Excellent piece and massively needed. Another contributory factor for this talent sclerosis arises from that the lack of specialist capability in recruitment and talent roles, previously discussed on this forum. Too frequently the recruitment process lacks institutional knowledge and subject matter expertise, with staff wearing a hiring hat out of expedience. This generates a lack of confidence in what good looks like—a total absence of capability frameworks being a perfect example—and drives hiring risk-aversion. Consequently, overall costs increase for all parties due to this lack of decisioning confidence and externally accrued knowledge. Miss-hires happen, and should be a factor within the overall talent lifecycle, rather than this risk-aversion slowing everything down and favouring those already known to the recruiter. More concerningly, 80k hrs decision to switch off mid and senior roles into non-AI cause areas is only going to make this bottleneck worse.
William Sceats
Really insightful and tallies with my experiences. I would also add in challenges from broken processes indicating lack of organisational value placed on the function. E.g. receiving no responses from applications only to find out roles have been filled after repeated chasing; advised timeframes being massively missed; total absence of response from direct queries.
I wrote some thoughts from my experiences here, which might be added into the mix. Keen to help improve this vital function.
Many thanks Emma. If you’ve not come across this post it’s also v helpful from recruiters perspective with some very useful discussion.
I’d imagine the key disincentive would be resource scarcity; the usual barrier to change in organisations. Resource will be needed both to redesign the process and to implement. My very limited experience of EA recruitment—frequently taking 1-2 weeks to respond to an email, missing stated feedback dates, not receiving any notification at all and finding when chasing they went with someone else—is that there seems to be significant under capacity and scope for capability maturity.
My – admittedly commercial and thus possibly rather cynical—experience with incentives is that unless these are instituted at a leadership level then change seldom trickles down. Until recruitment quality and candidate feedback KPIs are hard-baked into a leadership scorecard / goals, resources won’t be re-allocated to the overworked recruiters / outsource providers, and the process won’t be updated. While there appears to be an oversupply of candidates for roles—which appears to be the current situation in EA—and attitudinal fit isn’t causing significant performance issues, there’s no real incentive to change the status quo other than good intentions.
Proactively by ensuring a consistent, transparent and auditable hiring process, and retroactively by effective talent / performance management. I’ve worked in highly regulated financial and professional services, and it’s largely seen as a cost of doing business. The bigger risk is not making a timely hire /leaving open positions unfilled. Which doesn’t seem to be the case from my AIS experience. Corporate values definition and embedding is also hugely helpful to enable others to call-out / evidence non-compliant and risky behaviour before issues are created. Most happy to discuss—these are pretty easy changes to make to drive up efficiency and impact across the movement.