I was out today trying to recruit a suitable person. And realized, as i have many times over, that i struggle while recruiting. And that there is something flawed about the current process.
Let me try and explain:
A Company is chugging along. A gap is felt. Often triggered by an emotive experience – gap in service, gap in capability or simply to do more for more. And this gap becomes a vacancy to be filled.
This rather emotive need (gap) then goes through the soul-stripping resource allocation budget funneling process. And if it comes out from the right (tight) end, the bureaucratization, in terms of efficient industrialization of a process begins.
The search is most often out-sourced (to a head-hunter). And to assist this search a job description (JD) is constructed.
Most JD’s are generic in nature unless until the search is extremely specific. Thus, a JD would indicate years of exprience, area of experience and certain attitudinal traits viz. energy, extrovert, etc. And the JD has a whole lot on the Company. And this is where a Script (to sell an opportunity in a Company) takes over the real corporate need.
And from my experience, i know, most CVs comply neatly with the way JDs are constructed (fun question: what came first – the CV or the JD). But the problem is that these CVs are written with extreme bias and are simply Scripts to sell (an individual).
Thus, we have a market with two ‘sell’ mandates and no ‘buy’.
So imagine, if this search was not for talent but say a book. And my JD for such a search was ‘english, thriller, interesting, fun’. If Google was my search agent, i would end up with zillions of possible options which meet my search criteria. Which also means that my search has failed! But hey, with books, there is help available. The professional literary critic. So i could still filter these zillion options by those reviewed and rated by – say Buzzfeed.
But unfortunately no such independent critic for talent exists – and we all know the fallacies of reference checks. These ‘referees’ should come with explicit warnings: they are part of the ‘sell’ contract!
Thus i stress when i recruit. In an ideal world……
The ideal market for talent would be a transparent 24 x 7 x 365 process where supply (of talent) and demand (to recruit) is constantly matched by an optimal and efficient allocation of talent devoid of all that shit that unnecessary Scripting brings.
So Linkedin exists but does it move beyond the Script? Should it?
Strumng 