The recruitment of persons has become the most important challenge for employers today. Two weeks ago I wrote about the value of employer branding for a company to distinguish itself from the rest and how this helps in attracting talent, reducing staff turnover and reducing recruitment costs. Employer branding assumes more importance given the difficulties faced by employers in attracting talent.
I would like to return to the difficulties being experienced by employers in recruiting persons, also in the light of an interesting finding in the annual Misco Survey on HR Developments. Employers reported that in a number of instances they were not even receiving applications for their vacancies.
Such a development requires a mindset from the part of employers which is totally different from the one that they have been used to hitherto. The idea of promoting a vacancy on the part of an employer is that one receives a number of applications and one is able to choose the best applicant. It was essentially a buying operation, over which the employer could exercise an important element of control.
The situation has changed totally. Recruitment is no longer a buying operation but it has become a selling operation. When faced with options (and today there are many), employees will choose that company that manages to sell itself best.
This is evident in the effort put in by accountancy and audit firms to attract the best students. They spend significant resources to sell themselves. And this does not happen with those students who are about to graduate but with students in the first two years at the University.
The employer has lost control over the recruitment process and the shots are being called by those persons applying for jobs
The employer has lost control over the recruitment process and the shots are being called by those persons applying for jobs. Some employers have described it to me as ‘the recruitment circus’. The reason for such a notion is not that employers need to brand themselves (which is required and which is a positive concept), but rather that employees are now taking their employment for granted because they know that they will always find an employer that is willing to offer them a job.
Some persons looking for a job are happy to spend some months unemployed, until what they consider to be the right job offer comes up. Worse still, such persons do not consider spending some months unemployed to be a negative thing. One job applicant told me specifically that spending time not working provided him with time to learn a new digital game and to rest and that he saw nothing wrong with it.
Admittedly this situation will persist while job opportunities abound. Once there is a blip in the labour market, the system will be shocked and the ripple effect will hurt many people. Cyprus has experienced such a shock in the last years.
They had as buoyant an economy as ours is and suddenly it went into a recession. Although youth unemployment is very high, employers still do not receive many applications for their vacancies because the labour market is shell-shocked. Employees wanted to remain in their comfort zone rather than risk losing whatever job they had.
To consider the recruitment process as a selling operation and not a buying operation may appear to be against the natural order of things. I tend to agree with this point of view. Employers need to make their human resources strategy part of their business strategy and therefore giving the HR function more importance.
On the other hand, if we were to consider the labour market as any other market, the supply is represented by the job seeker and the demand is represented by the employer. It needs to remain so to have a labour market that functions effectively. Thus recruitment needs to remain essentially a buying operation.