Context in Recruiting

Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under Online Recruiting, Best Practices |

Written By Peter Weddle, Weddles

Why is it that some recruiting teams do all of the right things and still fail to acquire the best talent? Why do these groups implement the full panoply of best practices and still get the worst results? While there are any number of potential reasons for such a disappointing return on their investment of time, effort and money, I believe the most likely causal factor is context. When recruiters ignore the context of their sourcing efforts, they encourage candidate misperceptions that can undermine or even negate the value proposition of their employer or staffing firm.

By now, many recruiting teams have a reasonably good understanding of the basic components of an effective online sourcing strategy. They know how to:

identify the best job boards and career portals for their target demographics;
write compelling job postings that will activate even the most passive candidates;
data mine for prospects in the right way and at the right sites;
develop relationships with career activists by networking in their professional communities; and
build and operate career areas on their Web-sites that attract the best talent when they aren’t looking for a job as well as when they are.

They do all of those things, and still, they aren’t succeeding at their mission. That’s not my view; it’s the opinion they and their customers have both expressed. When Accenture surveyed the senior executives in the Fortune 1000, only one-in-four said they had the quality talent they needed to accomplish their business objectives. And, when the Recruiting Roundtable asked recruiters in 47 organizations to evaluate the quality of the talent they had accessed for their own organizations, not a single one rated even 20% of their new hires as “A” level performers.

Why is this happening? Because well written content and sophisticated candidate connections are simply not enough to persuade the best talent to make a change. Top performers and those with rare skills are almost always already employed. In other words, to recruit them, we must convince them to do the one thing we humans most hate to do: change. We must convince them to go from the devil they know (their current employer, boss and commute) to the devil they don’t know (a new employer, an unknown boss and a different commute). Even Shakespeare would find it tough to get them to do so with mere words; and the king of networking, Harvey Mackay, would be similarly challenged even with his connections.

So, what should we do? I think we must pay more attention to context. Think of context as a lens through which candidates view and interpret the information you provide and the actions you take in your recruiting process. That context has three potential states, two of which can undermine your sourcing results:

A negative context will cause candidates to see even the best written content and most appropriate recruiter actions in a critical light.
An undefined context will encourage candidates to insert their own (often inaccurate) views and biases into their assessment of your recruiting process’s information and behaviors.
A positive context will induce candidates to see the same information and behaviors in a constructive light so that they are more likely to recognize their relevance and value.

In other words, if you want candidates to be predisposed to believe your message and trust your actions, you must attend to the context of your message and actions.

How can you do that? There is a context for both your recruiting process as a whole and for each of its constituent elements. At the strategic or process level, context is created by the way things are done. If what you do encompasses the best practices for sourcing and recruiting candidates, then how you do those things defines their context. And that context, in turn, determines the way your practices will be received and interpreted by candidates.

For example, the way you organize your employment information can actually determine how it’s perceived. You can structure that message by describing the various business units in your organization or by detailing the career paths that provide the talent for those units. The former puts the organization at the center of the message; the latter puts the candidate and his or her career at its center. Since even the best prospects want to know “what’s in it for them,” the candidate-centric approach establishes a positive lens; the employer-centric lens installs a neutral or, if it’s done in a heavy-handed way, a negative one.

The same is true at the tactical level. Candidates’ perception of each step in your recruiting process is affected by its context. Take your Web-site, for example. The context for that destination is actually created before a candidate ever arrives. Since the best prospects are usually employed, they don’t act like active job seekers. They won’t come to your site unless you persuade them to do so. That’s done by creating an expectation-a claim about what it’s like to work in your organization-that’s so compelling they can’t ignore it. In marketing terms, this expectation is your employment brand, and if that brand is well promoted outside your Web-site, it will act as a magnet to pull top talent into it.

That’s only half the challenge, however. Because these top performers are also good consumers, they want proof that affirms the claim you’ve made in your brand. Said another way, they want the expectation to come true. If that happens, you’ll establish a positive context for whatever else they see and learn on your site; if it doesn’t, you’ll create exactly the opposite effect-a lens that distorts and potentially negates your meaning.

How do you make sure your lens is positive? You must acknowledge and adjust to the fact that these candidates-cum-consumers have the attention span of a gnat. Hence, the visibility and accessibility of your message is key. You must provide your proof quickly and with a minimum of effort on their part. On your Web-site, therefore, it must be the first thing they see and it must be highlighted. The best approach is to set the context with your proof right on the landing page, but if your design precludes that, it must be no more than one click away.

For example, in the career area on the Nordstrom’s Web-site, the employment brand (the expectation) is clearly highlighted and then directly connected to the company’s career paths (the proof) with a single click. Similarly, at the Enterprise Rent-a-Car site, the employment brand is distinctly set apart and then directly linked to some of the best proof you can provide-employee testimonials. Unfortunately, however, both sites have significantly obscured the expectation-proof connection by also providing access to a range of other employment-related content from their landing page. There’s nothing wrong with the content, just its placement. It enables visitors to go directly to lots of information without first establishing context. When that happens, visitors are given an undefined perspective which can lead to a positive or negative lens, depending on the visitor’s preconceived (and potentially inaccurate) notions.

In the end, winning the War for the Best Talent is an exercise in both doing the right things and in doing the right things in the right way. The first, of course, involves the implementation of the best practices in our field. That’s a precondition for success. While it is critical, however, it is not sufficient for victory. What’s also required is the careful establishment of a context, for that lens will determine how the best talent interprets both what you say and what you do.

Thanks for reading,
Peter