, do another one. From episode 26 in January 13th, 2021, how many candidates do you need to make a decision? Um. The short version of this, well, one is what the answer should be. Short version,
there’s this misconception that if you just keep talking to more and more and more candidates, you’ll keep finding better and better, better people. So if you want to make a great hire, you just have to take forever. That’s what the logic usually comes down to. Completely whiffs on the candidate side of the market.
Like people have options, they lose interest. They see indecisiveness as systemic of your company of not being able to make good decisions. It’s also missed on the fact that people are in limited availability, both in terms of the amount of people who want to do a skill, certain skill, or have a certain skillset.
Plus the amount of people who would actually be open to looking things and would actually be interested in talking to your company. And this is usually driven by companies that made a bad hire. So if you made a bad hire in the past, you’re gun shy. So you want to talk to more and more candidates, but instead of fixing your hiring process to become more decisive, you actually make your hiring process worse by making it harder to get candidates to say yes, because you’re just not good at making decisions.
All you’re admitting is exactly that. You can’t make decisions. All right. Nailed it once again. Next one: good onboarding fixes bad retention. Back in March of 2022. One of your finest taglines, I will say, James. Thank you. Trying to mass hire when you’ve got a retention problem is like pouring water in a leaky bucket.
You can’t recruit your way out of it. Nailed it. That’s a good one. Key takeaways here. Teams are now, well often fully remote. So they’re out on an island. No one’s walking by their desk to check in how they’re doing. No one’s reading body language- by in large. Water cooler talk doesn’t exist, especially when they’re new and they don’t know anybody yet.
So like infamiliarity and disconnect can be fostered quickly in these environments. If onboarding stinks, all of that recruiting activity that that candidate or your new employee has engaged in prior to onboarding suddenly becomes interesting again. And there’s no real loyalty at that beginning part.
What we’ve seen since we did this show, was it’s resulted in a ton of small hops over the past couple of years, which is perpetuating this notion that like candidates move all over the place. But in reality, it’s just you didn’t invest any time into it once they were seated in the seat. Bingo. Number three, you can have the best interview process in the world,
you actually could have a really good company, but if this initial period doesn’t bridge the gap between you know, the reality of sitting in the seat versus the interview process, there will be a disconnect. Fact. This is the number one thing that can ruin the investment you made as a company in the first place.
So guys, invest in a good onboarding process. It’s worth it. Moving on- another banger, employer prestige is dead. This was from episode 40, the no one understands recruiting, but recruiters, volume one from March 30th, 2022. My personal favorite. Yeah. This is my evergreen, when someone ever asked me like what the biggest issue in talent acquisition is, I always come back to this.
It’s that employer prestige, the inflated egos of leaders and people at companies drive lots of bad aspects of recruiting. A lot of the other things we talk about, a lot of the other things in this list comes down from this kind of institutional arrogance. Now, I hate to completely dump on people because I understand if you’re a founder, if you’re a leader, you’re proud of what you built, you’re proud of what your organization is.
As you should be. Maybe it is a great place, but you have to remember that candidates are not mind readers. They’re also not you. They don’t have the same comp plan. They don’t have the same expectations. They don’t know what you know in your head about the industry. Like, they have to be sold. You have to convince them.
You have to tell them and explain the benefits of working there. And you can’t just say, well, we’re so great. I mean, the amount of times I’ve heard people say, like, well, the right person is going to want to work here because they’re going to see how great of a place this is. If they can’t see it, then they’re not the right person
anyways. Yeah. It’s that the employer prestige, that concept, that idea is, especially if there’s more and more companies- like I get it. 30, 40 years ago, like in the past when there were less companies and they were ones that were clearly better than others, that made sense. But now, most people work at smaller medium sized companies.
No one’s ever heard of you before. This whole prestige thing is dead. And I think this was actually one of your lines back when we did the show. Sorry, my landlord doesn’t accept, but my company has five stars on Glassdoor when it’s time to pay the rent, so. They don’t. It is not acceptable currency. Yeah.
All right. Another one, stop hiring and firing internal recruiters. We just did our pitch rant, what, one or two ago? I can’t remember what it was. But seriously, we got to stop this. Why on earth are business leaders still hiring FTE recruiters for literally known short term hiring spikes?
The best recruiters sit and will now always sit in agencies because of the last two years. It ruined the market for internal recruiting. The best of the best of our profession will always bet on themselves moving forward. And it’s also why companies that invest in internal TA will still have to budget for external help.
So we implore every- just check out Hirewell’s philosophy on hybrid recruiting models. You can check it out anytime, Hirewell.com. The solutions are literally right there for any company that wants to get off of this hamster wheel. Next one, soft job markets doesn’t mean hiring is easier from episode 61,
no one understands recruiting but recruiters, volume three. March 15th, 2022. Basically just because it’s a soft job market doesn’t mean it’s actually easier to hire people. There’s more unemployed people, that’s easier. But convincing someone to leave their job when they’re fearful about the economy, they’ve already survived a bunch of layoffs.
It’s 100 percent harder. You want to talk about- we’re just coming out of it right now. Yeah. It’s the active versus passive candidate market when people talk about that. Someone’s who’s currently in a job that’s at a good company, like it’s infinitely harder to get them to look at stuff right now than it would be. So, I mean, it’s trendy to say it’s not about the money, it’s about the opportunity. But that’s a bull market thing. You know. People aren’t worried about risk when things are good and they can feel free to pursue their dreams or take a swing at doing some crazy new thing.
But when the market sucks, everyone’s just more risk averse. So yeah. It’s harder right now than it is normally. Yeah. I mean, no matter how highly you think of your own company, very few people are dying to work there, if anyone. I mean, recruiters need to sell the hell out of these jobs at your places, especially in tight markets.
And this is a tight market. You know, just a few things at play. I mean, hiring managers and founders think changing up job descriptions is going to have like a material difference on making candidates apply. That is false. I mean, we’ve seen that happen already. And then number two, every other company is selling their roles the exact same way.
Yeah. It’s just there’s so much noise. It’s impossible for a candidate to really understand the differentiators when everyone’s putting their best foot forward. All right, let’s have some fun. We got a few minutes left here. Our bad topics. Let’s talk about the five we really booted or we just got wrong over time and blew up in our face later on.
Jeff, you go with the first one. Episode four. So it was early September of 2020. We’re still, well, not quarantined quarantined, but kind of quarantined. Maybe contract to hire isn’t dead.
All right. Apparently pre COVID contract to hire was dead. I don’t even- I think so. I don’t remember. Must’ve been the take. I remember wiping down Amazon boxes with like, you know, antibacterial things. This all seems like forever ago. What we do know is that in boom markets, it definitely becomes less popular.
So if you can land, if a candidate can land a permanent job, why would anyone take contracts? Yeah. Makes sense, right? And so employees are forced into more permanent hire situations due to that competitive pressure. But in the fall of 2020, with this large spike of unemployment, you know, we saw it start to come back in that tiny moment of time.
Give us a break. It was our 4th time. Yeah. Well, next one we followed it up with a real banger. Episode 5, can LinkedIn stories make recruiting easier? 2 weeks later? October 7, 2020. Probably don’t even remember LinkedIn youth for 1 year. They killed it a year later. They had a whole stories thing like Instagram or Snapchat has.
It was so unpopular. No one actually used it. I had a great series. I used to read bad Glassdoor reviews on there and let people guess the company and send them a mug if they got it right. But yeah, that was top shelf stuff. Can’t believe he made it past five episodes. It’s so pathetic. All right.
Number three, unlimited PTO is a scam. July 14th of 2021. Admittedly too provocative. I mean, this was in our hell fire.
Reality time. “Unlimited PTO can be a scam” would have been more accurate, but- terrible title. It’s true. Companies do use unlimited PTO because it saves on payouts. There’s financial interest to it. And some companies say, you know, you have unlimited PTO, but don’t actually, you know, walk the walk as they say. Now,
that’s not all companies. We have unlimited PTO. So we had tons of people reaching out to us on that one. Both leaders and people, you know, individual contributors saying my company has it, it’s pretty great. Yeah. Everyone here is offered the opportunity to take as much time off as they need
so long as they produce. Case closed. Yeah, episode 51. Another bad one. “Will Gen Z kill bad companies?” From September 21st 2022. Notice a timestamp on that. Like, I can’t think of a bigger or in a bubble topic than thinking junior level employees are going to kill- be the catalyst for toxic work culture to end.
I mean, I want that to happen. It seemed like for a minute there, like the hiring demand was so high, gen Z was being really picky, but they hadn’t had their dreams crushed like the rest of us. And like in the work culture, they weren’t going to put up with this kind of stuff. But, uh, yeah, that was a bowl.
And everybody wanted that. It still wants that to be the case. Yeah. All right. Lastly, “there’s not enough experienced hires to go around” in January of 22. Yeah. I mean, your promo copy said it all. Record setting VC funding and remote training is difficult plus low unemployment equals
there’s not enough experienced hires to go around. Sure. Under those conditions. It was accurate. Another solid bubble tank from- that exact moment in time it made perfect sense. Now, on the bright side- if we’re always right, which we kind of are a lot of the times, you’ve never really said anything at all, so. True, true.
We took a swing. We missed on a few. Anyways, we are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week and for the first 100 episodes. Thanks for tuning in the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insights series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com as well as YouTube, Apple podcast, Google podcasts, and Spotify.
Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, see you soon.
