#TruLondon 2012 (1): Does talent grow on trees?

A great post Michael, especially for those of us who missed the event. Thanks for sharing.

I think the issue of Talent Shortages - and how much anxiety this causes - is a function of the cost of making a bad hire. This is in part the financial cost of actually making a hire; and in part the cost in terms of lost business of making the wrong hire (or making that hire only with a considerable time delay).

To the extent that technological advances mean we can hire staff i) more quickly and ii) at lower cost, one theory could be that talent scarcity will "remain" most acute in those sectors where the business cost of not having hired the right people is felt most strongly (IT, sales, etc.). Interested to hear others' views on this...

Thank you for the generous feedback on this post, Tony, and also for the excellent and intriguing comment!

Would your theory also suggest that the cost to employers of making bad hires might actually increase (depending on the extent to which technological advances allow the speed of recruitment/hiring processes to increase?

I'm also very interested to know if you or any other out there have any views on the best ways that employers might tackle the root cause of the problem you identify here: What is the one thing employers should be doing to help them avoid making bad hires in the first place?

In my view, as someone who has worked in recruitment marketing for over 20 years, there has been a definite dumbing down in the messages that people, some recruiters and employers alike, put out there these days. In the days of press advertising, the focus was very much on finding the right vehicle for a certain industry sector and/or focusing on a certain part of the country where you knew these people you were looking for to be,and then targeting those mediums/areas with an alluring campaign that appealed to people's emotions - it made them WANT a job that was being advertised even though they were happy in their current position because it spoke to them in a personal and enticing tone, just like other areas of advertising do - cars, holidays, booze etc. etc. Over the past what, 18-20 years however, as the online snowball has got ever bigger as it continues its relentless roll forward, quality, creativity and focus (i.e. researching your target audience, where they live, what they read, how you might get your message in front of them and what you should say) has in many instances been replaced with a scattergun approach - 10 job boards for less than £100 - and a quick cut & pasted job description. Not an advertisement, not a creative vehicle for picking up quality passengers, but a dull, uninspiring, often grammatically inept and endless dirge with no sell within it whatsoever.

I don't believe there is a huge talent shortage. Instead, I believe there is a huge lack of creativity, preparation and forethought. Why? Because technology has made it so simple to fire out any old recruitment message and hope for the best.

I used to work with one of the largest recruiters in the world as the Account Director on their recruitment advertising account. I had a team of 4 working purely on that business. They spent £1.5m a year on advertising, marketing and research. They held regular focus groups with applicants who had responded to their advertising and candidates they had placed within organisations, to find out what made them tick. Where did they loook for jobs? What would they warm to in an ad and what didn't do anything for them etc. A lot of that ground work has disappeared now. The importance of the message and the truly targeted approach (not just searching by age, job title and location on a generalist site like Facebook etc.) is a thing of the past for so many. It's become a numbers game. People moaning about getting 300 replies but most of them useless ("Job boards are dying" is the cry!). The crazy notion that social media will somehow be the silver bullet, the fix all solution - even though the same bland content is invariably been placed on there rather than on a job board or on a media owned recruitment advertising portal such as a newspaper or trade magazine.

Fact is, whatever you advertise, the message is always key. That and the right targeting. Without one or the other you will always be left with the impression there is a shortage of talent. Truth is, many recruiters don't know how to target and speak to that talent in an appealing way. They're not appealing to the emotions of the reader. They are just going through the motions. And so it will go on!