Finding the right staff may not be market problem

Executives looking forward to a softening labour market with some relief — at last, it will be easier to hire people — may be in for an unwelcome surprise. In a survey report released on April 4 by the Conference Board, 57% of CEOs said they were having problems attracting qualified workers. While that number fell from the final quarter of 2022, it still means that more than half of companies find it hard to hire.

For years, business leaders complained about battling to fill jobs. They usually blamed the economy, workers or even the US education system. Sure, some jobs are genuinely hard to fill. There may be few people who can do them (data scientist), few people willing to accept low pay to do them (changing nappies of adult or baby variety) or few people who want to do them (personal assistant to “art world family”).

But hiring is hard for a more obvious reason: many firms just don’t do it well. They reject promising candidates who don’t meet their impossibly long list of requirements or overlook qualified internal candidates in favour of outside talent.

The prevailing attitude to applicants seems to be, “You’ll be lucky to work for us at Heaven Sent Corporation”. But executives having difficulty filling jobs — and there are 3-million more open roles now than there were in 2019 — should consider how the application process looks from a candidate’s point of view.

That’s exactly what Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi did when he posed as an Uber driver. When the ride-hailing company had trouble attracting enough new drivers, Khosrowshahi and other executives got behind the wheel themselves, and quickly realised they needed to revamp things to compete for workers.

At full-time white-collar jobs that come with salaries and benefits, applicants can expect to confront a marathon of interviews, assessments and screenings. From 2009 to 2019, employers nearly doubled the time they spent interviewing candidates, says Glassdoor.

In recent weeks, I’ve seen screenshots of multipage questionnaires that applicants have been asked to complete. I’ve heard of hiring processes that stretch over months and include meetings with more than two dozen interviewers. It isn’t unusual for candidates to be asked to take personality assessments or complete sample assignments. Some could take hours.

And compounding all of this, says Wharton School management professor Peter Cappelli, companies today fill about 80% of open roles with outside hires, compared with perhaps 5% or 10% a few decades ago. That means that as painful as the hiring process is for a single candidate, it’s even more onerous for managers evaluating multiple applicants.

Companies also want new staffers to come ready-made with the skills they need to do the job without any training. But those unicorn candidates often don’t exist, especially not at the salaries most employers are willing to pay, says recruiter Laura Mazzullo, founder of East Side Staffing. That’s a message that many senior executives are reluctant to hear from their HR departments.

Companies need to be more disciplined in hiring from start to finish. Sure, the first draft of a job description can include a wish list of 42 different skills and attributes candidates should have. But the final version should focus on what’s actually needed to do the job.

Interview processes should unfold over weeks, not months. A handful of structured interviews is more revealing than a dozen freewheeling conversations.

And though judging candidates by sample tasks can bring some fairness to a process often warped by personal biases, the tasks need to be short enough that candidates can complete them in an hour — something that will also help hiring managers evaluating dozens of them.