Recruiting with practical detail saves time.

I have recently been helping a company to recruit some new talent into their sales area. It has been a real eye opener. Now let me put this into context, I have typically worked for large multinational companies so when recruiting, I have used experienced recruiters or in-house talent acquisition. when I have been recruited it has been via high-end recruiters who have either headhunted me or are working on my behalf with a brief.

In this instance, I am seeing this world very differently. Working with a smaller business, budget does not allow for top end recruiters so the applicants are not pre-screened. This chews up lot of time to sift through the many unsuitable applicants which I why I was asked to help out.

However, two issues struck me when looking at the respondents – they were from a geographically massive area and had a vast range of unaffordable experience.

On the first point, I found that many applicants were being rejected because the commutes looked impossible. Now people do commute for longer owing to higher house prices and the concentration of work in the south east but I think there is something else at play here – badly written job advertisements.

I checked and in the advert the various agencies had stated ‘London’ or ‘South East’. That meant a business based in south west London was receiving applications from personnel based as far as Oxford, Bedfordshire, Basildon and Canterbury. If you were looking for a house you wouldn’t state ‘south east’ you would pick a specific area that suited your budget and lifestyle with the infrastructure you require. Anything else would be rejected out of hand. London is vast and hard to travel across in certain directions so while a 2-hour commute might be technically possible, practically you won’t get a productive day from that employee after a while. So why on earth are recruiters so poor at communicating where exactly a role might be based? They need to sell a role to the applicants as much as the applicants need to sell themselves.

Which brings me to my second point. Your recruitment job descriptions. When did you last read yours? These documents have become bloated beyond belief and often bear no relationship with the day to day functions the role requires. The job description and person specification I was asked to work with required a high performer with many years industry specific experience but detailed some duties a very junior sales person might undertake - all for a sub 50k package. We can all aspire to recruit rock stars but need to be realistic in the expectations we set. This brief was the equivelant of a league one football team requesting champions league experience coupled with a consistent 20 goal a season record. You can ask for it but you won’t get it.

We re-wrote the job ad and description stating clearly the location and adjusting the requirements and while we received fewer applicants the interviews were more worthwhile and uncovered some great talent the business can now develop. Importantly, the roles were filled on budget and the business can stop focusing on recruitment and look to grow.

So, the lesson from this is that both sides of the table need to do better and strange as it might seem, both could learn from the much-maligned world of estate agency – why not create honest, location specific details of roles outlining core features. That way interested parties can be far more suited on first meeting and everyone saves a lot of time.