Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: I Failed @SHRM’s new Talent Acquisition Credential!

So, you guys know I wrote a book, right? A book on talent acquisition! I truly believe I actually know something about Talent Acquisition and Recruiting! So, it came as a pretty big shock when I took SHRM’s new TA Specialty Credential and Failed It! Well, kind of…

I’m the President of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP), so I have a real interest in training and learning programs for talent acquisition. Also, because I’ve been in the TA space for a couple of decades I wanted to take the TA credential cold. No studying. Don’t even look at the materials or what it involves. If I’m good, I should still be able to pass it, right?

Right away I knew I made a mistake. Part of it is just simple word usage. What I might call something, the instructional designers at SHRM call it something else. Another part of it is how the material is taught. What’s the most important of the following four….? Well, I might believe something is more important based on my experience and situation, but if I actually studied the material and took the two-day course, I would know what was ‘the’ most important based on how the material was put together.

All of that being said, I was really impressed with the questions! 

Every single question (there’s 50 that you take for the test) were really legitimate TA questions, and the questions were designed around a really modern, up to date talent acquisition function. The questions spanned a broad area of TA from workforce planning, to recruitment marketing, to sourcing, to technology.

Now, you also have to put this into perspective. SHRM didn’t launch this believing a micro-certification was the answer to educating someone to take the credential course, pass the test, and then go run a Fortune 500 TA shop. The credential is meant to help educate an HR professional who is moving into TA, or works as the sole HR pro/leader of a company that also has TA responsibility. So, you might only be doing TA as part of your role.

I’m actually teaching one of these SHRM TA credential courses in San Francisco May 13-14th. That was the main reason and desire for me to take the exam, I wanted to see what those going through the program would experience, and I can confidently say that if someone goes through and does the self-paced modules, does the two-day workshop, studies, and passes the exam, I would feel very comfortable that they have a working knowledge of how a modern-day TA department functions!

The reality is no one certification, credential, training course, etc. is going to make you an expert. You become an expert by doing many of these things and becoming a continual learner. What I love about SHRM Speciality TA Credential is that it exposes HR pros to a new world in a way that lets them know what’s important in talent acquisition, some baseline knowledge, and teaches them how to pursue each part further for expertise.

So, who should take the SHRM TA Credential?

  1. HR Pros who don’t have TA background, but want to expand their tools across HR.
  2. HR Pros/leaders who have TA as part of their function and they don’t feel comfortable in the modern world of recruiting
  3. Corporate TA pros/leaders who feel behind and want some freshening up of their skills.

I think this is a great development opportunity for HR Pros who are looking to develop themselves for future promotion. Having a Talent Acquisition skill set, with your HR skill set, is a differentiator when it comes to hiring HR leaders. Modern organizations are desperate for great TA, and for HR Leaders who understand how to leverage the TA function to drive business success.

So, for all those who love to dump on SHRM for being dated or behind the times, Kudos SHRM! Your TA Specialty Credential is something that is really helpful to individuals and organizations looking to modernize their TA practices!

What Does Tim Sackett Actually Do?

So, besides my beautiful wife asking this question, frequently, I get asked this question all the time! During the spring and fall conference season, I’m out and about all over the world speaking. At almost every stop I’ll have at least one person come up to me and ask,

“So, what do you actually do?” 

Ugh! It’s the single biggest failure of my life!

I probably should start each conversation like an AA meeting:

“Hi, my name is Tim Sackett, and I run a technical staffing company!” 

That’s the real job. That’s the money maker. I run a recruiting shop! Like most of you, I have to go out and buy a recruiting tech stack that works. I need to decide if I spend money on Indeed, or LinkedIn, or ZipRecruiter. I need to hire and train recruiters. At the end of the day, I’m in the weeds finding talent.

Unlike most Staffing Firm executives, I can’t really hide. I’ve been blogging and speaking for ten years in our industry. When I meet with new clients who want to use my team, I try and tell them, “I think we’re better than most, but the one thing I can guarantee is I won’t lie to you, or take advantage of you! I’m too public! You could kill my brand overnight if I was one of those cheesy staffing guys selling you a load of bullshit!”

The name of my company is HRU Technical Resources. We are a 100% certified female-owned technical staffing company. Most people believe I’m the owner, but in reality, my Mom started the company in 1980.(Check out her profile pic from the 1st day! She looks like Farrah Fawcett!) She’s the original OG Recruiter! In her 70’s, she still could out recruit probably 99% of Recruiters in the world! Old school and proud of it!

Want to work with me? I want to work with you! 

Here’s what we do:

  • Contract staffing – helping organizations for 38 years build that part of their company that they want to maintain as contingent to add flexibility to their workforce.
  • Sourcing Projects – we will your funnel with talent and let you do the recruiting
  • Project RPO – we bundle some critical hiring for you and do the entire thing end-to-end
  • Traditional Direct-hire staffing

I also do a bunch of Talent Acquisition consulting with clients as well, helping them build out their own recruiting tech stack and just flat out execute better when it comes to their own direct hiring and figuring out what’s the best way to get the most out of your recruiting team.

So, yeah, I write a lot. I speak quite a bit. I do webcasts, etc. But that’s not the full-time gig. I wrote a post a few years ago titled “What would it take to get you to work 80 hours per week?” I don’t work 80 hours per week, but I probably work 60-ish. A lot of nights and weekends to make both my full-time and my side gig work.

The reality is, if I don’t work my full-time gig, my bills don’t get paid. That’s real life. So, let’s work together! I would love to get to know more of you and work with a bunch of you. Send me a note and let’s connect – sackett.tim@hru-tech.com.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @PowerToFly

This week on The Weekly Dose I review the D&I technology platform Power to Fly. Power to Fly is a recruiting platform used for connecting people with companies committed to building more diverse and inclusive environments. 

Founded in 2015 by two females who were named one of Fast Companies most creative people in business. The original concept was to connect women with remote jobs (which it still does). From that PTW learned many organizations also wanted and needed gender diversity in their in-house teams as well. Today it’s not only women but all underrepresented talent in the marketplace. 

The original concept of being a marketplace to connect one type of candidate with companies isn’t new, but Power to Fly definitely come at this from a different angle than most. While you can post your jobs on their site, which has over a million profiles of female candidates, Power to Fly focuses more on community events and interactions, both in-person and virtual. 

Power to Fly hosts in-person networking events hosted by client(s) companies to bring women in a specific marketplace together. These interactions help females and underrepresented candidates build a network of their own to leverage as they grow their careers. 

These live events bring together upwards of 200 women and are sponsored by some of the largest brands in the world, but can also be leveraged by a handful of employers in a market coming together to co-sponsor together. Power to Fly has found females are much more likely to apply to your jobs after attending these events (and the research into gender-specific applies echoes this as well).  The likelihood of apply from those attending these events rose 60% after attending. 

Power to Fly also holds virtual events with top Female executives and thought-leaders allowing women to ask live Q&A to help them in their career. Giving anyone a chance, in an ultra-safe environment, to ask questions they probably wouldn’t or don’t even have access to a mentee to ask. 

I love the concept. Traditionally, men clearly have had so many built-in networking advantages to aid their career path. Building out these networks for females and underrepresented candidates is a must and long overdue. 

If you are looking to add diversity into your talent pipelines Power to Fly is definitely something to check out. Job postings, live events, and virtual events, the power of their community is their real strength.  It’s women helping women in the most positive ways! 


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Career Confessions of Gen Z – Great Recruitment Content

Welcome to the reboot of Career Confessions of Gen Z! I started this in 2018 with my Gen Z son, Cameron, and the response was off the charts. So, in 2019 I found 8 great Gen Z HR, TA, and Marketing pros to continue the Gen Z content. Enjoy! 


Skyler Baty is a Videographer and Video Editor for SkillScout and lives in the Detroit Metro Area in Michigan. 

Skyler loves doing video work and helping organizations with their video projects. Connect with him, he’s a genius with this stuff! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @EmployUsApp – Referral Automation

Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the candidate referral automation platform EmployUs. I actually first told you about EmployUs about four years ago when they just launched, but since then they’ve improved their tech and added a bunch of stuff, so I wanted to give you a second look! 

You guys already know I’m in love with candidate referral automation. In my experience of looking at every kind of HR and TA Technology I believe it has the single highest ROI of any tech on the market, and let still relatively few organizations actually use it as part of their TA Tech stack.

EmployUS took candidate referral technology one more step and actually allows you to use it both internally and externally with your organization. Clearly we love using this tech with our employees to get more of their referrals, but what if we could also use it outside our organization to gain more referrals as well? EmployUs allows you to do that, if you choose.

What I like about EmployUs:

  • They jumped into the chatbot/AI world to help those referring candidates make it much easier and faster, and through the use of SMS they’ve actually made is super simple for hourly workers to now refer candidates in seconds! Always a draw back to traditional referral software.
  • The automation aspect truly helps make the referral process simple for your internal employees who might not be thinking of this all day, every day, but once they do decide, you need it to self-sufficient and fast.
  • Tailored email and texting campaigns so you can target parts of your organization for specific referrals.
  • A dashboard that tracks and automates payouts based on the rules you build, that also gives you the gamification aspect of internal scoreboards to keep your referral program top of mind all the time.

Here’s what we know. Most of our top hires come from referrals. Our most inexpensive hires come from referrals. Almost all of us would say we need more referrals in our hiring process.

Then we watch our old, tired, analog referral program deliver the exact same results year in and year out, and we do nothing to change it. Go demo EmployUs and take a look at what your candidate referral program should look like.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The Talent Fix Book Club Starts this Week!#RecruiterDevelopment

If you are a regular reader of this blog than you clearly know I wrote a book, The Talent Fix, that was launched in April 2018. I have been overwhelmed by the awesome response and I would like to give back to the community that has given me so much. 

Beginning January 23, 2019, I’ll hold a monthly book club webinar, for free, where I’ll be going over each chapter of the book in detail, from a discussion point of view. Each webinar is scheduled for one hour, it might be a bit less or a bit more depending on discussion and questions. 

Each month, I’ll pull out some of the highlights and strategies, discuss them in more detail, open up the discussion to Q&A from the book club attendees, and probably bring on some micro-celebrity Recruiting guests as well to talk shop and continue to challenge the way we think about Talent Acquisition! 

We’ll go one chapter at a time, and while they might be too slow for some, most people don’t even read one book a year, so we’ll go slow and make sure we have truly dynamic discussions each week! 

The schedule will breakdown like so: 

  • January 23, 2019 – Introduction to the Book Club, we’ll breakdown Kris Dunn’s Foreword and I’ll tell you the “KD” story, plus a bonus topic of what recruiting tools you need to look at in 2019! 
  • February – Chapter 1 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • March – Chapter 2 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • April – Chapter 3 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • May – Chapter 4 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • June – Chapter 5 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • July – Chapter 6 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • August – Chapter 7 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • September – Chapter 8 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • October – Chapter 9 – Highlights, discussion, and live Q&A
  • November – A look forward to preparing for 2020, looking at our next book club read, and a mini-demo of the hottest recruiting tool on the market I found in 2019! 

Also, remember, I’ll bring in several surprise guests that are genius level TA leaders, sourcers, and tech experts as well! 

Register for the free Talent Fix Monthly Book Club! 

This will be the easiest Team Development you’ll do all year! I’ve already had multiple teams contact me about signing up! One TA leader went out and bought each member of his team the book so they could get started and be ready for January 23rd! 

Buy The Talent Fix on Amazon or SHRM Members can buy it directly from the SHRM bookstore at a discount with your SHRM membership! 

I can’t wait to talk to everyone on January 23rd! If you have any questions, just send me an email at sackett.tim@hru-tech.com! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Content_App – Job Branding

This week on the Weekly Dose I review the job branding and messaging technology Content. Content is a mobile-based SMS text-based technology (app) AI social media assistant that scales across your recruitment teams to help your business get the most from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Content will send you a text message when she/he/it discovers something relevant for you to share. Every share Content creates will have relevant hashtags and an image to ensure you get the best engagement.

Content will also decide the best time to share the article so your recruiters don’t need to worry about the details. Just reply yes to share it, or no to decline.

Content will also automatically grab your jobs from your career site and brand them to look like a professionally digital marketed piece of content for your team to share out to your networks and talent communities.

One of the biggest issues we face as Recruiters in sharing great content with candidates is usually we don’t know what good content is out there, and we don’t have time to go out and find good content. The Content app does this automatically for you, while still keeping the power of customization in your hands.

What I like about Content:

  • Content is built on machine learning algorithms that will learn what content you like and dislike, and work to deliver more of the content you want to share with your talent networks.
  • Solves your share issues – want to share a piece of content to your internal team so they’ll share it outwardly, Content uses SMS-text based communication to do this with a simple “yes” or “no” via a text reply.
  • Tracking ROI via clicks is pretty cool showing you which person is responsible, plugs into your Google Analytics on your career site, and will give you ROI verse pay per click advertising.

One of the most difficult things in talent acquisition right now is being able to measure the ROI on social media recruiting and Content gives you a tool to actually show these results, but also makes it super easy for your team to share more and better content out to the networks they are trying to engage with.

Ultimately Content does the one thing we all need more of which is to get more traffic to our career site, and with the right CRM and retargeting, this really puts our recruiting on a different level. Well worth a quick demo, as this simple to use tool will help move many TA shops to the next level.

The team behind Content is the former team behind Broadbean, so you know these guys understand recruitment and how to drive traffic to your jobs.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

The 2018 Emerging Jobs Report is Here!

LinkedIn released their 2018 Emerging Jobs Report today and as always it’s packed full of some great information that speaks to where we see the world of Recruiting today, but also what we need to keep our eye for the future! 

So, what stood out in the latest report? First and foremost it’s what jobs are hot this year to last – 

So, I think we’ve all been hearing all of this A.I. and Blockchain stuff. The reality is, we aren’t really talking about true A.I., it’s Machine Learning (ML) and we’ve seen giant increases in the needs for these skills. 

Out of the top 15 emerging jobs (those jobs growing the fastest on LinkedIn) 6 of those were related to ML, Data, and Blockchain. That’s significant in terms of the products and technology that are being built by companies for the future. 

What else did we learn? 

While the report is designed to make us believe it’s all about Tech hiring, it’s not really all about tech hiring! 

  • Sales Executives
  • Recruiters
  • Realtors 
  • Account Executives (another title for sales)
  • Administrative Assistants 

Were all super high on the list as well. What does that mean? Well, those really aren’t emerging or growing jobs, it’s more about who’s living, searching, and spending time on LinkedIn. That might not be the patronage that LI really wants long term for the health of the site, in terms of your normal mix. 

The largest skills gap is still good old fashion oral communications! 

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is truly a skills gap and how much of that coming up in the data is just a function of the types of roles people are trying to recruit for on LI. If the report shows that all of these A.I., Blockchain, and Data jobs are what’s truly hot, oral communication wouldn’t be the most critical thing in those roles. 

But, oral communication is definitely a skill that is in short supply for most professions, and much needed by most professions outside of tech, like sales type roles. 

Machine Learning is definitely a skill set that employers are begging for. I reached out to my buddy and Recruiting savant, Steve Levy, just the other day as we had a search for a client demanding 10 years of ML experience. I was like, I don’t even remember ML being used as a term ten years ago! 

Steve confirmed, it most likely wasn’t. We did find some mention from 2009, but that was about it. So, the hysteria is real. Entry level position, five years of experience! 

I was surprised not to see Autonomous vehicle knowledge on there as this is another skill set we see companies begging for and we are constantly helping our clients in these searches. It’s not just about cars. It’s about delivery vehicles, mass transit, freight hauling, garbage trucks, etc. If it moves people or things, it’s going autonomous eventually. 

Check out the report. It’s great read at the end of the year as you’re preparing for recruiting plans for 2019! 

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Indeed takes Away Free Traffic to Staffing firms!

Today on The Weekly Dose I dig into Indeed’s recent announcement to stop scraping the jobs from staffing companies. If you didn’t hear Indeed announced as the Staffing World conference that beginning January 7, 2019, they would no longer include “recruitment-based” jobs in their organic search results due to ongoing search quality issues (link to the official Indeed Policy on Recruitment-based companies).

I was able to talk directly to Paul D’Arcy, the SVP of Marketing for Indeed, about this decision. Paul was refreshingly frank about the announcement. Here are some of the things that came out of that conversation:

Think of the jobs Indeed posts on its site in four type of buckets:

#1 – Organic Jobs listed on Corporate websites scraped by Indeed

#2 – Promoted Jobs listed by corporate TA teams willing to pay to get those jobs to show up higher in the search results

#3 – Organic Jobs listed on Staffing Industry websites scraped by Indeed

#4 – Promoted Jobs listed by staffing firms (recruitment-based organizations – in Indeed’s wording) willing to pay to those jobs to show up higher in the search results

Of those 4 kinds of jobs, three out of the four have very similar rates of candidates getting hired. One of those types doesn’t do well at all because of a number of factors. Basically, Organic staffing jobs that Indeed has been scraping do very poorly. “Analysis shows that impacted jobs represent approximately 5% of applies but just 2% of hires on Indeed.”

So, the decision is made, by Indeed’s Search Quality team, to no longer scrape staffing jobs.

THIS IS SUPER UNFAIR TO STAFFING FIRMS!!! (I hear a collective 3 trillion dollar industry shout!)

Is it?

No one on the planet has lit up Indeed worse than me over some of their practices! (Hi, Todd!) I’ve been in Indeed Jail since early 2018 when they first shut off my free organic traffic. But, let’s be real, Indeed isn’t saying they won’t work with staffing firms or kicking staffing firms out. In fact, every single product Indeed sells is still available for staffing firms to use. They just aren’t giving you anything for free anymore, and that stings a bunch.

It’s like that first time the crack dealer tells you that you have to pay for the next hit! It sucks, and then you hand over some money.

Indeed understands the optics of this, according to D’Arcy, and they also know this will take some work to repair some relationships within the staffing industry. The fact is, staffing companies have been making millions of dollars off of free traffic from Indeed and it hurts to lose that!

The reality is, we (staffing) basically did this to ourselves. No not you! It was always the other guy! There was location spamming, posting ‘evergreen’ jobs that you would never fill, etc. Like most good things in recruiting, the staffing world found ways to exploit it and Indeed is shutting that down.

It’s D’Arcy’s hope that Indeed will find a way to begin bringing back some of the ‘real’ staffing jobs that out there. Think of contract and temporary jobs. Indeed corporate clients will be impacted if those jobs aren’t filled, as many now rely a great deal on their contingent workforce for large parts of what they do. Those are real jobs, that real candidates, will want to apply for and Indeed just took those away from candidates. They do realize this and they are trying to come up with a way to bring the real jobs back, without opening up the bad jobs again.

This is just Indeed making a move into the staffing world!

Wouldn’t be a bad business move, let’s be honest! I would do it, so would you, but Indeed is telling me this isn’t part of the strategy behind making this decision. Take it at face value, some will believe it, some won’t. The reality is Indeed is making hundreds of millions of dollars off staffing firms as clients right now, and for years have also been working in the staffing industry simultaneously, so I’m not sure it really makes that big of a difference, short term.

What does this mean for staffing firms!?!?! 

If you want to keep making hires on Indeed, you’re going to have to start paying up! Indeed’s short-term revenue will increase because of this decision because most staffing firms will initially just fork over some money to keep the faucet on. Eventually, they’ll find our avenues to find candidates. Optimize their postings for Google Jobs and the traffic and hires will come from others sites and sources.

You might decide to start testing other tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice, ZipRecruiter, Programmatic job postings, maybe even pick up the phone, build a recruitment marketing machine, grab some sourcing technology, etc. Staffing firms don’t know this yet, but the reality is not relying on one tool so heavily is a blessing in disguise for your longterm success.

One piece of good news from Indeed is they’ll still allow staffing firms to use their paid resume database product.

What does this mean if you’re in Corporate TA? 

The hope will be you’ll actually see more traffic to your jobs, but understand that Google is no longer indexing Indeed’s job pages, so traffic has been going down and will continue to go down unless Indeed buys that traffic through marketing efforts. What does that mean? You’re probably going to be paying a lot more for the same or less traffic.

Now, with less staffing firm jobs clogging up the search results the hope is that you’ll see more candidates, faster to your jobs that are scrapped as part of your organic Indeed feed, and potentially even better results using Indeed’s job promotion products.

What do I think?

From someone who has been living in Indeed Jail for almost a year, you’ll survive. It’s not fun losing your free organic traffic, but you’ll figure it out and you’ll be a stronger recruiting shop in the end.

I think Indeed really screwed up by announcing this without first figuring out the contract/temp/consultant jobs. The contingent workforce is the fastest growing segment of the labor market, and someone at Indeed completely dropped the ball. I’ll blame Matthew in search quality because that’s kind of the inside joke at Indeed, if a client is pissed, blame search quality. But, my hope is Paul and the team will stick by their word and figure out a way to get those jobs back on Indeed for candidates.

I’m not sure this was a wise business move, really by Indeed. You never want to wake a sleeping giant. The staffing industry has been a sleeping giant over the past decade ($3 Trillion). Fat on Indeed free traffic and LinkedIn Recruiter licenses, the normal staffing recruiter today is not the staffing recruiter of a decade ago. Indeed just kicked them awake to see if they wanted to pay the check or go find somewhere else to spend their money. Some will go elsewhere.

I also know that Indeed produces results, so many of us, myself included, will continue to use them and pay for the products that work, but it won’t stop me from continuing to test everything and figure out how to lessen my team’s reliance on any one product. That’s just good recruiting strategy for both corporate and staffing leaders.


The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Recruiting is not Marketing – Here’s why!

We love, I love, to say Recruiting is Marketing! I love Recruitment Marketing and the technology behind it, I think it’s brilliant! Recruiting is also not sales!

Why is Recruiting neither Marketing or Sales?

What’s the core function of marketing and sales? To welcome as many people as possible into your funnel so that all of those people will buy your product or service, or give to your charity, etc.

In Recruitment we in the Rejection business!

Can you imagine you walk into a Cadillac dealership? You saw the commercial for the new SUV, you decide you want that SUV. You saw the billboard for that same car, heard the radio commercial, heck you even saw an Ad on Facebook, it’s almost like they’re listening to your brain! You’ve got a pocket full of hundred dollar bills and you walk into the dealership because today you’re driving away in that brand new, beautiful Cadillac SUV!

DealerNo!

MeUm, what?! 

DealerNo, we aren’t selling you that new Cadillac SUV, you’re not a Cadillac “Man”! 

MeA what!? 

DealerYeah, sorry, you don’t get a Cadillac today, we’re saving those for only certain people! 

It’s funny because we know this would never happen! I could walk into the dealership holding a severed head and the first words out of the salesman’s mouth would be “the trunk on our new sedan could hold a hundred of those heads!”

Recruiting isn’t Marketing or Sales, because true Marketing and Sales is in the business of ‘All’, not one. No one really gets rejected in marketing and sales if you have the means. In Recruiting, you could fit every single thing the organization is requesting and you will still get rejected. Recruiting is in the Rejection business, not the sales and marketing business!

If we/recruiting are in the Sales and Marketing business, we are in a really sick and twisted business! Hey, “Everyone” come and apply to our jobs, because I get really excited when I get to turn you down and say “no”! So, let’s not kid ourselves. Our business is about Rejection. Hey, come on over here and let me tell you what’s wrong with you, and then I’ll make the decision if we want you to be a part of our team or not.

Marketing campaigns sometimes try to fake like they’re being exclusive. “Only ‘you’ are being invited to buy this new SUV! You’ll be the first to own it! No one else!” Until next week when everyone will own it and actually have a better color than you. That’s not true rejection for those who don’t get it first, it’s just a game we play to increase demand.

So, why does this manner? 

If we know we are actually in the Rejection business, and we are, we/recruiters have to have an empathy level that is off the charts if we want to survive. Let me get this straight, you want me to talk as many people as possible into loving our company, then you want me to reject 99.9% of them? Yes!

To be able to do that and not drink yourself to sleep every night takes a really high ego or an endless supply of empathy towards all those great people who just wanted you to pick them, but your organization picked someone else, but they left it on your desk to share the bad news!

This is probably the main reason so many candidates never get dispositioned. We can all just crush only so many souls in a day! It’s easier to ghost candidates than to crush their dreams!

Rejection business is a hard, hard business to be in. Sales and Marketing are easy. Can you imagine how easy your life would be if you were able to give everyone the job!?