Job Descriptions are Part of What is Killing Recruiting

As I said in my last article, I got some loud and passionate responses to my article Recruiting BS and How to Get Rid of It. Last post I talked about the response to my call to get rid of requisitions. Now we turn to my statement about job descriptions:

(They) don’t have anything to do with the job

...and my advice about how to fix that problem:

Job Descriptions should be about the job that needs to be done next year, not the job that was needed last week. By the time you have spent 90 days hiring the right person for yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s job still needs filling.

Most of the comments I got were simple and to the point:

We are recruiters, not HR people. We fill the position that is given to us. Job Descriptions are the hiring manager’s responsibility, not ours!

And my response is always the same:

Get ready to move to India / China / etc.

Please allow me to digress into a little business theory as a way of explaining my point of view.

All business is about selling products. The product can be tangible (i.e. a car) or intangible (i.e. recruiting), but they are products all the same. Even Broadway producers talk about their shows as “product” as do artists and producers and spiritualists. Sometimes the product is bought with money, sometime with time, sometime with attention and devotion, but it matters little, the point remaining the same: recruiting is a product.

All products sell in one of three domains: commodity (price), quality (value) or experience (connection). These three domains are not about the product itself, but about what is wrapped around the product.

For instance, coffee can be sold in bulk and ground, put in a can and stuck on a shelf where you evaluate whether you want to buy it by the price; it can be specially roasted, sold in smaller units, shipped more frequently, and guaranteed fresh, so that people who really like coffee get a better coffee flavor (value); or those same beans can be roasted specially, shipped specially, served in a great atmosphere that delivers cool music and great taste and good conversation. That’s an experience sale. The same exact coffee bean ends up commanding radically different price points based on the delivery mechanism, the positioning and the services that are wrapped around it.

Now let’s take that structure and look at recruiting:

If all you do is collect resumes, sort them and forward them to the hiring manager, occasionally booking the interview, then you are a commodity. If you do these services cheaply and with relatively little pain, you will be seen to be effective, but it is tough to be as cost effective as a company that can pay it's employees $60 a day. Eventually you won't be able to compete with call center recruiting operations in other countries that can use VoIP infrastructure and cheap internet connections to reduce their cost structures to 30% of what you could possibly afford.

If you sit down with the hiring manager, ask them about their business, take a look at the resumes of employees who were previously successful in the hiring manager’s organization, and then use specialized services to deliver passive candidates that can’t be found through posting on a job board, then you are selling value. You can charge a little more and be a little less efficient, because you offer something better than the administrative paper-pushers who are selling on price (commodity). But your value has to be superior to what the hiring manager can do themselves with the right tools. As the tools (online posting, social networks, referral tools, etc.) become more advanced, the value bar for recruiting goes up.

But offering the recruiting service as an “experience” is something totally different. The administrative services of recruiting are offered as a gimme, and done with such a level of precision and delivery perfection that the customer never realizes they are getting the service in the first place. Each hiring manager has a “Talent Specialist” serving as a business consultant that works with them to be a trusted advisor to their business. The approach is built around the concept that talent is everything to the client’s business, and so the trusted talent advisor must be versed in every aspect of that client’s business.

The trusted talent advisor introduces the hiring manager into circles of talent that they could have never entered without the advisor, and by virtue of the introduction sheds instant credibility on the client. The trusted talent advisor is able to review business activities from the perspective of how that activity will impact the talent brand and the future availability of talent. “Recruiting” is part of an ongoing talent process, where every part of the talent experience is controlled to make the product being sold (the job) be as perfectly fit to the best available talent as possible. This is the recruiting experience, and you could charge a whole lot for it if you customers only knew they needed it. Demographic and business challenges will bring this about in the next five years.

What does all this have to do with job descriptions? Simple: people telling me that job descriptions are the job of the hiring manager is exactly the same thing as saying “I’m a commodity: I provide candidates based on a loose specification.” It’s not that there is anything wrong with being a commodity, but the tides of business are working against you. If you are in a corporate recruiting department, you are likely going to be outsourced, and if you are a TPR, you are likely to get dumped.

To put this into context:

Commodity Recruiting: Takes the specification (the job description) posts it on a job board, gets candidate flow, evaluates candidate flow against the spec and then forwards the favorably rated resumes to the hiring manager. Everything in this transaction can either be done by the hiring manager or by an administrative assistant making minimum wage, or be automated (the holy grail of electronic recruiting is matching, which is the final step in recruiting commoditization).

Value Recruiting: Takes the specification, asks probing questions about what is really meant by the description and changes language to fit what is currently acceptable in the market, asks for resumes of previous “stars” and compares those resumes to the specification, changing the specification as appropriate to more closely match those success profiles, brings specific candidates in against the spec to examine how clear and committed the hiring manager is to the spec, and changes the spec as the process continues to bring the true requirements of the hiring manager and the availability in the market together.

Experience Recruiting: Refuses the specification because it will unduly prejudice the truth about what the business needs to succeed, interviews “stars” as well as “laggards” to try to identify key cultural, competency and chemistry dynamics that will help describe the perfect candidate, puts together detailed behavioral profile of the target candidate, uses detailed marketing profile techniques to source against a pre-developed grouping of talent (since the experience recruiter will have predicted the broader needs of the client and been actively developing value-for-value relationships in those domains well in advance of the client’s need - perhaps Sumser's farm system), will bring in specific candidates with specific behavioral profiles and detailed work portfolios to gauge the upper and lower bounds of variation in the specification, marks the specification variances for forward looking business projections, tailors specific work and compensation packages in order to get the most value from the talent, introduces the hiring manager into key talent arenas in order to build the credibility of the client with potential future hires, and periodically report on larger talent trends that the experience recruiter feels will impact the business (the “what business can we be in?” question).

Today’s job description is largely the domain of the commodity recruiter. As stated the commodity recruiter doesn’t validate, change or otherwise amend the job description: they just post it. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the hiring manager knew what they were doing when they wrote the job description. But few, if any, do. Most hiring managers have a very specific pain they are feeling, here and now. They put that pain into language that they think describes a solution to that pain. That is over 90% of all job descriptions. The problem is that:

1 - Average fill rate for companies that don’t source ahead of demand is 45 to 60 days. Given the dynamic nature of most businesses, the needs will change in this time.

2 - Even if they don’t change, most hiring managers are overly general about the pain that they are feeling. For instance, an engineering manager may know that they are behind on a project that requires C# programmers and so they create a job description for a C# programmer (the logic being that more programmers = less time). Only after the job is filled will the hiring manager realize that they didn’t need another programmer, they needed a better QA specialist to design test procedures that don’t bottleneck the development process. So the specification may be correct on its face, but end in eventual disaster.

3 - Even if the hiring manager can adequately predict their business needs in the future, and the causes of their present pain, they often can’t describe the variables that make for a successful hire. In the previous example the hiring manager says that they want a C# programmer and hires the first person that comes in that has the MSCE certification and good credentials. But the person they hire is a data structures guru, and what they really needed was someone who was strong in algorithms.

This is why I claimed that “the job description is not about the job.” It’s not. Asking hiring managers to understand the nuance of job descriptions is like asking drivers to understand the vagaries of the manual shift throd bearing. Not likely, even by people who understand cars and are reasonable mechanics.

Couple the general ignorance (and dare I say apathy?) of the hiring manager with the general apathy (dare I say ignorance?) of the commodity recruiter and you have a recipe for future commoditization of the recruiting profession. So if you want to keep recruiting strategic, think of focusing on the recruiting experience. And the best way to start is to forget today’s job descriptions and start thinking about tomorrow's specification.