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Roundtable
Joseph Di Carlo
“There are 5,000 books when you go to Barnes & Noble on how to beat the interview, but you will not find one book written for someone who is actually giving the interview.“
Annette McLaughlin: Candidates often surface who do not match 10 out of 10 criteria for the job. That’s where you have to reevaluate—if you can train them on the skill, and if the fit is right for the culture and the organization. And that also is in line with compensation—sometimes candidates surface during the process [who ask for more] than what you thought you needed to pay, and you have to really be open-minded.
Luba Sydor: The largest mistake is force-fitting someone into a role just because they have the technical requirements. Companies really need to look at the functional fit and the job fit, as well as the organizational fit. And the organizational fit includes doing a lot of the interviewing, the soft skills—do they really fit the mission and the value? Do they exhibit those core values?
Robert: So employers tend to neglect the intan- gibles: the personality, the culture?
Annette: The soft skills; exactly.
Richard: Your soft skills are equally, if not more, important than the technical skills. You can teach somebody debits and credits or IT stuff. You can’t teach somebody how to be a good employee—how to show up on time, how to have energy, and how to have a work ethic. That is an innate thing.
Joseph: Culture is so critical. For example: Every position at our organization needs to have an entrepreneurial spirit. What that means to us at WESTMED is that whether you’re a physician or someone who takes phone calls, you will be suc- cessful in that job if you look at that job and say, ‘How can I do this job better and more effectively?’ And that type of mindset is what separates the real stars and the strongest staff from the folks that aren’t in the top echelon.
Robert: Has the Great Recession made it easier or more difficult for employers to recruit and hire top talent? Is it really a ‘buyer’s market’ for employers right now?
Annette: It is much more difficult, because employ- ers perceive that the talent is out there and it’s a buyer’s market, yet with culture and making the right fit in regard to organization and the entrepre- neurial spirit, that is harder to find.
Gregory: There is an old saying in HR: ‘How you treat them in the bad times is how they treat you in the good times.’ The good people, the talented people, know they are good—they know they can get a job and they knew they could get a job even in the depth of the Great Recession. For them it was more a matter of, ‘Where do I want to work?’ and not, ‘Can I work?’
Donald: We use the term ‘passive candidates’— people who are happily and gainfully employed, because if they are going to make a switch, their level of commitment is very different; they’re making the switch because they feel there is a better level of opportunity for them. With someone who is unem- ployed, the potential is they are taking it because it’s a port in the storm, so there is always a danger in that. During the Great Recession, we’ve seen this seismic shift in employer mindset—seemingly because there are so many resources available—‘We’re going to keep interviewing until we get a 97.5 percent fit.’ And somebody who comes in and is 95 percent there, ‘Well what if the next person who comes in is 98 percent?’ I grew up in a world where we hired for potential, and we looked at people who were an 80-percent fit for the job—that 20-percent gap was your challenge as the employee. Who wants to do a job where I’ve done 98 percent of it in the past? Over the last year and a half, it has become a ‘candidates’ market’ again; the good people are back at work and it is very competitive out there.
Richard: Most of our clients have been hiring peo- ple who are employed. And some of these jobs are very specific and the company needs that position filled. So the perception years ago was you can hire someone at 40, 50, 60 percent of what the normal salary range was. But if they did that, they would get burned because those people, if they were good, would be jumping a year later to another job, so they are hesitant to re-fill that job at the same level—they realize they have to raise the level and the value of the employee also.
Robert: It sounds like the recession really has ‘polluted’ the applicant pool with fewer additional qualified or non-qualified people that you have to sift through.
Gregory: There are so many resources out there— LinkedIn, Craigslist. They are getting inundated with 5,000 resumés. So they are thinking, ‘Oh my God! I need a 99-percent fit.’ It’s taking so much longer to fill a job.
Donald: Finding the pool is no longer the challenge. It used to be, ‘Oh, I’m looking for a needle in a hay- stack.’ Now you’re looking for a needle in a pile of needles, and it may be harder to do that because you don’t really understand how to go through it. If you’re getting inundated with resumés, how do you make a decision on who is the right person? How many am I going to see? It is a cloudier path today than it was.
Joseph: There are so many great tools out there. Our ability to be greater ‘hunters’ in the recruit- ment process is probably greater than it has ever been. The way I look at it, the Great Recession has caused the really talented people to pause before they leave a company to take a new opportunity.
Robert: Because of the uncertainty in moving on?
Joseph: Exactly. Right now they may want to take an opportunity to grow for responsibility, but the economy has caused them to take a pause.
Annette: It has made the recruitment process more complex. Recruiters need to be much more in tune
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