The Great refusal and why CEO’s should apply for jobs in their own companies

31 May

We’ve recently finished a piece of integration and talent value creation consulting for a business that has four new acquisition companies, and one of the key areas of challenge was to understand how to build a central integrated recruitment process that was quick and efficient, engaging the candidate throughout and dealing with the central challenge of ‘The Great Refusal’. More on The Great Refusal shortly.

The company’s recruitment processes across their four acquisition businesses had one thing in common. The end to end recruitment and interview process was taking too long, scheduling for interviews was poor and the interview times were dragging on longer and longer with more and more assessment centres, with little or no justification for the complexity of processes.

SO I applied for a job in every company.

The process, candidate journey and experience was pretty similar in each of the acquisition companies, each with a 45-minute to 90-minute application process, submitting a personal statement video and guess what? I never heard back from any of them. Not even an acknowledgement of receipt. My CV was consciously vague, but all the same nothing, no word back just eerie silence.

WHAT DID WE IMPLEMENT AND HOW DID WE SOLVE THE CHALLENGE?

The group CEO said ‘We care a lot about creating a positive application experience for our candidates'. OK, then, we said then ‘apply for a job across these companies and experience it for real.’ Which he did. This was important for the CEO, because as a leader in a company, you have the ability to monitor and understand the recommended changes we would be inevitabley be making to their hiring processes to ensure that they secured the best market talent.

He applied for vacant roles using a made up name, CV and email address. At first, we wern’t looking to fake the entire interview process. I just wanted to see how long it would take from submitting a high-quality CV, to receiving a notification from the recruiting team (or a rejection), to booking an initial interview. Along the way, he experienced some real frustrations with parts of his own companies’ hiring processes. And if he was feeling frustrated by the process, I knew for damn sure that top candidates that are applying for vacancies were feeling the same thing too.

When you apply as a founder or executive at your own company, it’s challenging to get into an initial phone or video screen because everyone at the company will recognise you. So, in one past project, I took this a step further and asked two colleagues with high quality, relevant CV’s to apply for open roles at the client company and asked for feedback on the time between stages/steps. This helps to get a sense of how fast hiring processes moves further down the funnel.

HOW DID WE REDUCE THE TIME TO HIRE?

Our goal is always to get a candidate to the next step of the hiring process (or to a rejection) in five business days.

Use the Rule of Four: Todd Carlisle, who ran staffing/HR at Google, then Twitter, found that four interviews are enough to predict whether or not to hire someone with 86% confidence. Every additional interviewer after the fourth person only adds ~1% of predictive power. Google moved to the Rule of Four around 2010, and this change alone shaved their median time to hire from 180 to 47 days.
Assign a full-time scheduler to the recruiting process: Most leaders think, “We already have admin assistants or recruiting coordinators, so we’re good.” The reality is, these jobs are extremely complex, so assigning someone whose singular responsibility it is to schedule interviews is a game-changer for actioning candidates quickly between each step in the process.
Set timers per interview stage: There are rarely reasons why any individual stage in the hiring process should take more than five business days. There are many ways to do this, depending on the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) you use. Allowing recruiters to see metrics on how long candidates sit from initial application to initial resume review, to first phone screen is a game-changer, especially for large recruiting efforts. When you can see that candidates sit for 30+ days in a particular stage of hiring, you can take the first step to address a wider problem.

WHAT IS THE GREAT REFUSAL AND WHY SHOULD COMPANIES BE TAKING NOTE?

Simply put, top candidates are turning down excellent roles and pay packages because there is no flexibility offered in their working arrangements. As I write this, a trusted former client, has just posted on LinkedIn that she has turned down a top Head of L&D role (you’d expect the HR and L&D team in a hiring company to be at the forefront of trust based working right?) as she was expected to be on-site 5 days a week with no justifiable business reason why that was a key requirement of the role. So she said, thanks but no thanks and refused the offer. She is now seeking a role and an offer that has hybrid and flexible working options as a central part of the package. Pre-pandemic thinking and ‘old style’ leadership is chocking talent opportunities, and we’ve seen that pre-pandemic leadership styles are also chocking successful M&A’s across the board, not just in talent but in hiring too.

And the majority of talent of is seeking flexible and trust based working options too.

If you haven’t got your hybrid value proposition sorted then its a must. This is simply ‘Proximity Bias’ at play. You can learn more about how help companies identify Proximity Bias here and how to it leads to inequality gaps across companies and organisations, along with steps on how to overcome it in recruitment and hybrid working practices.

So in summary, if you can’t recruit top talent in your company, go and apply for a role and see how the process can be improved.

And if you don’t see this as a priority get ready for ‘The Great Refusal’ too.

DO YOU NEED HELP WITH INTEGRATION?

Lightbulb has a dedicated value creation team working with investors and hyper-growth companies focusing on talent, culture, leadership and human capital integration. You can find out more here.