I heard a quote from Seth Godin that stuck with me from the interview I watched between him and Tim Ferris.
"Human resources (HR) comes from the idea of treating people like a machine"
I thought when I heard that - "hmm.. that sure is accurate."
Then I thought; Why don't recruiters just sit down with the hiring manager and define the open role in the most simple terms - including most important goal, biggest challenge, and probation KPI's?
This would help so much on the confusion between job seekers and actually understanding hiring managers; who have deadlines to meet, instead of playing the recruiting games to get a seat at the table for an interview. Like optimizing your documents for key words and so on.
One of my clients fit a job posting real well, so we approached the head of the department as such last week. Head of the department who ultimately signs off on the hires in his team, tells us that my client's LinkedIn profile doesn't fit the role.
We don't understand. His profile fits the job post! We said.
He responds that the job post is not accurate to the real requirements for the role.
...Wait, what?
At this moment in German we would say - Hä?
But seriously, this is a major, classic problem.
You could be getting denied repeatedly because you don't understand how the company actually envisions that specific role.
You just see how the recruiter tries to describe it. And that is a big difference.
That's unfortunate, because it's not the recruiters fault.
They can't realistically be expected to be involved and know about every department and role requirements in the company.
But why does this happen way more than it should? It sucks for the job seeker like you who wastes time.
I propose that recruiters and hiring managers meet at least once to define every new role so that the description, although not exact, can be aligned to the same "end in mind."
Some companies do this but plenty do not.
By the way: Do you see why this makes it so important to reach out to the head of department instead of the recruiter?
In the end, we saved valuable time by not applying to this role. But we also were able to hear from the gentleman that when a role does come open which is a better fit, he would let us know.
Tell me: Did you ever find a similar situation where the job post fit you perfectly, but they said that you were not a fit?
Interested to hear from you!
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Talk soon.
-Kevin