Why Can't We Get Hiring Right?

It's difficult to think of another business capability that has received more attention over time than hiring.

Talent Acquisition teams have expanded. Business leaders have started their own mini TA functions. AI dominates nearly every conversation. Organizations continue investing in recruiting technology, assessments, employment branding and candidate engagement platforms, all with the same objective: hire better talent, more quickly.

Conversations with executives sound eerily familiar:

Hiring takes too long. We aren't getting good candidates. Recruiters are overwhelmed. Positions are vacant for months. When we get hiring data, we don't trust it. Early attrition is rising and we're seeing more no-shows on day one than we ever have.

Despite significant investments in people, process and technology, executive teams continue asking the same question:

Why can't we get hiring right?

After more than twenty years helping organizations evaluate and improve Talent Acquisition, we know that senior leaders have more ideas for fixing TA than they have the time, budget or organizational capacity to pursue.

The real challenge is deciding which hiring problem matters most.

Most organizations simply don't have the time, resources or internal mobility to build all of the talent they need from within. Acquiring exceptional talent has become one of the few sustainable competitive advantages available to many businesses.

Organizations Aren't Short on Ideas

When hiring can't keep pace with business demand, recommendations come quickly.

The COO believes it's time to invest in AI. The VP of Talent Acquisition needs more recruiters. Hiring managers quietly begin using outside search firms. Talent Management proposes new assessments and competency models. Marketing launches its own campus recruiting program. Finance recommends outsourcing all of recruiting. Everyone has a point of view—and many of those ideas have merit.

But each of these solutions addresses a different problem - and, in my cases, exacerbates the root cause of hiring shortfalls.

Over the years, we've watched organizations:

• Add recruiters when existing recruiters spent most of their day administering the hiring process.
• Invest in new technology before standardizing the hiring process that technology was expected to support.
• Centralize Talent Acquisition to create consistency, only to decentralize it a few years later because business leaders demanded greater control.
• Focus on improving time-to-fill without insight into the rate of no-shows on day one and early attrition data. 
• Spend months developing competency models, interview guides and assessments that hiring managers ultimately chose not to use.
• Outsource recruiting, only to discover they had outsourced the symptoms rather than the problem.

None of these decisions is inherently right or wrong.

The question is whether they address the organization's foundational hiring challenge.

Too often, senior HR leaders are pressured to land on a solution before the problem has been agreed upon.

That's often where we begin our engagements.

We've Been Solving for the Wrong Customer

One observation we've made over the past twenty years has been the fact that many organizations have unintentionally designed their hiring process around the wrong customer.

For years, Talent Acquisition (and often all of HR) has been encouraged to think of the hiring manager as its customer. We understand why. Hiring managers are key players in the hiring process.

But we believe that mindset has unintentionally pulled Talent Acquisition away from its primary mission.

The customer isn't the hiring manager.

The customer is the talent your organization is trying to win.

Whether you're competing for a truck driver, an experienced salesperson, a nurse, a software engineer, a plant manager or a Chief Marketing Officer, your competition isn't another hiring manager.

It's every other organization pursuing that same talent.

That distinction changes everything.

Winning exceptional talent requires a hiring process that is fast, professional, disciplined and compelling—one that effectively evaluates talent while clearly communicating why exceptional candidates should choose your organization over every other opportunity available to them.

All the friction points - every unnecessary approval, interview, inconsistent practice, lack of communication, delayed decision, onerous candidate requirement - mires recruiters into more administrative work and repels top talent.

And in competitive labor markets, friction costs organizations great people.

Talent Acquisition and Hiring Managers Are Partners

Recognizing the candidate as the customer doesn't diminish the role of hiring managers. Hiring managers and Talent Acquisition should operate as partners, each bringing different expertise to the hiring process.

Hiring managers understand the business, the work and what success looks like in the role. Talent Acquisition understands labor markets, sourcing strategy, candidate assessment, employment branding and how to compete for scarce talent.

One of the more interesting observations we've made over the years is what happens after organizations implement a more disciplined, data-based and differentiated hiring process: Hiring managers rarely complain. In fact, many tell us they're relieved. They never wanted to become recruiting experts. They simply believed they had to because no one else was leading the process.

The objective isn't to satisfy hiring managers.

The objective is to win the best available talent.

Four Conversations Every Executive Team Should Have

Before investing in another hiring initiative, we encourage leadership teams to align around four fundamental questions.

1. What hiring problem are we trying to solve?

Hiring is not one problem, and the answers are rarely the same across job families.

For one organization - or job family, the issue may be speed. For another, quality of hire. For others, recruiter capacity, hiring manager capability, candidate experience or early attrition. Trying to solve every hiring issue across the enterprise usually results in incremental improvements at best.

2. Why do hiring managers dictate the hiring process?

Most hiring processes weren't intentionally designed. They evolved over time - one hiring manager preference, one additional approval, one technology configuration decision and one exception after another.

The result is often a hiring process built around accumulated habits rather than a deliberate strategy for winning talent.

3. Why aren't recruiters recruiting?

The reality for many recruiters across many industries and organizations, is that they don't spend much time sourcing or screening candidates. In our experience, recruiters spend much of their day getting requisitions approved, chasing hiring managers, posting jobs, forwarding resumes, scheduling interviews, manually tracking progress and waiting for feedback.

Pile on forty, fifty or even one hundred open reqs at a time, and there is little time left for meaningful intake meetings, proactive sourcing, candidate assessment, market intelligence or advising hiring managers.

Every hour spent administering the process is an hour not spent identifying, engaging and winning talent.

4. What does "good hiring" actually look like? What is our goal for hiring?

This question often produces very different answers around the executive table. But our firm belief is that the ultimate objective of any investment in talent acquisition is in fact measurably improving the following results:

• Faster time to fill

• Better quality of hire (meaning, people stay longer and perform better)

• More effective cost management

But an organization's leadership team needs to agree on the priorities in the near term - faster hiring for which roles? Better hires for what verticals? What's the right level of investment?

Until executive teams agree on which outcomes matter most and what success looks like, it becomes difficult to prioritize investments—and almost impossible to determine whether those investments are creating business value.

A Better Place to Start

There has never been a more exciting time to rethink Talent Acquisition.

AI will undoubtedly reshape portions of recruiting. Technology will continue to improve. Assessment methods will evolve. Candidate expectations will continue to change.

But before investing in another solution, leadership teams should first agree on the hiring problem they're trying to solve. And that requires a current state audit to understand what's working well, which outcomes are most problematic - and where to begin.

Once executives align around the problem, conversations about AI, recruiter capacity, technology, organizational structure, assessments and process become much easier. They become investments tied to business priorities and differentiated by the criticality of the role and the availability of talent—not isolated initiatives competing for attention and budget.

Most organizations simply don't have the time, resources or internal mobility to build all of the talent they need from within. Acquiring exceptional talent has become one of the few sustainable competitive advantages available to many businesses.

The organizations that consistently hire well recognize that reality. They align leadership around a small number of business outcomes, design hiring processes that help them compete for talent and manage Talent Acquisition as the strategic business capability it has become.