Sometimes, job postings surprise me. A small organization having its office in downtown city asks applications from candidates who are supermen from nice institute, having mind-blowing experience of handling everything. Of course, their salary package is not that mind-blowing. Sometimes their expectations are just unrealistic. I have seen the job post which asks 8 years of experience in certain technology and that technology is only 5 years old. Every company wants their candidate from reputed institute, working in reputed company either in MNC or Indian MNC. When I see these job postings and if I would have been the candidate, I am sure that there are little chances of my résumé shortlisted. There are few candidates who also don’t bother what’s written in the job advertisement; they apply for every position cluttering the inbox of recruiter. Recruiter gets confused whom to shortlist because s/he doesn’t get anybody who is qualified.
As commonly cited statistic is that women only apply for jobs when they feel 100% qualified, while men are willing to apply when meeting just 60% of the qualifications—evidence of a confidence gap between the genders. But both men and women fall into the trap of taking job requirements too seriously.
I frequently listen to talent acquisition specialists aka recruiters speaking about selling the job to the candidate. This is because their mailbox in cluttered with irrelevant resumes because of strange job posts and they get very few relevant candidates. It doesn’t mean that there is a dearth of relevant candidates.
Most of the time such job posts are created by most junior recruiter in a team. Hiring manager will write everything, he dreams of having. They want readymade candidate who will start delivering from first day in the organization. Don’t know when those hiring managers started delivering when they joined the organization.
Then there is a category of job postings (common in India) which only seek applications from certain institutes (like tier 1), specific gender (to improve the diversity targets given by their bosses) and certain companies like European or American companies. People in American companies think that working in American companies is very tough and employees working in Indian or other MNCs will not survive in “their” companies. And later think the same way.
In short, they want the best, fast & cheap. This is the rule of three in the business world: whether you’re talking about a product, a service, or a person, you simply cannot have it all. But then what we do in such cases. As a professional we need to calibrate our expectations and you can do it by working on following tips.
Challenge the assumptions: Healthy and challenging discussion is always good. HR professional, talent acquisition specialist and hiring manager should come together. In-take meetings are crucial. TA specialist should ask lot of questions and challenge if manager has some different expectations. For example, most of the time, managers expect candidates from competition. By only hiring from competition, we are creating artificial dearth of candidates, secondly, we are discouraging the diversity and third creating the monopoly for the talent. Same is for candidates from specific college, specific region and genders.
Recognize & overcome biases: We have biases as explained above about companies, colleges, gender, community, cast and regions. We need to recognize that, yes, we are bias and then work on to overcome those biases. HR plays an important role here to help the manager by challenging his biases and supporting him to take the right decision.
Hire for potential: Candidates should not be shortlisted based on their tenure, short or long, in the company. Selection should be based on what experience they gained, how they developed themselves, and what they contributed to the business. You should find out the reason of short or long duration. They may contribute in a short span in one company or multiple contribution in another company. See their growth and pattern of development instead of just experience.
I know this is not rocket science, but you take a balanced view, you may get a result.
