Recruitment Debt: A Glossary of Terms to Help You Hire Your Next Great Candidate

By Reuben Roth

My first few years working in recruitment felt empty and unfulfilling, so I sought meaning elsewhere in my life and began volunteering at a suicide hotline. During the rigorous training process, I was shown the dazzling power of active listening, of patiently and intentionally encouraging someone to s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monopoly Partners LLC
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737987109

Reuben Roth

Reuben Roth runs a boutique firm specializing in building customized recruitment infrastructure at scale, with a focus on software engineering placements. Having consulted in both the public and private sphere, Reuben has contributed to the growth of some of the world's leading technical companies. If you ask him why he's so passionate about recruitment, Reuben will tell you that job seekers are often in distress, and it's his privilege to become their advocate and guide them through the hiring process. His enthusiasm is contagious; talk to him for long enough and you, too, will be able to see the beauty in cracking open data to make the best hiring decisions possible. When he's not obsessing over all things hiring related, you can catch Reuben at the gym, cooking, or reading.

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INTRODUCTION

After working in recruiting for several years, I realized I wasn’t finding it as meaningful as I once did. While I had taken my first role full of optimism about how I could use the position to help people improve their lives, that initial promise had deflated and I was left drifting from company to company. Eventually, I decided to supplement my work as a recruiter with some sort of volunteer position that would enable me to do what I so craved, but wasn’t finding in recruiting: create meaning with someone else.

When I came across a notice for a suicide hotline I thought, Now that seems impactful. The application process was rigorous. After making it through multiple interviews, I found myself on the first day of a hundreds of hours long training course. I had hardly sat down when the instructor said, There will be no questions throughout this entire class. It will be an extremely uncomfortable experience for everyone. But you just have to listen. I was fascinated.

The instructor was right. The course was designed to be loud and chaotic and combative, and we were trained to respond with neutrality. We were taught to assume nothing, with the point being that we have no idea why people do what they do in distress. We’re always looking for a reason, we’re always accusing people, we’re always trying to dig into a motivation, put words into their mouths; but it’s okay for people to be inconsistent. It’s okay for people not to have a clear reason for doing the things they’re doing. Once you accept that, you can turn your energies toward building a psychologically safe environment for the person you’re interacting with, helping them to feel connected and grounded by speaking in clear, full sentences.

On the suicide hotline, we couldn’t answer any questions. We couldn’t use any pronouns like I or me or my. We weren’t there to talk these callers off the proverbial ledge; in fact, we weren’t there to talk at all, really. Instead, we relied heavily on active listening skills: acknowledging, validating, paraphrasing, and encouraging the callers to say more about how they were feeling.

A couple of months into my time at the suicide hotline, I realized I was seeing an unbelievable amount of application toward recruiting. It became clear to me that in many ways, job seekers are in distress and they’re just looking for someone to listen to them. The techniques I was learning around using active listening to befriend, but also to create firm boundaries, could absolutely revolutionize my approach to recruiting.

Is revolutionize too dramatic a word? No. Because nobody teaches recruiters how to hire. There’s no formula, no framework, no set of steps based on best practices. It can feel like it’s all based on trial and error. Maybe, at best, you get some training on what you can and can’t say based on whether it’s legal or illegal. Maybe you get experience in the form of shadowing other people while they interview. Or else, maybe you end up practicing on the candidates themselves, which is certainly not ideal; this is someone’s life and you want to take that seriously, but it often seems like that’s the only way to do it.

The point is, it’s very rare to have any formal training.

Given all of this, it’s unsurprising that I was left feeling dissatisfied with my early years of recruiting and unsure of how to make the position all that I knew it could be. Given all of this, it’s totally understandable if you are not feeling confident in your hiring skills because without a map, any road can lead anywhere.

Hiring can be an intensely confusing process, on both the company and the candidate side. There are no agreed-upon rules, no clear set of expectations that both sides are adhering to. Instead, we’re left to flounder in the dark, occasionally getting lucky and making a great hire, but often getting it wrong or settling for less than a perfect fit.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The process of recruiting can be smooth, structured, and reliable, and can even have a certain beauty to it. As a hiring manager, you are finding the people who will help make the collective dream of your company come true. And as you do this, you get to actively develop the new team members. You can help them grow and give them a life-changing experience, all while forwarding your own enterprise. It’s a win/win.

Hiring managers are found in abundance. Exceptional ones, though, are extremely rare. I’ve worked with some of the most prestigious in the tech space, and while they employ plenty of hacks and are able to cobble together relevant information to create decent recruitment processes, very few know how to recruit with elegance.

Believe it or not, this is good news for you. The rarity of extraordinary hiring managers means that, by cultivating the right skills, it is downright easy to stand out from the herd.

What I offer you is not a set of best practices or a highly specific approach that should be adopted to the letter. Thoughtful and effective recruiting processes should be delicate and pliable. To recognize this truth, this book has instead been arranged as a glossary. If understood and embraced, the topics presented here can transform your recruiting process and, therefore, your company. Feel free to skip around or head straight to the topics that speak to you, or else plow right on through from beginning to end. There are no rules here; only the hope that you close this book ready to design a recruitment experience that truly articulates the beauty of your company.

Let’s get started.

Martin Fowler came up with the term technical debt to describe the trade-off between quality and cost that has become a mainstay in the software world. Corners may have been cut to release a product in time for a certain milestone date, but when you cut corners, things can break in the long run. If you’ve ever read about the software engineers that say they work twenty-four-hour shifts or they’re always on call, it’s because people at their company were cutting corners. Now they have to be on call in case a website goes down or some application fails. When you don’t cut