Recruiting Talent Is Always Hardest in Your Industry?

I started my talent acquisition career when I was ten years old. My mom started her technical recruiting agency, HRU Technical Resources, in 1980, and she would work at night on her bed calling candidates. She was a single mother, so my sister and I would sit on her bed watching TV with sound low and listen to her talk to candidates.

These were pre-automated tracking system (ATS) days for a small technical recruiting firm, so she would have to mail a skills checklist to each candidate and then have an administrator at the office key in every skill into a green-screen database. I got ten cents for each skills checklist I folded and stuffed into an envelope. It was a great first recruiting gig for a ten-year-old!

I tell people I was born into recruiting. It's been in my blood since I was a kid. When you sit and listen to your mother question candidates on the phone, you can't help but pick up some tips and tricks along the way. Being a kid of a recruiter may be the best recruiter training of all time.

So, right about now you're thinking, Great, we get to read Tim's life story.

Not quite, I'll skip zero to nine and my college years, and other than those years, I've been recruiting or in human resources my entire life. So, yeah, throughout this book, you may learn a few things about me. But my hope is you'll learn a lot more about how I believe talent acquisition should run within an organization.

Right out of college, mom gave me a job in her company. Lucky for me I got a raise from the ten-cent envelope stuffing and started out in the recruitment agency environment in a new role she had just learned was the up-and-coming thing in recruiting, a "research assistant."

The research assistant role was basically the precursor to today's sourcing professionals. I worked directly for the recruiters in her company tracking down candidates who were interested in the jobs I had open, and then I would pass them along to the "real" recruiter to fill in the rest.

In that first job, I learned one of the biggest lies in talent acquisition:

No one knows how to recruit talent in your industry unless they've worked in your industry!

This is one giant load of BS!

The only other lie in talent acquisition that is close is the one about having to work in the job to truly be able to recruit talent in that field. This is the "you need to be a developer to be able to recruit a developer" farce.

I worked for years at Applebee's, the worldwide casual dining chain that serves beer and burgers. It's not that awfully complex, but you can imagine with over two thousand restaurants, there are some challenges.

I left Applebee's to go run talent acquisition at a ten thousand-person hospital system. I still remember sitting in front of the CEO and hearing him say, "You've never worked in healthcare, you have no idea how to recruit a nurse." He was a true believer of the above lie. If I didn't know the industry, how could I ever recruit people to his organization?

So, in this first chapter, I'm going to give you the biggest lie in talent acquisition and the biggest secret! The biggest secret in talent acquisition is: Recruiting in every industry is exactly the same!

It didn't matter to me if I was recruiting a bartender or a critical care registered nurse, the process of making this happen was exactly the same. Also, the bartender and the nurse couldn't care less if I had ever made a drink or delivered critical care to a patient. Those were their jobs. My job was to connect them with the people they would be working for who actually knew those jobs.

I've worked in retail, dining, healthcare, and technical, and every single industry is exactly the same. There are challenges. There are buzzwords. There are bad hiring managers. There are good hiring managers. And if I could find talent that was interested in our organization and the positions we had open, then that was all that truly mattered.

The question then is, Why do we perpetuate this lie that you must have industry experience to be able to recruit talent for that industry? It's really just basic psychology. If people think your job is super hard then you tend to have more respect and more job security.

If executives thought a monkey could recruit, we would be peeling bananas and fetching them coffee. So, it's to our benefit to get everyone to believe that industry knowledge is super important to uncovering great talent.

So, this may be a good spot, early on, to point out a fact about this book. This is a leaders' guide to talent acquisition. I'm writing this book to help leaders better understand talent acquisition, and better help talent acquisition leaders run a more dynamic recruiting shop. Some of this may sting a bit for people not in those roles. It's our job to rise above that so we can understand how and why we've gotten to this point.

Recruiting Isn't Hard

Recruiting isn't difficult. In fact, it's never been easier in the history of the world to find talent. Nine in ten Americans have access to the internet and use it on a daily basis. Everyone who uses the internet is leaving digital exhaust and footprints. Sourcing technology has gotten so advanced that it's basically killing the sourcing function that was just created a decade ago!

You can now find and find out about the majority of candidates you may want to hire. Job boards have collected hundreds of millions of résumés and profiles. On top of that, we all leave a social trail on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on.

Within minutes of training a new recruiter who has never recruited a day in his life, we can give them access to millions of potential candidates and have them start contacting them. Of course, these new recruiters will probably be terrible at convincing a candidate to work for your organization, but even a blind squirrel can find a nut occasionally.

I tend to believe we overcomplicate a very simple function. Recruiting is simply about connecting with people who have the desire to work for your organization and the ability to learn the skills needed to work in the positions you need to hire for, if they don't already have them.

The problem so many recruiters face is looking at talent acquisition through our own lens of the organization. If you work inside an organization for any length of time you know what's great about working there, and you know what's awful about working there. Talent acquisition professionals tend to focus way too much on why people wouldn't want to work for their company, rather than why they would want to work there.

I'll talk about this further in Chapter 5 when we look at...