Where Are All the Right Candidates?

You’ve advertised a vacancy. Applications are coming in, but the shortlist is disappointing. Nobody quite fits what you’re looking for, despite plenty of people apparently looking for work.

Where are all the right candidates? Perhaps you should ask your recruitment system.

Before you’ve seen a single CV, applications may already have been screened, ranked or rejected against criteria you established weeks ago. Job titles, industry experience, qualifications and keywords determine who gets through. The people you eventually consider are those who survived the process. And you’re left wondering why nobody looks quite right.

Recent research from the Office for National Statistics and the British Chambers of Commerce highlights a curious contradiction in the UK labour market. Vacancies have fallen, yet employers continue to report significant recruitment difficulties. We’re surrounded by people looking for opportunities and businesses struggling to find people. Something isn’t connecting.

I think part of the problem is that we’ve become very good at defining the candidates we expect to find, and remarkably poor at recognising people who don’t fit that description.

The Candidate You Never Got to See

Consider a growing business looking for an operations manager. The company needs someone who can introduce structure, improve performance and help it manage its next stage of growth. The job advert asks for five years’ experience in the same industry, and the screening criteria reflect that requirement. Somewhere among the applicants is a Service Delivery Manager who has spent ten years improving operations, developing teams and helping organisations grow. They’ve done much of the work this business needs doing. They simply did it in another industry, under a different job title.

The application is filtered out. The hiring manager never sees it, never asks a question and never discovers what that person might contribute. Instead, they receive a shortlist of people whose CVs resemble the job description and wonder why none is particularly compelling.

We’ve created a recruitment process that can reject somebody for not looking like the answer before we’ve properly understood the question. And the more applications we receive, the more we depend on those filters.

We’ve Confused Familiarity With Suitability

There is a reason employers recruit this way. Familiarity feels reassuring.

Someone who’s worked in the same industry, held the same job title and used the same systems looks like a safer choice. Their experience is easy to understand, and the hiring manager can picture them doing the job. But familiarity isn’t the same as suitability.

A job title tells you remarkably little about what somebody has actually accomplished. Two operations managers can have completely different responsibilities, while somebody with an entirely different title may have solved exactly the problems you’re facing. Yet we continue to build recruitment processes around labels because they’re convenient to search, compare and filter.

Technology has made this easier than ever. We can process hundreds of applications, rank candidates and produce shortlists without spending much time understanding the people involved. That’s efficient if the criteria are right. If they’re wrong, we’ve simply become more efficient at overlooking people.

And that’s the uncomfortable part. When the shortlist disappoints, employers often conclude that the market lacks suitable candidates. They advertise more widely, pay for another recruitment campaign or ask an agency to find someone better.

Meanwhile, the criteria that produced the disappointing shortlist remain largely unquestioned. We keep looking harder for the same person.

Change the Search Before You Blame the Market

If you’re struggling to recruit, I’d suggest doing something different before advertising the vacancy again.

Start by putting the job description aside.

What does your business actually need this person to accomplish? What problems must they solve? What would success look like six months after they join?

Then look at the requirements you’ve been using to filter candidates.

Which ones are genuinely necessary to do that work? Which are simply characteristics of people who’ve done similar jobs before?

Finally, ask where else somebody might have developed the capability you need.

The answer could lead you into another industry, a different career path or a candidate whose job title bears little resemblance to the one you’re recruiting for.

Now look at the applications your process rejected before anyone had a meaningful opportunity to understand them. You may be surprised by what you find.

This doesn’t mean abandoning essential qualifications or treating every applicant as suitable. It means taking responsibility for the assumptions built into your recruitment process and making sure those assumptions deserve to be there.

Automated screening can be useful. But it should help employers recognise relevant capability, including experience they hadn’t anticipated, rather than simply reproduce the preferences written into a job description. The objective should be to discover people who can do the work, not merely people who look like they’ve done the job before.

There’s an important distinction between those two things, and I suspect it’s costing employers more opportunities than they realise.

The next time you’re disappointed by a shortlist, don’t immediately conclude that the right candidates aren’t available.

Ask yourself who your recruitment process prevented you from meeting.