Why Will They Work for You?
David Earle

It’s easy to oversimplify the answer. If we must hire 5,000 people into a workforce of 50,000 each year, the individual faces will have to blur out of necessity. We simply can’t function otherwise, or so we have been taught. Handle those 5,000 candidates any differently and our carefully organized recruiting funnel will collapse. In the end it has to be about the numbers, not the people.

(Data Source: "Recession Turns a Graying Office Grayer," Pew Center Publications)

Today we are traversing interesting terrain in recruiting. The great industrial triumph of the 20th century was standardization. We created enormous enterprises out of carefully engineered interlocking parts, each with a specific place and function, and each with a manual that explained how it worked. The genius of the system was the way individuals could be efficiently hired and trained to operate that system and make the parts mesh smoothly year after year.

But standardization is showing its age. Performance gaps have appeared. Companies superbly engineered for one environment are having difficulty adapting when that environment changes. Products that have dominated their categories for decades are now regularly leapfrogged by radically different products. Business processes carefully developed and vetted by the home office often don’t work well in the field, especially if the field is foreign.

And most perplexing, our employees are no longer grateful for their jobs. We rigorously screen them, train them, pay them competitively (not to mention the benefits) and listen to their concerns, yet they regularly jump ship to work for someone else. They also complain about their work. We want consistency and reliability; they want flexibility, autonomy and creative input. We want things run by the book; they want to run things with ad-hoc teams. We want them to work for a supervisor. They want the supervisor to work for them.

What has gone wrong?

Recruiting successfully in tomorrow’s world will be much more difficult than working in the world most of us were trained for. Every part of the old process will need reassessment and reworking: where jobs are posted, how those jobs are framed, how candidates are evaluated, how they are persuaded to work for us (and stay with us), and how we organize our staffing systems to provide useful performance feedback.

One place to begin is with a better understanding of the labor markets we recruit from. After all, every one of us is fishing from the same pool, so the better we can locate the fish and determine what attracts them, the better we’ll perform.

Today’s workforce is astonishingly complex, perhaps even topsy-turvy. We used to know who we were hiring for what – young people for lower level positions, mid-career professionals for middle management and experienced senior professionals for executive positions. An ample supply of workers entered the workforce in their late teens or early twenties and departed reliably in their mid-sixties.

But all that is breaking down. For example, U.S. government estimates for the 2006-2016 period we are now well into, tell us that 93% of growth in the workforce will come from workers 55 and older. And these new workers are showing us they have quite different objectives from those of their co-workers already on site.

At the other end of the spectrum, younger workers’ entry into the job market is being increasingly delayed. Among Americans 16 to 24, only 57% are currently in the labor force; in 2000, less than a decade ago, 66% were. Now, 73% feel that getting ahead requires a college education; a generation ago (1978), that number was 49%. Today’s poor economic climate is also delaying workforce entry by young people, which will subsequently delay the accumulation of experience and skills necessary for their promotions and the performance of their management responsibilities a decade from now. Compounding the situation, 40% of this age group say they can’t find work.

(Data Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Gender roles also continue to evolve. For five decades, the percentage of women in the workforce has risen steadily, from about 43% in 1970 to 60% in 2000. But for the last decade it has flattened and even declined slightly. One reason is the work/family trade off, which women wrestle with much more then men. The public shares these misgivings. Only 12% of us feel that a woman with young children should hold a full-time job outside the home.

At the same time, men are having their own problems. Their percentage participation in the workforce has been dropping steadily since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in 1948, standing at just 73% this past June. The lousy economy, which affects men twice as often as women, is not the root cause. As the chart shows, the trend line has been steadily down through both good times and bad.

I concede that studying the labor force may appear overly academic to a recruiter facing a pile of job requisitions, but it’s part of a sea change taking place in the profession. Competence no longer entails making the old system operate smoothly. It involves reworking the system. Shifts in the labor force are only the backdrop. We can study Boolean searches all day and practice telephone sourcing until our voices crack. Unless we step back and begin to think strategically about how we drive our organizations forward though, we will become, despite our best efforts, the inefficient machine, the outdated product, the dispensable part.

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