I often find the problem vacancies I’m asked to fill suffer from poor recruitment documentation and the wrong first principles.

To see what others think, I ran two polls, asking complementary questions:

1/ What do you find hardest in trying to fill critical or problem vacancies?

2/ What do you think employers find the most difficult when they recruit critical or problem vacancies?

In the first poll, 16% of employers voted for “establishing vacancy needs” and “defining “Good” in a candidate”.

In the second poll, 73% of job seekers voted for the same.

Quite the disconnect.

I suspect a blind spot is at play.

Documentation is commonly the starting point from which recruitment begins.

It can be the same documentation it was when the role was last recruited, an adaptation or even a brand-new document.

Typically, they are written from the context of the employer. So, when employees read it, it appears representative of their needs, wants and assumptions.

But if you haven’t confirmed those needs, wants and assumptions are relevant and representative, and if you haven’t given your words meaning to the people you want to employ, what happens then?

“I am recruiting for bark”

I know exactly what I mean, and so do my colleagues.

I know I am referring to the outer layer of a tree, representing the resilience of my dynamic candidates who can hit the ground running. And all those other generic terms that fill up your space.

What happens if a potentially ideal candidate thinks I’m talking about the sound a dog makes, and they don’t like dogs?

Well – they may never apply, and you’ll never know you were barking up the wrong tree.

If you have a problem at the top of your recruitment process, those problems will only magnify the further down the cascade you go.

And that’s why audited, blind spot overcome, recruitment documentation and first principles are so important, before we get to the candidate piece.

It’s not always easy to do yourself, so if you have a recruitment partner you can trust, they’ll get you where you need to be through asking the right questions, challenging you, getting your recruitment right, and improving your outcomes.

If you don’t have that partner – we should talk.