I recently wrote about how important speed is to getting quality talent. We have to move quickly or we risk missing out on the best talent, as the best talent is often impatient.

But we also have to be sure we’re investing time up front in aiming before we fire. We should only move quickly if we’re sure we’ve aimed at the right target.

AI is amazing. It can generate hundreds of tailored outreach messages in minutes. It can find untapped talent based on explicit keywords and patterns and inferred skills. It can move candidates through a process quickly. And it can do most of it — all of it? — faster than an average recruiter.

But — and I say this all the time — just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’m worried. Worried that we’re starting to turn on tech that allows candidates to mass apply with no aiming and allows recruiters to conduct mass outreach without aiming. Worried that we’re sourcing way more candidates than we need just because we can.

We need Ready, Aim, Fire!

Execution in recruiting is getting automated. The admin and process pieces of our jobs are shrinking, leaving us more time to do the ready/aim part, while the tech does the fire part. But that means it’s even more important than ever that we’re great at the aiming part. Why? Here are a few reasons:

• So much time is wasted when the recruiter and hiring manager — or hiring manager and interviewing team — aren’t aligned. Misalignment is a top-three reason that reqs exceed average time-to-fill benchmarks.
• So much time is wasted sourcing more candidates than we need — and it creates a bad candidate experience for all of those folks who are never seriously considered.
• So much time is wasted moving candidates to interview that we can’t afford (or refuse to pay market wages for) — the targeted candidate pool is unaffordable from the start and the recruiter isn’t educating and pushing back on unrealistic hiring managers.
• Candidate fraud is a real and growing problem, causing CEOs at companies like Google to suggest a return to in-person, live interviews may be the “back to basics” we need, which means inexpensive Zoom-based interviews and asynchronous video interviews may be replaced with more costly in-person interviews at HQs, with candidate travel popping its head up in a big way like it’s the olden days of 2019.
  • I was talking to Elaine Orler, the chief strategy and product officer at Match2, about the challenges of finding the needle in a haystack. She said, “Yeah, John, it’s like there are big trucks dumping more and more hay on top of the needle.” I replied, “And it may evolve to trying to find a needle in a stack of needles because candidate-apply tech is going to tailor resumes and interview responses to exactly what it thinks employers want.” Identity and skills verification is going to be a big deal in 2025 and 2026.

Enter the Talent Advisor recruiter

I was working with a client who has over 100,000 employees, and their head of TA said the headline in the executive offices was “Recruiting is Broken.” 

Except it wasn’t. 

In fact, almost every metric that measured the part that TA owned was better than before. The real challenge? Attrition was out of control. So, the net “butts in seats” was pretty awful, and those vacancies were costing the business in lost revenue and overtime and more turnover.

The head of TA moved the conversation to focus more on the actual root issues. High turnover was expensive and the symptom of all kinds of root issues. But rather than pausing and “aiming” better at the right problem, the org initially reacted to high turnover with requests for TA to keep on hiring. And only after all the mass hiring was barely adding any net new capacity and the TA leader brought receipts (metrics and facts), the org was ready to invest in better aiming. 

Ready, fire, aim became ready, aim, fire.

This was a large-scale example of poor aiming, but it happens at the recruiter/hiring manager req-level, as well. Outside of work, how much time is wasted shopping for homes in neighborhoods we can’t afford? At work, how much time is wasted bringing in candidates when the hiring manager doesn’t even know what he’s really looking for? 

How many candidates are interviewed before we realize the interview team has different definitions of “senior” or “leadership” or “A-player” or 1,000 other bias-filled, poorly defined hiring criteria? How much time is wasted because the recruiter is a people-pleasing, customer-focused order taker, lacking the skills and confidence to push back on unrealistic hiring managers or to influence and educate the hiring manager to slow down and define what good looks like before we start posting jobs and sourcing and screening candidates? Poor aiming leads to lots of waste and expensive internal “taxes.”

The business needs us more than ever

I talk to executives in tech, sales, ops, and corporate functions almost every week and they want more from us in TA. They want us leading more, which includes helping them aim better. 

Yes, of course, they still want us to execute well — we can’t just be good talkers; we have to make hires. But more than ever, they need us to be asking better questions, aligning our work to their business goals, guiding their hiring managers, and improving speed and quality without introducing all kinds of complexity.

Stephen Covey famously talked about the sharpening of the saw in his “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” book years ago. He uses the metaphor of a lumberjack who is so focused on cutting trees that he neglects to sharpen his saw, making his work even harder and less efficient. 

Today, the tools and tech (the “saws”) we have are better than any time in my 25+ years in TA. They’re capable of doubling the output of a single recruiter. They’re also capable of creating a lot of waste and exacerbating the problems of too many candidates engaged per open req, leading to poor candidate experience, slower time to fill, and fatter funnels.

We need to sharpen our saws! And we need to aim better!

Now is the time to demonstrate to the business we support that our guidance — our aiming skill — is heat-mapped to their talent needs and priorities. That we will adapt our recruiting plans to their needs, not just push a one-size-fits-all set of best practices.
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Originally published on LinkedIn