Volume II – The Hiring Journey

Technology is a wonderful thing and is what has allowed us to do tasks, a great deal of work that once had to be done on location, and a significant percentage of full-time jobs without ever needing to leave the comforts of our home office. So much of our lives have been made easier, faster, more interesting, and exciting with the exchange of information happening seemingly at light speed. Our ability to absorb information has likely not been tested to the extent it is today all due to the advancements of technology.

The creation of the internet decades ago propelled these advancements and within the first few years, savvy business people knew this would eventually be where the majority of business is done, and it did not take long for them to be right. Just about every type of business we ever knew or heard of is being done online it seems. Among the first industries to go from an in-person system to nearly all online is the hiring industry. Some of the earliest platforms created in the nineteen-nineties are still in business today, while thousands of others have followed suit, some of which have found success at the highest levels, while most have come and gone. With so many years under its belt, through trial and error, the Hiring Industry has accomplished a great deal. With the ability to transact completely online and basically within minutes go from no account and no job posting to a ready-to-go business presence on any job site with your open position out there for the job-seeker to find and apply. It is so simple, easy to use, and with millions of visitors on the Big Boards, how can you not fill your role in days if not hours?

The problem is that this is not how the typical story unfolds. The labor market data suggests tens of millions of people are unemployed, and most, about three-quarters, of employed people are looking for something better than their current job, yet I’m not seeing the candidates I expected. The sites we are setting up accounts with advertise thousands, hundreds of thousands, and into the millions of users on their site each month, so what exactly am I getting for my money? So many people out there, looking, looking for something new, and should be finding us! If you have had this experience, you should ask yourself these questions before repeating the same method of finding talent for your business every time you need to backfill or to grow your team:

• How long did it take to complete the ‘simple’ business account setup?
• What help did I get to work through their interface?
• How much is it costing me for Membership, Job Listings, Clicks, and more?
• Am I doing all of the account management when I thought this was what the job site’s system was going to do?
• Where are the needles that are flowing out of that haystack I heard about?
• Why am I seeing so many resumes of people, some with good experience, yet not with what I listed as the needs for my open job?
• For a critical hire that I need to ‘get right’, how long is it going to take to get even a few people that I feel good about to compare with one another and give me confidence that we have the right person for our team?
• Am I better served in terms of time, effort, and cost to contract with a recruiter, or a talent acquisition in-house, or make my first hire a staffing professional to hire full-time?

There are numerous other questions to ask as well. But while the industry and the platforms have become sleeker, cooler, and ever more functional on the surface, offering more and more services every time a user logs in, some related, some unrelated, a user needs to ask whether they need any of it. “Is this why I now get more marketing from other companies than I’m getting qualified candidates?”, “Did I sign up for other companies to now market to me, presenting me with offers and upgrades when the only reason I signed up was to fill a single job opening?” If you simply want to post a job opening and find the right candidates, why is there so much happening? Meanwhile, as the days and weeks tick by, more and more questions abound beyond those raised here, but there is really only one you need to answer to determine what is the right choice for you:

Does This System Work?

The short answer is YES! But not for you if you have tried to hire someone. Having gone to most of the major online job boards, the biggest players in the hiring industry, you will quickly learn that despite all of the advertisements, cool, flashy interfaces, and access to the most sophisticated algorithms to match you and the right people, you will be doing most of the legwork. You will go through all of the resumes sent to you by the site, doing your own filtering just as you would with any method you used to attract interest in your job. So, who DOES this system work for? The Job Boards themselves. The more time that passes, the more cost to you for every open job you hope to fill. You will pay for applicants, or Per Click on your job listing, membership fees, ‘Boosting’ or ‘Promotion’ of your listing, not to mention your business is already being impacted each day as you play catch-up to manage the work of the person you are trying to hire and fill that open role.

Let’s break down a very common example of how a company begins working with the average online job site as the starting point of bringing on their next hire.

You are Building your Team, Expanding your Operation – You’re Hiring:

• You’ve looked online and all of the same, all the biggest and most popular, job sites keep coming up, and makes you think ‘these must be the right ones, so many people and they’ll manage the whole process for me so I can focus on my business!’
• Sign up for a Business account on the Job Portal
• Fill out all of the information about what your company does
• Detail what type of hiring you are or will be doing
• Provide the appropriate Points of Contact
• What open jobs you may have currently
• List prerequisites and qualifications for the open position
• Choose the package and associated pricing for the level and type of service you will pay for, which may include membership, job listings, pay-per-clicks, resume, and candidate screening software, access to resume databases and candidate information, and premium services for what most of the site’s term as ‘sponsored listings’, as well as company branding and advertising.
  • These costs can run into several hundred dollars per month for a single job listing to be run for thirty days and may be in addition to a monthly membership fee
  • PPC, Pay-per-Click, options mean you will pay every time someone clicks on your job to review the role and company, whether they apply or not.
  • PPC can look cost-effective as you can manage a daily budget, but very quickly those clicks can amount to the cost equal to or above standard pricing. Either way, it can be very costly simply to list a single job and find the right candidate.
• If you elect to go a different route, there are many ‘Niche Job Boards’ that specialize in specific industries, which can be effective. Their members are almost exclusively from that industry, making it more of a like-minded community, and can make it easier to locate people who speak that industry jargon and to connect with one another.
  • In addition to industry-specific boards for Technology, Hospitality, Media and more, there are others that specialize in ‘Job Type’ like Remote, Small Business, or Part Time work.
  • The Niche job boards offer more refined filtering as they typically focus on a single industry and thus the myriad of specialized skills and job types within that industry allows an employer to get candidate information and resumes more effectively.
  • Similar to the more generalized job boards, the pricing tiers include access to candidate resumes, advertising, priority placement of job listings, and other features
• Own your requisition/job listing – most sites won’t do it for you. They’ll post what you give them, including misstatements, grammar and punctuation issues. While it’s yours to own, you may have to work with customer service groups to have it done, not always in the most timely manner. It can be a convoluted and frustrating process even to have a single posting online, which does not often line up with the ‘simple’ or ‘concierge’ service you see advertised.
• Follow the steps to track dates and budget allotments, or you will often be charged the following week or month, despite intending or making clear what you needed and for how long.

This system, these steps, are not ‘worst-case scenarios’, but a typical example of what a company experiences hoping to hire someone with the belief it is quicker and easier than having to hire a talent or staffing team in-house. That is why this has become the accepted process that many companies use to fill their jobs every day. What seems like ‘upside’ is actually an illusion that it is better, easier, and more cost-effective to get on board and follow suit. Having gone through this process more than once, many companies are willing to go another route if for nothing else than to have more control over cost, effort, timing and more accurately determine who the candidates they bring in will be. Why after years are these online companies operating so successfully? That’s simple – there are over Thirty-Million businesses in the U.S., and for every company that quietly ceases their strategy to hire this way, there are ten new businesses starting up or experiencing growth for the first time and need to hire. Starting the same process outlined to begin, the diligence is done on the job opportunity, the listing itself, not on the system to use. Thus, the online hiring platforms of today are flush with new business every day.

Good businesses begin by identifying a Need, a Gap, for which their product or service will fill. Some companies make every effort to do that, and why they last for decades, some in the U.S. for over a hundred years. They stand the test of time because they always look to deliver what people need and want. Other businesses identify the same Need or Gap, and make every effort to ‘Look Like’ they have a product or service or mechanism to fill it. A simple example everyone experiences: You are running low on laundry detergent, you go to any store, and you pick it up in twenty minutes, or order it online and it’s on your porch the next day. You know what to expect and you get it every time without fail. By contrast, the ‘Need’ and the ‘Gap’ in the Hiring Industry is that companies are looking for a cost-effective way to hire people while staying focused on their business, not on the hiring process. Too many of the most popular job boards advertise how well they do this, yet instead of the candidate ‘showing up on your porch the next day’, you go through every painful step outlined herein, and you wait, and you hope, and you don’t question that there could possibly be a better way. But there is.

Personally, I have been in the business of hiring people for many years. I have worked with internal and external recruiters, looked at an innumerable amount of resumes, and interviewed thousands of people in the process. Those who’ve been in position to hire throughout their career know the following. Regardless of how a candidate was presented to me, there is one universal truth about hiring: No One can do it for you. No Algorithm can figure out what is right for you. You can list every facet of the job and every task the person hired will fulfill, but it is not mathematics where equations only ever come to a single conclusion. This is a People Business and a People Industry. It takes time and effort to do it well, and more importantly to Do It Right. Companies are already investing quite a bit to try and get it right, yet by not questioning the system to try something differently, they have allocated those resources to a system built for ‘Them’, not for ‘You’.

I started Careereon, not as a Job Board, but as a Community of People at both ends of the Hiring Spectrum. We focus on Relationship Building, around what matters most in the hiring process – People Connecting with People. Professionals, Talented People looking to take the next step of a career, want to connect with the people doing the hiring. The many steps between the two in today’s online hiring system are intentional, and designed to keep both parties – the only two parties that matter – away from each other for as long as possible. Most of the other ‘Stuff’ on most such sites is noise, filler, and distractions to keep everybody logged in, clicking, reading, surfing, and of course ‘Buying’, instead of staying focused on the only reason you went there in the first place – to Find the Right People.

At Careereon, our process is this:

• Sign Up: Fill Out the Simplest Business Profile you will find, one that asks for the least amount of information needed to get you meeting candidates immediately.
  • The steps and in-depth information exchange is simply not necessary just to connect with people.
• Free Commercial: As part of our Business Community, you create a video to tell your company’s story, and have talented people come directly to you without ‘finder’s fees’, ‘commissions’, or paying for every click on the site.
  • Our Job-Seeking Members go to our video gallery to learn about what companies do in the most Up Close & Personal Way possible. They want to hear from You!
• Start Connecting: Yes, that’s all you need to do to get going and start seeing and meeting the people you think may be a fit for your team or organization.
  • We provide a link to your company’s website, or directly to your Careers/Jobs section if you prefer to provide the quickest path for Our People to Connect with You!

Careereon also has a rich, robust Jobs Section where you are invited to post your open job(s) so our Professionals Community are able to see you both in our Business Community video gallery and in our Jobs section.

• Post Job Listings: You can also post the most important roles you need to fill in the Careereon Jobs Section to provide added exposure to our members who surf our Jobs section each day.
  • Our system promotes Connection – We want our job-seeking members exploring your open jobs, your site and your company to learn what they need to in making the decision to apply.

Isn’t this what you want when signing up with any company to hire the right people? To identify the right candidates for the jobs you need to fill? There is no one, no job portal, or recruiting service, offering the simplicity, and straightforward approach to connect you with people on Day 1 as we do every day at Careereon. Our mission is to break down the many walls built in today’s hiring system and Start Connecting on Day One!