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. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. Are you ready, Jeff? We spared the peanut gallery, our political musings right before. We’re going to have the big convention here next week in Chicago. Or is it this? Yeah, it’s next week, right? I forget. Don’t care. Doesn’t really matter. This week’s topic, episode 94, the fear of messing up hiring.
And so the backdrop here is a bunch of us, colleagues and I, we were having a discussion about the differences between 2021, 2022 as well as 2023 and 2024 and the TLDR, breaking out some of the Gen Z terms. I don’t even know the Gen Z terms. I’m not even sure. But the FOMO market, the fear of missing out market of 2021 and 2022.
So post pandemic. Companies had a fear of missing out on hiring. So everyone was just getting gobbled up. Sales reps, technology people, recruiters, you name it. Multiple offers, counter offers, short interview processes, salary inflation was going through the roof. Super fast market.
Like, if companies didn’t move quickly and aggressively, they had no chance of meeting their hiring plans. Great business for us, but it was insane. Yeah. How many times did we say, this can’t last, can it? And well, that’d be the meat of what we’re about to talk about. I mean, in hindsight a lot of the hires, when it’s that fast and that exponential, like lots of those things don’t work out- things being hires. Yeah. Mix of reasons for it.
Some of it was companies just simply being too optimistic with an unsustainable runway, i.e., you just hired too many people thinking that you were going to grow super fast, making hires that you don’t need. And then some people were just landing in roles that they weren’t qualified to do and or were paid too much to do.
And then thirdly, some was just because of, you know, just overall, hiring junior level individuals and trying to develop a training strategy around it. Even the best LND shops that we knew of didn’t or and continue to not have a 100% success rate. Yeah. Now comparing that with like the current market, the FOMU market of 2022, I’m sorry, of 2023 and 2024.
Companies have a fear of messing up hiring. So longer interview processes, more steps, delayed decisions, changing requirements. It’s a slow market. Companies are not only making sure they make the right hire, but if they even need to make that hire to begin with. Training isn’t something that’s emphasized. Everybody wants like their next hire to be plug and play day one, able to start the job immediately and get up to speed themselves, learning development is down, like we’re not even seeing recs for that much anymore.
Please hire, save us. You’re the one person that can save us. Yes. See what we did here with FOMU, here of- yeah. I was not familiar with FOMU. You’re messing up. Well, we made that up. We’re trying to- us mid forties. We’re trying to get into the glizzy culture. I don’t even know what that is. It’s a hot dog.
It’s literally a hot dog. So I used to pin everything on corporate dysfunction. I still pin everything on corporate dysfunction. But in related to slowing down processes and things becoming a train wreck. But I do think that the fear of messing up a hire is much more individual level.
And I know you have a few more points on that. So I’ll let you kind of riff a minute here. Yeah, that’s kind of a summary. So again, bear with me. Number one, things are just, they’re competitive as a whole. I think companies think that there’s like four people behind their top choice to take the role.
And I think what we’re missing out on is good people who like their job, they’ll still apply for jobs. But they’re not going to jump at like a lateral offer. I think there’s too many options. And we touched on this in the last episode, the idea that this is an employer’s market outside of like our office dork circle is just, it’s not true.
The data completely refutes that. Two, if you’ve got the fear of messing up, the FOMU as we’ve said, did your firm build in things like a personality assessment? You know “recruiting astrology”. We’ve harped on it a million times at this point. Are you starting to do homework? Like all of this stuff is just dumb.
It doesn’t- you don’t glean anything new that’s insightful about what will make that person last or not last. The third thing, is if the suits are telling us something that has to get done, like i.e., a hire, like you’ve got to make this hire, it’s super strategic. But in the same breath, they’re reiterating something along the lines of like, don’t fuck this up.
It’s really, really scary and it creates this paralysis. So I think the pressure is the main driver of the fear. Hiring too many people, hiring the wrong person, wasting money, et cetera, we’ve all heard these things for the last two years. They’re happening at a widespread level. So it is a misery loves company sort of situation.
Perhaps executives are doing a poor job at scale of enabling folks to make and own their own decisions. I’m not making a, I’m just asking a question. We don’t know, but we all, we know that fear just doesn’t pop up out of thin air. Yeah. And I wanted to relate this, this isn’t even just hiring. Like it’s-
timeline creep is everywhere right now. It’s one thing that’s really stuck out to me in the last 6, 12, even 18 months or so, how everyone feels like they’re in the same boat. So like I talked to sales leaders, revenue leaders, founders, everyone has the complaints how it’s just taking longer to sell people.
I was at a dinner last week. Matt Green from Sales Assembly invited- shout out to Matt Green. There were 30 people there, I probably had four or five conversations, one on one conversations with people who had the exact same complaints and how everything is just taking longer to sell the same thing that it did a year or two or three years ago.
And they’re peddling- like these are growth individuals from a variety of industries, products, services. It’s not just recruiting, right? Yeah, correct. So it ties into hiring. When I talk to internal TA people or talent leaders or VC’s or PE’s, anyone who’s looking for talent- everything is taking longer in these cycles, in these recruitment cycles.
So approvals for new hires. And the hiring cycle is like everything just takes a long time. We had a company who had an enterprise AE make a quick exit. Unfortunate. It took four months for us to find backfill. Like that’s a four to six week fill. The main point is it’s a salesperson. I don’t mean to make it really, really simple, but sometimes salespeople don’t work out.
You have to be able to move on to the next person and trust your gut and your instincts as well as your process. Yeah. And that’s what’s really causing this. And like, I don’t buy economics. I feel like that’s a decision to make a hire or not make a hire, not a reason why things should just take ungodly long.
One of our colleagues who just came from an internal recently brought up- I think part of the solution, kind of the really reasoning behind this is his old organization kind of went through this. They had a lot of processes. They want to tighten it up to encourage everyone to make the best decision and do things the right way.
But all they really did was, hiring managers at his firm ended up questioning their ability to do anything right and make good decisions. So it became like full blown imposter syndrome. They actually had to address it firm wide that they went so far into one direction, they needed to find a way to make it snap back.
Now, basically everyone has the yips and that’s something they had to address. And the someone- they’ve now blocked the entire, the entire TA team and hiring manager. So now here’s the thing. There is actually, there is a psychological phenomenon behind this, the paradox of choice. And this applies to any decisions we make.
And I think this is kind of the primary culprit here. The more options we have, the less satisfied we feel with our decisions. So basically it occurs because anytime we have too many choices, it requires more cognitive effort and then leads to more decision fatigue that leads to more increased regret over the choices we make.
Yeah, so you’re buying a car. Let’s do just a real world example. If you only had one, two choices, it is what it is. And you select one and you drive off the lot and carry about your life. You have 50 choices, you spend way more time on it, number one. You’re comparing and contrasting and like, do I want -when this, whatever.
And you’re essentially put into a situation where you second guess, if you’ve made the right choice at all, even after you made it. Chances are you didn’t because there was 50. You probably didn’t get it right. Yeah. Same thing happens with hiring. If there’s only one candidate and you find them and they can do the job, it is what it is. They will work out or they won’t. But you won’t have any regret about
the decision, even before that decision is made, whether they succeed or fail. But if you have 600 resumes and there’s only one team member that literally has to go through all those 600 resumes, then, you know, a CFO jumped in and said here’s another couple of people. All of that added stress
on the TA team and the hiring managers, it all compounds into like decision paralysis, essentially. Yeah. And when you do it, it was one thing across one hire. But within your organization, if the same thing happens across a dozen hires, all of a sudden compounds become systemic. And then if it happens across a 1000 hires, tens of thousands of hires, 100,000 hires across the entire hiring landscape,
that’s why everyone’s kind of viewing and kind of seeing the same things. Totally. I’m not going to lie, I buy it. I mean, if you’re a hiring manager and you just, you made some FOMO hires two years ago, had to lay people off due to economics and things that are outside of your control, which no one likes doing.
Now you’ve got a limited budget. Someone tells you, “Don’t fuck this up, you have to get this right the first time” you’re going to have self doubt. Yeah. 100%. And it’ll take you forever to get anything done, not just hiring. Anyways, takeaways. How do we fix this?
We actually have a couple ideas. And here’s the thing, I do believe everyone recognizes this is an issue. I don’t think there’s anybody out there who’s like, what are you guys talking about? But you can’t just magically fix human psychology. I can’t just say, hey everyone, do shit faster. You have to turn it into some sort of process or give some sort of framework that it can actually make this workable,
so. Yeah. We have an idea, Jeff. Yeah. Number one, I mean, set decision timelines, deadlines. An offer must be made and accepted by X date. The point being is if you have something like that set, then there’s an accountability structure on why things are or aren’t done on time. You can do a retroactive look at things and say, okay, here’s what happened and here’s why we didn’t get to that outcome.
You can work backwards, collaborate across teams to get the time to fill numbers where they need to be. You can treat it as a true like programmatic project management issue. Yeah. You start by asking leadership at what point does this become painful if it’s not filled? Once you have their commitment, you can set timeframes on interview process and the duration and account for how many, you know, you need to do to make multiple offers to land one hire.
Like all of this stuff is part of the math. And again, accounting for sourcing time, et cetera. Point being, you get the commitment from the executive team on when it needs to happen and how impactful it is to the business, you can set a project around it accordingly. That’s the proper blocking and tackling of how to do this.
The second thing, which is much simpler, you have to give yourself and your team permission to make mistakes. They’re going to happen anyway. You’re not going to bat a thousand in terms of like every hire is going to be a good one. No one ever should ever think that’s realistic. And as long as you can put the process Jeff kind of outlined into place, then realize even still, mistakes are going to happen.
Not every hires going to be a home run. At least you’re moving in a positive direction, you can actually do the rest of your job and everything else your company needs to do, so. For sure. We are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning into 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 podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always. Everyone out there, we will see you soon.
