In May, Malcolm Gladwell spoke at the 2008 New Yorker Conference, “Stories from the Near Future”, on the challenge of hiring in the modern world. This is a must watch video of Malcolm Gladwell for anyone who is involved in hiring. Malcolm discusses the miss-match problem with hiring, and the issue of using criteria to assess a person’s ability to perform a job being dramatically out of whack with what is required to do the job. He illustrates examples of this from sport, through to education and business. Too often we are drawn to using objective and standardized methods to measure people, which are no longer relevant as the demands of every profession have changed, and will only continue to do so.
By having too much focus on a set of narrow requirements most of us are hampering our ability to attract the best and brightest. This is being increasingly exacerbated by volume-driven, transactional and matching approaches to hiring. Big databases to process resumes and match on key terms is clearly not the answer.
The key takeaway is that the way we hire people has not changed in a long time, yet the world, people and occupations have. Six Figures is a progressive sourcing channel designed for today’s market (not ten plus years ago) that provides the ability for hiring businesses to broaden the scope of what they are looking for in their job ads and what they offer in return. Ideally, businesses need to be looking to hire as much on past skills and experiences, as on future potential and those intangibles that you cannot match as readily via a resume or a few interview questions. Focusing less on getting the volume and more on quality, personalization and building relationships is the key to sourcing top talent.
As we have shown through our research, the majority of job seekers at the six figure level don’t leave one job to go and do the same elsewhere. These people want to be engaged, challenged and rewarded. They even value engagement and the ability to try something a little bit different more than salary. Does your hiring system enable these people to connect with your business or are they being miss-matched out?
