Recruitment is broken

Maybe I just interview well, or maybe I’ve just always found myself in the right place at the right time. But without any word of a lie, I’ve been offered every job I’ve ever interviewed for. Granted, it hasn’t actually been that many, and there have been a couple of occasions where I didn’t actually get called to an interview. Each time I viewed such an outcome as being their loss, not mine.

Recruiting staff used to be a simple, unscientific process based on little more than CV, a cover letter, perhaps an aptitude test, and (most importantly) the interview itself. The interview (and there was only ever just the one) was the deal maker or breaker, often more a test of personality and compatibility than pure ability. Bosses need to know that they will be able to collaborate and communicate with staff, candidates need to know that they will fit in with the respective firm’s corporate culture. A good interview is a two-way process (and beware any firm that doesn’t welcome questions).

While plenty of people across the world are still hired in this unscientific but simple and beautifully effective way, ever increasing numbers of people are not. The hiring process, like so much else that technology and automation should have made simpler but in fact did the opposite, has at many firms become a long, drawn out marathon that usually starts with artificial intelligence sifting through CVs and cover letters, not ideal given that AI systems can inadvertently discriminate against older workers during the hiring process, according to the World Economic Forum. Then, what was once a single interview has in many cases been replaced by a series of interviews, with four to five now being the standard for most mid-level professional and corporate positions, even more in some places. First impressions count? So do the second, third, fourth, fifth (and on) by the looks of it.

Recruitment professionals happily admit that the process has become more complex ('thorough' is the word they prefer), but usually fail to offer any real explanation as to why.

Fear seems to be the most likely answer, fear of hiring the wrong person, which can be an expensive mistake to make, not least in the United States. Get recruitment wrong and it could cost at least 30 per cent of an employee's first-year earnings, the US Department of Labor says, while the Society for Human Resource Management puts the full bill even higher, at anywhere between half and twice the annual salary, more for senior roles. That kind of money makes people responsible for hiring nervous, cautious, and faced with such a high cost of error, the instinct of any manager is, understandably, to gather more information, with yet another interview always feeling like the best way to get that extra information.

Google, of all firms, actually took the time and the trouble to check if it is, and came to the conclusion that as excessive as it sounds, four interviews are about right. There’s certainly no need for any more. Its people-analytics team sifted through five years worth of interview data and found that four interviews could predict whether someone should be hired with 86 per cent confidence. Every interviewer after the fourth added just one per cent. Google christened it the ‘rule of four’. Plenty of firms have ignored the online leviathan’s findings.

What they have done instead is add more and more interviewers to the process, each with their own agenda, their own opinion, and (likely) a veto. The sheer number of people applying for good jobs hasn’t helped, given that more candidates means more managers wanting to check them out, which in turn means more interview rounds to fit them all in. Few firms have consciously designed seven-stage interview processes (although there will be some that unquestionably have), the process simply grew bigger and more complex organically, one interview at a time, until a firm ends up with something no sane person would have proposed on purpose.

When automation goes wrong

The optimistic idea that AI might help to simplify all this died a quick death. Candidates now largely expect their CVs and covering letters to be sifted by AI well before a human being takes a look, and so have largely armed themselves with the same weapon, firing off AI-written applications written not to explain why they might be right for the job, but to fool the AI at the other end. Employers, drowning in AI applications, respond in the only way an overwhelmed bureaucracy knows, with more filters, more stages, more calls, more interviews. A problem largely created by automation is being answered with more automation and more interviews, which, if you think about it, is more or less how we got here in the first place.

And where we are is at a stage where time-to-hire has reached an all-time high, according to the Josh Bersin Company and AMS. It now takes around 44 days to hire someone, and two in five employers run candidates through five rounds of interviews or more. The best candidates might well have already had another offer by then. Ironic, then, that adding round after round of interviews brings firms back to precisely what they want to avoid: ending up with candidates who might not be the best.

Which brings me back to my own unblemished record. I have never interviewed more than once for any job, and I will happily admit that I would almost certainly not survive today's version of the recruitment process. Not because I interview badly (far from it), but because somewhere around the third ‘quick chat to align on values’ I would probably lose the will to live and give up (besides, at 54, that AI gatekeeper would likely file my application under water before a human ever met me. Their loss, as ever). The single interview I would once have walked into was for a long time rigorous enough to hire on. First impressions used to count. It’s a shame that no one trusts them any more.