Finding, attracting, and recruiting the right talent are some of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of running any organization. People drive organizational culture, and the right culture is critical to an organization's success. Smart companies understand people matter. These companies will empower people, encourage them to contribute to the culture, to become the culture. Smart companies attract smart people and actively help them maximize their potential within the organization. Smart companies win more often.
Companies that understand people matter invest in their recruitment process. Unfortunately, many focus on the wrong things. Some build HR departments and silo them, leaving them out of touch with the business and its requirements. These HR departments use the 'resume' as the main recruiting tool. What they fail to understand is that resumes are really good at telling whether people are good at writing resumes, but really bad at telling whether they know anything about the role they will be asked to play. Some companies rely on external help and work with recruitment agencies. These agencies operate to maximize the chances of short term success across a pool of jobs. This means that it is in their best interest to make sure that a decision is reached as quickly as possible in order to maximize return on time invested in any position they may be working to fulfill. The best way to convince people to make a decision is to give them no choice - recruiters put forward a handful of carefully selected candidates out of which one or two will stand out. It is also in their best interest to create competition between the companies trying to recruit the candidates they are putting forward. This will inflate salaries, which for recruitment agencies working on commission is evidently advantageous.
For job seekers, finding the right job is even more difficult. The process is obscure, the landscape is filled with opportunists and until the candidate walks through the door of the company he is interviewing for, he will know very little about the role or what it is like to work for that company. If the candidate does not understand their audience, changes are their discourse will be misguided. In the event that the candidate is offered the job, they now have to decide whether they want to commit the next few years of their professional life to a company they don't really know.
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Given what we know today, and how we feel about what it means to go through the process of finding a job that is both stimulating and rewarding, how will we be doing it differently in 20 years?
