The Position Description: a Poor Starting Point in Defining the Ideal Candidate

As with most of us, I’ve been on both sides of the table when it comes to the recruitment process. I’ve searched for and interviewed for positions myself, and I’ve been responsible for recruiting the right candidate as a hiring manager. It seems that this “flip-side” experience should provide us with important insights into how we ultimately direct and improve our efforts in recruiting new employees. Unfortunately, we also sometimes find we must consider sacrificing what we know to be the best practices for the sake of expedience. 

After all, the recruiter is typically responsible for concurrently filling multiple positions for a number of different job categories. In addition, the recruiter receives hundreds of resumes for each of these positions that must be screened before being passed on to the hiring managers for review. We know how important it is to the company’s success to hire the right person for the job, but there is only so much a recruiter can do!

Therefore, the challenge is to find a way to continually improve our success rate in identifying and hiring the best individuals for our open positions. I believe that ultimate success in any activity begins with defining the correct initial requirements or conditions.  The scientific/mathematics communities have recognized the sensitive effect that initial conditions can have in determining the final results.  A theory called “chaos theory (a.k.a., the “butterfly effect” ) has been widely applied in these circles for many years.

The butterfly effect moniker has been used to describe chaos theory in simple terms, illustrating that the flap of a single butterfly’s wings on a distant continent can very slightly alter the initial conditions of a given weather pattern and ultimately result in creating severe local weather impacts. The recruitment process is a complex system as well — not steeped in complex mathematic predictive modeling, but in complex human engineering interactions.

So, how do we normally define the initial conditions of any recruitment activity? In most cases, it begins with generic position descriptions that have been generally established by a company to define various classifications of employees (e.g., administrative assistants, engineers, manufacturing technicians, etc.). Since the purpose of these documents is to establish very broad descriptions and structure the company’s workforce, they typically cover a wide range of activities within each classification and can only generalize the minimum requirements. Therefore, we cannot rely too heavily — and certainly not exclusively — on the position description as the benchmark of the recruitment process.  

The following approach is a somewhat subtle — but significant — departure from some current recruiting processes, one that can dramatically improve the success rates of recruiting and hiring:

Require a face-to-face meeting with the hiring manager when the recruiting process begins, so that the recruiter and hiring manager can collaboratively develop a more meaningful set of qualification needs/desires and incorporate some flexibility in fulfilling these qualifications. The recruiter would develop a list of specific questions that they can discuss with the hiring manager in advance in order to take them from the generic position description requirements to their actual needs.

For example, one doesn’t have to firmly set an experience range of “more than 10 years” for a senior engineering position if the hiring manager can live with less than that. This “flexible description definition” approach is critical in establishing the correct initial conditions for the hiring process and, therefore, in finding the best fit for the open position.

Recruiters should conduct regular teleconferences with the hiring managers they are working with to ensure timely progress is being made on reviews, interview arrangements, approvals, etc. These meetings provide an excellent way to determine whether the initial conditions that were established for the recruitment process are still accurate or they need to be altered.

Recruiters can also make informal contact with hired employees — and separately with their managers — soon after they have joined a company to ensure that things are moving forward successfully in the transition. This serves as a “lessons learned” review of the overall hiring effort and will lead to future improvements of the process.

This approach, although involving some additional effort on the part of both recruiters and hiring managers, can in the long run result in huge rewards for your company and for all involved in the process. It all begins with a better definition of the initial position’s needs!