Will the Great Resignation change how we hire?

Managers were feeling a sense of overwhelm throughout the pandemic. Not enough time, too much to do, and then the Great Resignation rolled in the door.

This prompted a desperate scramble for talent, and the interviews, advertising, and paperwork that comes with it.

Yet while managers were grappling with this, LinkedIn was full of reports of complex interview processes, long rounds of deliberation, and periods of silence that led candidates to accept other roles instead.

The Great Resignation has challenged how we hire

The traditional way of hiring was put to the test by the Great Resignation and has often fallen short. Candidates have been put off, managers were left with a damaging aspect to their employee experience, and companies have wasted resources.

I’d like to propose a solution.

Our current hiring cycle is based on the idea of finding the “best person” for every role, but we don’t always end up with this.

I’m sure we’ve all worked alongside poor performers or seen individuals hired with glowing recommendations that fail to create change. We’ve come across, as Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic puts it, “the surplus of incompetent men who become leaders”.

To improve this, we need to change how we think about roles

Our current approach to hiring looks at each vacancy as if we need to find the “best person for the job” every time.

We can call this hiring for “maximum impact”. We’re recruiting with the expectation that the person we’re hiring has to be the best possible candidate because of the impact their role will have on our organisation.

However, for most organisations only a handful of roles – the ones with the potential to make a large, company-wide, bottom-line difference – truly require this “maximum impact” approach.

More often, the roles we’re hoping to fill can be seen as “minimum requirement” roles instead.

By assessing roles based on where they fall on the spectrum of “maximum impact” or “minimum requirement”, managers can vastly reduce the time spent on hiring processes without impacting the quality of new talent.

What’s the difference between maximum impact and minimum requirement roles?

“Maximum impact” roles are ones that can activate change and alter the face of an organisation. So arguably, they’re worth the investment in time and resources to find the “best person”. Candidates for these kind of roles need to be rigorously measured, and recruited for. They justify having longer interview processes or bringing in experienced talent spotters.

On the other hand, “minimum requirement” roles are exactly that. Roles where hiring is based around finding people who meet the minimum standards needed to perform the role. These candidates can be recruited via single-round or automated interviews, making the hiring process swifter and more agile.

How do you identify a maximum impact role?

Before recruiting for a role, ask yourself the following questions.

The more of these you answer “yes” to, the more likely you have a “maximum impact” role on your hands:

1. Does this role have scope to grow with its occupant?
2. Is it positioned to innovate and create change?
3. Would you be willing to invest in training individual “talent scouts” or interview skills around this role or hiring specialist recruiters?
4. Are you expecting this role to alter the fabric of your organisation, or forge new paths for entrenched teams?
5. Does this role need to inspire and lead complex teams to launch new products or services?
6. Is this role likely to keep an “A-player” interested for more than a year? If not, is there a visible and accessible path for this person to take within your organisation?

How can this approach improve hiring in the wake of the Great Resignation?

I would argue that currently most roles are being hired in “the worst of both worlds”. By assuming that the majority of vacancies require the best possible person, we are removing resources from the vacancies that really need it.

As an organisation, a HR team, or a hiring manager you can simplify your hiring process by assuming your vacancy is minimum requirement first (not the other way around).

This change in attitude reduces management overhead, simplifies the candidate experience, and changes the complexity of task we are asking interviewers to engage in.

Instead of differentiating between candidates from patchy biased information, hiring managers need only look for whether requirements are met or not.

The final decision: How do you choose between minimum requirement candidates?

The final part of the “minimum requirement” hiring process may feel uncomfortable at first. Once you have identified all the candidates who meet the minimum requirements, you need to select one.

Here, the normal stages of deliberation and back-and-forth and “gut feels” are replaced by a much fairer system – random chance. That’s it. Select one of them at random.

This reduces risks of biased hiring, as an interviewer needs to justify where an interviewee didn’t meet clear criteria.

Also, if minimum requirements are regularly distributed (and traditional hiring doesn’t find that), your pipeline for diverse talent improves – providing you with access to “under-valued talent” that your competitors miss out on.

How can I trial or implement this hiring approach?

If you need help finding areas of your organisation to trial this within – we would recommend two potential approaches:

1. Consider running a “role review” survey for the largest/most frequently hired jobs in your organisation, asking questions aligned to the “maximum impact” list provided above.
2. Identify “workload hot spots” for your manager populations – these are clear areas to implement a reduction in hiring demands.

If you need help running these diagnostics, or implementing the changes needed to deliver this approach, get in touch.

Links and additional thoughts: 

Ultimate guide to employee engagement – a key output of positive employee experiences

A great study on how much we over-rate our ability to make hiring decisions 

A meta-analysis of evidence that we shouldn’t just “scrap all interviews” 

More perspectives on the traditional hiring cycle: 

• “Talent” by Tyler Cowan and Daniel Gross (intro here) posits one cause of this cycle is because we aren’t skilled enough at hiring.
• “The Talent Delusion” by the aforementioned Dr. Chamorro Premuzic instead says that human biases will always prevent humans from choosing talent effectively.
• “The Tyranny of Merit” by Michael J. Sandel, says that the entire sorting machine from school-age to hiring is broken (summary here).