In an outside-in approach to recruitment you place candidate needs front-and-centre of every step in a recruitment process, in service of the outcomes you want.

Few recruitment processes take this approach, because it’s much easier to say what you want and lead with a job description pitch.

How’s that working in terms of time to hire, fill rate, problems solved and desired outcomes reached?

To work outside in effectively you start with the needs, situations and wants of the people who could end up being ideal employees.

This requires you to know what and who they are, and what your vacancy might offer to encourage further action.

Everyone is different, and if you lead with a pitch, sometimes the wrong candidates will bite, while the right candidates will feel outraged you dared get in touch. And everything in between.

Have you ever delivered a brilliant message and wondered why it didn’t land?

Is it because of the message, or because of what the message meant to the recipient?

So if a pitch, no matter how brilliantly put together and conveyed, can backfire, how else can you engage with people that both brings forward and qualifies them in the right way?

Through calibrated questions.

In “I want my cake dammit*”, Chris Voss places calibrated questions at the heart of his negotiation strategy.

These are open-ended questions designed to

Through better understanding the other, we can deliver a message tailored to their needs, while checking if they are even the right people to bring forward at all.

By starting with them, in a way that builds trust and keeps it, you reduce the odds of them dropping out with no good reason.

By doing this at every step in a recruitment process, many of those problems we see complained about disappear to become individual issues, not systemic - ghosting, dropouts, lies, you name it.

After all the aim of Voss’ approach in hostage negotiations was for the good guys to leave alive. And you can’t do that if the hostage taker ghosts, drops out, lies, you name it.

The goal is that everyone gets the best possible outcome at the end of a negotiation.

For him it might be an alive and released hostage at minimum cost, a dead hostage taker with minimal victims, or bank robbers who give themselves up.

For us, it’s candidates who go through a recruitment process with good reason, or drop out for objectively the right reason.

Calibrated questions are open-ended, and designed to encourage conversation through active listening.

They are also clarification questions, to allow us to fully understand what we are looking for.

And to allow us to better represent their stock as a candidate.

Sometimes we call this interviewing.

Sometimes we call this taking a brief.

So that we can better represent their stock as a vacancy.

And allow us to fully understand what we are looking for, through open-ended and clarification questions.

So that we find the right candidates for our recruitment process, who will become great employees for the right reasons.

It’s almost like better recruitment, starts with better questions, no matter where you look.

And another way in which recruitment reflects.

Of course, there is a third piece of the puzzle as a recruiter.

Which is that you can only ask calibrated questions if you have the agency to do so.

After all, if an employer is unwilling to enable access to that information, and agencies are disincentivised to take the time to gain that information from candidates - why is it any surprise the ‘negotiation’ that is fill rates, is so low in first past the post recruitment?

And when the fill rate is low, doesn’t it make sense to increase volume and speed to mitigate this problem?

Rather than address the fill rate, through a differentiated service?

Without access, you’re left with the information available, a job description, an email, a five-minute talk.

Is it any wonder that the stereotypical pitch to employers is 5 CVs by Friday, and to employment prospects the most bestest vacancy ever?

If you’re a high-profile brand that pays top fungible tokens, that’s probably all you need.

For everyone else, it’s shall we say suboptimal to copy the same.

For me as a recruiter, the priority has to be that I can ask calibrated questions to find those black swans and those opportunities.

It’s the heart of what it means to be a partner to the employer and the process.

If I can’t ask the questions to find the problems and therefore the solutions, I can’t give my best, in which case - what’s the point?

As for what these questions might be, it’s simple.

From a place of curiosity, and a desire to give great service, probe what, why, how, who, why and when. And never leave a negotiation with assumptions.

It may seem a cynical manipulation of candidates to ask questions, to build trust, and to serve your goals.

But if your philosophy is to put candidate needs first, and help unsuited candidates make the decision not to go forward, then what’s left are engaged, committed and qualified candidates.

It’s how I fill problem and key vacancies, and from there common skill vacancies from the same employers who see the benefit of a different philosophy.

While some might disagree about the importance of retention as a recruitment metric - if good retention of capable employees is a consequence of working from the right first principles -

why wouldn’t that be a goal worth aiming for?

Thanks for reading,

Regards,

Greg

p.s. *Never split the difference

p.p.s. hope you like my calibrated question at the end, now why haven’t you bought my recruitment stuff yet?