We have a strange verb in the English language, the verb 'to know,' that lumps together the facts we've learned in books and the Ahas! we experienced in the stories that make up our most vivid memories. That time I almost drowned in the lake, I learned not to swim drunk. That was a good lesson. That time I missed my flight and almost missed my brother's wedding, I learned not to trust the car service when they haven't arrived fifteen minutes after the scheduled pickup time.
When we think about these moments of learning, we feel every emotion. We remember the pattern in the carpeting at the airport as we raced past gate after gate hoping to get lucky, lungs seared and feeling like an idiot, but an idiot in panic mode.
We learn such powerful lessons from our experiences, but on a job search we say "I have ten years experience in this kind of work" and people say "Oh, only ten years? We need someone with fifteen years."
They never ask the important question: "What happened during those years?" They don't ask about stories. That is the only way to understand a person -- to hear his or her stories!
Imagine life in a little outpost on the tundra four hundred years ago. A guys shows up at the outer edge of the village. Everybody is like "Who is that guy?" They watch the newcomer suspiciously. Somebody goes and gets the old man or the old woman who runs things in the village.
They say "Some guy just came into the village, leading a donkey." The elders sit down with the visitor. The donkey stays outside. What are they going to ask him: "What traveling gear do you use? What traveling certifications do you have?"
They're going to say "What's your story? Where have you come from, and where are you going?"
We have to evolve and get smarter in our hiring processes. We have to remember that the most qualified Marketing VP for your company may never have held a Marketing title before.
We never know the exact background the perfect person for the job will bring.
We have been hiring people very foolishly for decades -- hiring them via bullet-point laundry list rather than by asking them "What have you done, and what do you know about the problems we're dealing with over here?"
We can scrap the infernal Applicant Tracking Systems and hire much more quickly, simply and inexpensively the old-fashioned way. If your reaction to that thought is "We'd be deluged with resumes" then we should pull back the truck and talk about marketing.
Why doesn't every vendor get swamped with sales leads from unsuitable and bad-fit prospective customers? It's because they understand how to market their products. Once we turn the dial just an inch to see in a flash of insight that HR is a sales and marketing job and that when we are recruiting, we are in full-on sales and marketing mode, we can recruiting more thoughtfully and effectively.
Most employers spend way too much time and money on their recruiting activities, because they focus on the particle aspects of recruiting.
They make up charts that say "We will run this job ad in this publication targeted to this demographic, and then we'll take out Facebook ads for these job openings and grab the social media users," and so on.
They forget about the waves. They forget that people get excited about exciting things. Why else would anyone join your firm? If the reason is "Because they need a job" then your hiring comes from fear rather than trust.
When you care about talent, you want to hire people you have to work to recruit. If you're not willing to work for them, why should they care what you have to say? We have lost sight of the central notion in marketing: people buy things that they want and need to feel better. That could be a furnace when the house is too cold. It could be a life insurance policy. It could be a bottle of super sexy red nail polish.
Purchasing even boring things makes us feel better. If we run out of leaf bags and we have to get some more, the purchase itself is not exciting but we feel good about being good citizens and using the approved bag for the leaves that fell in the yard.
People who read job ads and respond to them want to go and work among people who will make them happy they took the job. Thus every recruiting job must be tuned into organizational culture. The biggest complaint we hear in our business from third-party recruiters is that their clients expect them, the recruiters, to fill the gap between the candidates' expectations and the employer's cultural reality.
"I am half recruiter, half HR consultant," our recruiter friend Gary told us. "Most organizations are quite unaware of the perceptions their firms have out in the talent marketplace and among their own employees. They are shocked when I tell them that people are not dying to work for them. They have trouble putting on a job-seeker's glasses."
Experience is highly relevant to the mental shift required to begin recruiting with a sales and marketing focus. Our process is called Recruiting with a Human Voice. It is a marketing approach.
Who would want to work for your company? There are two groups of people who might.
One group is made up of people who see any job opportunity and go for it. God bless them, they are not qualified and have no idea what you do in your business. We have to feel a lot of compassion for them but they are not going to be your next, best hires.
The second group of people who will apply for your job openings don't apply for every job they see. They know something about you and they will invest the mental energy to figure out how their experience and worldview could mesh with yours and with your mission.
These are the folks you want to reach with your job ads. You want to reach a psychographic group, not a demographic one! This is one of the principal ways in which we've been recruiting so terribly wrong for years and years. That's okay -- we can shift our focus now!
What's most important in your hiring is not a pre-determined number of years doing X or Y but an aptitude for X or Y and a passion for X or Y or some other combination of letters. I do not know why that message has been slow to get through to recruiting leaders, but there is no doubt that it has. What you need to know about a job applicant is "What's your story?" and then "What are you looking to do?"
There is no better use of job interview time than to swap stories. Stories are the way humans have always communicated significant things.
Why do you think we all know so many stories, and remember them so well? When you can shift your view to see that your job as an HR person or recruiter is to tell the story of a group of people who started a company or an agency and make it obvious why anybody else should care, then you have taken a big step.
When you can tell the story of a job opening and why anybody with a brain and a heart would want to do the job -- selling the job and the company rather than expecting the job candidates to sell you - then you've taken another big step.
Those organizations who stay stuck in Godzilla Land, mired in fear and clinging to the delusion that the best or most worthy new hires are the people who beg for the job most fervently, are the ones who will lose. They are corporate and institutional dead men walking already.
Tectonic plates shift fast once they start shifting, and the Human Workplace is already here. Experience on this planet, the kind of experience that teaches us the most powerful lessons and the learning we can't acquire in school, is the essential and magical quality you need to learn about when you interview people, and when you meet people in other non-work circumstances, too. You can't know anything useful about a person until you've heard his or her story.
It is time for us to ask job candidates about their stories instead of screening them using pointless and irrelevant bullet points as though recruiting were a clerical matching game. Don't we, our clients and shareholders, and the talented people around us in the talent marketplace deserve that much?
