One day several years ago I got a call from a fellow who works at one of our beautiful government labs in Colorado.
"I want to send you a job ad that I'm running," he said, "and get your opinion on it."
"On the job ad?" I asked him. "Why do you want my opinion on your job ad? Are you not getting enough candidates in the door, or what?"
"Nothing," he said. "Very few candidates and very unskilled. It's really depressing and it's slowing me down like crazy. I'm not sure my Recruiting department is really backing me up here."
I felt a tug in my chest. That's my tribe, Bro Montana, don't be so quick to throw the recruiters under the bus.
"Why do you say that?" I asked him. "What is their responsibility for finding candidates for you and by the way, what sort of job is it?"
"It's a research job," said the manager on the phone. "It's a highly skilled job, and highly specialized. Our Recruiting department is supposed to send me suitable candidates. They've sent me very few, and not really qualified people."
When I was doing in-house recruiting I used to say to hiring managers only half-jokingly, "If you have some amino acids lying around we could find a petri dish and I could grow this magical new employee in about thirty years." We used to arm-wrestle about the endless list of Essential Requirements in those job ads.
I wanted to sneak in the requirements Must Tap Dance, Speak Ancient Greek and Play the Xylophone just for fun.
The requirements in the typical job ad are truly delusional. They cause even highly and multiply-skilled candidates to feel bad about themselves and not to apply for the job. That's idiotic!
We complain about talent shortages, but then we make almost every job impossible for the average brilliant working person to get.
I told the hiring manager at the research lab to send me the job ad to look at. I looked at it. You already know what it said. It was horrifying. "Research Administrator with blah, blah, blah and these fifty requirements, fill out this form and don't call us because you are nothing." It was an awful job ad, but no worse than any government job ad I've seen recently. It was nasty.
"This job ad is pretty bad," I said. "You talk to the candidates in the third person. You talk about The Selected Candidate, even though there's a person reading this ad or else the ad is useless. There's an audience for this job ad, and you're talking at that person in the third person -- you're talking past them! You're telling them that they could never be the Selected Candidate -- that would have to be somebody else!"
"I guess I see what you mean," said the science guy, "but people who apply for these types of jobs are used to that sort of language."
"You are a science guy in a specialized field," I said. "You have to build a network. This is your recruit. This is building your team. You have to know. Imagine a college football coach who's always scouting the high school talent. This is your field! There aren't an infinite number of people to know. You go to conferences, you get out there. It's not your Recruiting team's job to build that super-specialized pipeline for you. How could they ever be as expert in your field as you are?"
"I just think they could have done more promotion of the job ad," he said.
"I couldn't say," I told him. "I have no idea. I'm just telling you that the sooner you take on the thought leader part of your role and the ambassador part, the build-a-pipeline part, the better it will be for the agency and for you personally. That might not be your bent. You might be more of a lab guy."
"I go to things," said the man. "I speak at a few conferences."
"That's your recruiting ground!" I said. "You talk to people there. Tell them about the cool projects you're doing."
"I don't know," said the gentleman. "This work isn't all that high on the coolness meter." I was surprised. "I figured it would be cool to you, since you're doing it and you speak at conferences about it," I said.
"There's a lot of people trying to get into government jobs," said the man. "They're very secure." I tried to understand what he was telling me. It sounded like he was reading a script. Why are you telling me this, dude? I wondered. For twenty minutes we had been talking about the fact that the response to his job ad had been dismal. He didn't have one viable candidate.
"I'm trying to understand," I said. "There may be a lot of people looking for government jobs in the aggregate, but you need one specific person that you don't have."
"What would you tell me to do?" he asked.
"What are the three things that make this job opening a really great job?" I asked him. "You can take your time. That's a good starting point -- answering the question 'why would anyone want this job?'"
"It has a great view of the Flatirons," he said.
"You know what," I said, "if you work as a cart attendant at
"This is silly," he said. "It's a hundred-and-ten-kay government job. That's enough! I'm not going to sit here and try to convince people they should apply for it."
And there you have it!
"Well, I wish you all the best," I said. "You have no candidates, and you're outraged that people wouldn't rush to fill out hours worth of forms on a recruiting portal to apply for your highly specialized job. Yet you say that the greatest thing about the job is that it pays a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year. Here's the thing about that."
"What?" asked the gentleman.
"A job that pays a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year is a job that warrants that pay level. It isn't a personal gift from you to the lucky Selected Candidate. It's a job that pays what it pays because that's the going rate. A person who's qualified to work for you is qualified to do hundred-and-ten-thousand-dollar jobs for a lot of people.
"They don't need to work for you. There has to be more than just that paycheck, especially given the long list of things you're looking for. Does that make sense?" I asked.
"The right person will be thrilled to go through the process and to get the job," said the fellow, a tad sulkily if I am honest.
There's the cost of bureaucratic fear. An open job that is budgeted at a hundred and ten thousand dollars doesn't attract a soul, and that's because anyone who's qualified to do the job is not excited about it. If you're qualified for a specialized job like that, you know the landscape. The total package is not appealing.
The fearful manager who needs his candidates to be grateful for the opportunity --- needs them to be mojo-deprived and fearful, in other words -- is costing the organization (and thereby the taxpayer) money. Recruiting is a place where a lot of fearful managerial behavior shows up. It can get very ugly, and it's expensive, too.
I don't know whether the science dude ever made his new hire or not. I tried to imagine sitting at my desk, looking at the Flatirons and being angry at the job-seeking population for the cruel diss they'd thrown in my direction. I had a blinkin' six-figure job opening and those knaves refused to pursue it!
You have to understand bureaucratic fear in order to handle it when you run into it. There is a lot of it around!
