The Challenge
A very good project practitioner quietly put in her extended leave notice which was a few months before a major company sponsored conference was taking place that she was in charge of. I know that I was not pleased when I faced this situation, and I found a way to deal with it.
To be honest, the need for this kind of resource juggling happens all the time, which is in part why managers exist, to deal with the churn and make sure the group(s) you are managing have solid resource management practices in place to fill the roles that need to be filled when they need to be filled.
Today’s marketplace doesn’t make filling these roles any easier. Markets and business decisions can cause changes in the resourcing of projects, programs, and portfolios over night. There are trends and new accepted norms to stay on top of to source good and appropriate talent. This post will focus on a piece of how to get the good matches in the door, specifically we are diving into making those first impressions your company provides in the job application process, job descriptions, and the filtering of all those submissions.
Observations in Job Postings & Processing
Whether you are directly involved in the posting of jobs or you have your human resources group take care of hiring with interviews and decisions from you, there are multiple elements here that you should be aware of and can influence to improve your hiring process. HR can be a guide in helping you navigate appropriate job descriptions, high level filtering, fraud, and HR legal requirements. But, I invite you to work with them as a partner where they help provide a good and fair introduction to how your organization conducts business.
HR may ask you for an updated, approved job description, if they don’t already have one. They should be able to help you with this task, although you should be aware that what you post and the word choice you/your organization uses can turn potential candidates to be more interested in your offering, or can cause them to make a mental note to never look at postings from your organization again.
Here are a few examples and topic areas for your consideration to improve your first impressions and in the process get better matches.
Organization Description:
This is your chance to share about and sell your organization to potential employees. Don’t miss this opportunity. While technically projects are projects, the diversity across industries and the uniqueness of what different organizations do within industries varies greatly and clear mentions of “what industry” “client or internal focus” and “functional groups” can help with very targeted concise descriptions that project practitioners will appreciate and that helps them self select into or out of your applicant pool.
Lift & Shift Descriptions:
Your posting justifiably represents the job requirements, the environment and needs you have for your open position. Does your verbiage sound like lift and shift verbiage straight out of a project management book (i.e., you are responsible for delivering established scope on time within budget)? This kind of verbiage throughout the description may signal the maturity level of your project environment, your involvement level as a manager, and what kind of relationship they may be able to expect with you as their manager. If I see this example verbiage, especially when mixed with “high pressure environment,” and/or “ability to deal with ambiguity,” it leaves me with a clear impression that your environment may not be set up for success and you are putting the load on the project practitioner to deal with it… AND be perfect in scope, time, and budget.
Environment Descriptions:
Each project environment may be different. Helping the applicants get a fair look into your environment will help filter the application pool in most cases. For environment topics that can’t easily be shared in a clear and concise manner you may want to leave them out if they will mislead or cause confusion.
Don’t Publish Position Baggage:
If you are replacing a difficult employee leave out the negative overtones or left over feelings you may have had about them in the job description for the new replacement. You may be able to recognize these overtones if you see extremely strict requirements and absolute language that may reflect your experiences with your difficult employee. This can relay strong negative impressions to job applicants.
Description Specificity:
You may choose to be very specific in requirements simply in an attempt to limit your results to only the qualified, and limit the number of applications you or your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) needs to search and filter through.
This advice is highly subject to the circumstances, job market, and the position needs. The following grouping explanations are to consider that should help guide how specific you need to be.
- Applicant Self-Disqualification – You may have seen a popular Harvard Business Review study showing that women typically apply for only jobs they are 100% qualified for vs. men who would still apply if not fully qualified 1. Whether by gender or some other factor, the more requirements you post, the more self-disqualified applicants there will be that you never see. This group may include “job qualified” applicants for the job.
- Applicants who Applied – This group will be smaller than the universe of possible applicants and include those who may match qualifications in the job description, as well as those who applied even if they did not meet all the requirements. This group may also include “job qualified” applicants, some of whom will not make it through exact match filtering.
- Applicants who Applied & Cleared ATS and/or other Filtering – This group is composed of those who meet your job criteria exactly. If automated, or perhaps through recruiters beware of exact matching limits where limited understanding of context may mean highly qualified applicants are filtered out of this grouping because their “printed” resume may not be an exact match to what your “printed” job description stated. This group may include “job description qualified” applicants with matches based on your filtering.
- Reposting – You may choose to repost the job description if you don’t get enough qualified applicants in earlier postings, which makes complete sense. Or you may be required to have a job posted for a certain amount of time and you want fresh looks in searches. With the global growth and remote nature of many job options some of the internet job board marketplaces are extremely large and competitive.
As of this writing on linkedin.com I have observed single job postings with thousands of applications within a few days. What is puzzling to me is in these large application cases the job is reposted again and again… I understand there may be a few reasons for this that we can get into, but bottom line in my opinion a fix is needed, whatever the rationale, to stop wasting your time as a manager, the time of your job applicants, and to limit any bad impressions this public activity may have on your organization.
Rationale and Recommendations for Excessive Re-Posting
1. Fraud – It’s not really your organization’s posting, it’s a fraud.
In that case, to help preserve your organization’s rep make sure and post on your job descriptions, social media, website about your process and provide a path for applicants to check for real postings and contact information.
2. Regulatory Requirements or Organization/HR Policy – It’s a company or regulatory requirement to re-post for a set period of time.
In this case, if you have an ample pool of candidates after your posting, then why would you grow the size of your job applicant pool with a repost growing the number of applications to review? Even if you have an ATS system to filter your applications, this is more work with questionable outcomes.
Ideas to Improve:
A. Work to modify the regulatory requirements or HR/organization policies for re-posting if you already have a viable pool of candidates to a productive end. Remember that a job posting is much like fishing. You don’t know the specific fish you will get. You are interested in one that can match your needs for dinner and meets state size requirements. B. Review and test your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and your job description where your system is filtering out qualified applicants on exact matches of your job description criteria, and other criteria your company has implemented, and/or bias within the ATS itself. – Rates even a couple of years ago from a Harvard study showed ATS filtered out good qualified candidates, “88% of employers felt that qualified, high-skilled candidates were vetted out of the process by an ATS” 2… which appears to still be a problematic filtering factor. While ATS may be automated, I would recommend you assess the real effects of your automation. They may not all be good or acceptable outcomes.
