The Recruiting Coach – The Future For Recruiters

ecruiting is one of the oldest professions in the world (but definitely not the oldest). Records of employers using recruiters date back over two-thousand years. Julius Caesar had an employee referral program in 55 B.C., offering soldiers a third of their annual pay, for bringing anyone to join the Roman army. Other practices associated with recruitment date back even further. The Chinese used assessments to select civil service employees as far back as 1131 B.C. Looking at recruitment practices over history it seems that little has changed over the millennia. 

The New Recruiter

So what is the future for recruiting and recruiters? While the job may have remained the same for through the centuries, the results delivered could certainly be better. Depending on who you ask, the estimates for how many new hires fail range from 20% – 60%. While impossible to pin down an exact number we know that significant numbers of new hires leave or are fired within 6 months. Research by SHRM shows that half of all hourly workers leave new jobs in the first four months, and half of senior outside hires fail within 18 months. SHRM suggests that a major cause of failure and turnover is an inability of employers to effectively integrate new hires. Success requires addressing three Cs – Clarification, Culture, and Connection.

Ensuring that all three are done correctly is a role that should be taken on by recruiters. Historically there has not been much time available to recruiters to do so, but with technology taking over more tasks, the time will certainly be there. Looking at each, here’s what I see as what a recruiter can contribute:

Clarification refers to ensuring that employees understand their new jobs and all related expectations. The need for this may seem obvious, but goals and expectations need to be explicit and often are left unstated. A recruiter has a relationship with a hiring manager and is usually the one person inside an organization that knows the new hire best. The recruiter then is ideally placed to ensure that goals and expectations are spelled out and explained to the new hire.

Culture is a broad category that includes providing employees with a sense of organizational norms — both formal and informal. This is perhaps the most neglected aspect of recruiting – ensuring culture fit, and one that cannot be easily automated. A recruiter knows, or should know, what an organization’s culture is – values, social aspects, and the reasons people succeed. Most employers like to pretend that any qualified candidate can work and succeed in their culture but this is a fallacy. This has been known for a long time. The British army has for centuries put together its units with people all hired from the same town or region to ensure their culture and values don’t clash. If employees don’t share values and fit into the culture then it requires a great deal of effort to ensure they form a cohesive team. Throw in diversity goals and the mountain being climbed gets even higher. Otherwise hiring people that are a square peg in a round hole in relation to the culture is usually setting up the employee for failure, as was demonstrated by the case of James Damore at Google. Someone whose values are very different from those of the employer has little chance of success or advancement. They have to come to work in an environment knowing their views may be tolerated but likely never accepted. At a minimum a recruiter should take the time to evaluate how well a candidate fits with the organization’s culture and educate them if there is not a fit and what would they should expect if they do get hired.  At the risk of sounding flippant, there’s no law that prevents an employer from rejecting candidates that don’t fit the culture.