Hire dudgeon
Recruitment a highlight of HR? Not for The Villain it's notYes, I know I’m supposed to like it. And I know that recruitment is supposed to be a chance to turbo-charge organisational development and to make people deliriously happy because they’ve landed a great hire/taken a meaningful step towards self-actualisation. Etc.
But actually, it isn’t these things. What it is is a right pain in the backside. I for one would rather translate the UKIP manifesto into Sanskrit than take on another stinky recruitment project.
Why? Well, here are six reasons that spring to mind without me having to think very hard at all.
1. Hiring managers
Idiots. All of them. Imagine a set of goalposts being flown in a super-jet from a goalpost factory to a football field, and you won’t be imagining goalposts that move any quicker than a typical managers’ hiring request.
‘Now we’ve seen the candidates,’ they always end up saying, ‘we think that we should probably review the job spec.’
I once worked on a project where the hiring manager sent a brief in the first instance for a software designer, and we ended up recruiting an office manager.
2. Recruitment consultants
They waft into my office stinking of cheap aftershave and sales, tell me that my percentage is too low, and then proceed to promote our vacancy using some made-up or outdated recruitment message they can’t even be bothered to check the relevance of first.
Also, they act like they’re unsackable because they placed some nonentity on the Exec Board seven years ago. Bah.
3. Creative agencies
Creative or ‘attraction’ agency reps consider themselves ethically superior to the above, but they aren’t.
They chirrup away about ’employer branding’ and promise the earth, but end up delivering crappy, indulgent work that’s designed to win them awards rather than get bums on my seats. And do we still have to pay when the ads fail? Yup.
4. ‘Culture fit’
The standard excuse used by hiring managers who want to reject an objectively satisfactory candidate.
‘Culture fit’ doesn’t mean anything other than being a cover-all for ‘They went to the wrong school’, ‘I couldn’t follow their accent’ or ‘I didn’t fancy them.’
5. Candidates
They want to be courted. They want their expenses paid. They expect compensation rules to be bent, or even broken, if we have any hope of bringing their talent on board.
But they lie like hell and then, if you eventually offer, they think about the offer for ages before eventually realising that they actually want to switch industries. Or they just wanted the ammo to get a counter offer from their existing employers.
6. Unavoidable disappointment
You always ending up feeling you’ve compromised, because for various reasons the perfect candidate doesn’t exist or even if they do they’d far rather work at Google.
Them’s my reasons. Got any of your own? Always good to get the bile out before it rots you from the inside out.
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