Talent Acquisition and Retention
An article came out recently discussing how automated hiring software is hurting the labor market by rejecting good job candidates. This comes at a time when nearly every leader I speak with is worried about talent acquisition and, especially, retention. Many leaders I spoke with in our Outsell Leadership Community meeting last week talked about practices they are deploying to improve retention. While all this good work is going on, though, we can’t work against ourselves with practices that are obsolete for the times.
How can we be more attractive to candidates?
First, we have to attract them, and we can’t do that with broken software doing the work humans should be doing. It’s stupid to put computers at the top of the funnel when it comes to attracting PEOPLE. Ironic, or what?
Second, show up for meetings on time. Horror stories abound of people being forced to jump through incredible hoops. Large numbers of interviews — one person said 8 rounds! Being asked to take time-consuming standardized tests, being asked to do job work before being hired, sometimes even before being granted an interview.
How about interviewers keeping scheduled appointments, answering emails, and giving people the courtesy of a response that says “you weren’t selected and we wish you well… thank you for taking the time to explore our company”? I mean really, people, common courtesy goes a long way in our lives, which are already filled with black holes of automated routing systems or emails that go dark.
And if you’ve attracted good talent and haven’t sent applicants flying out the door for the wrong reasons, then please trust them when they’re working from home. The Guardian this week reported on how employers are using software to watch their employees working from home. Ugh — really? Workplace surveillance is downright wrong, creepy, and inept.
I have had staff work from home since the age of dial-up. Some of you are too young to remember those days, but it was when we only had a phone, a cord plugged into the wall, and internet at about 300 baud or something silly. And we couldn’t see each other. You trusted people to deliver their work on time, with integrity, and with the flexibility to get their best jobs done while tending to family, clients, colleagues, and whoever else needed their attention. Tattleware — now that’s a new magic quadrant category if there ever was one — is wrong.
So please, to those hiring companies out there: don’t add to your ails by creating too many ways for applicants and employees to filter themselves out. The best talent is the talent that won’t put up with these wrongs.
Soon I’ll share some of the best practices we’re researching. You can bet tattleware isn’t one of ‘em!