Hiring Insights from London

Cyril Samovskiy

Having visited London’s local event on Inhouse Recruiting, and speaking to the people on the fields, I perfectly see the people might be different in various parts of the world yet the problems they face are very much alike. So solutions should be.
Working with the client based in London, UK we learned about their problem – they were incapable of hiring people locally, as their processes were set for lets say pre-covid era. There was no outbound candidates search, they were relying on job ads posted on various platforms but the people who were applying were not creating enough of a qualitative pipeline, thus, at the exit of the recruiting funnel there were peanuts only.
What the company did – they want nearshore (wooha!) hoping (mistakenly) the vendor would be capable of solving the problems and having the right talent come on board. Indeed, the vendor multiplied the sourcing efforts, boosted the inflow of the candidates but then – a candidate consideration period on the Client’s side lasting for 2-3 weeks – killed it all.
Both for the UK tech labor market, and to any else competitive place we work nowadays – a duration and contents of the vetting/interviewing process is a key.
Make it 48 hours from CV received by interview scheduled – and you still lose some 20% of the candidates who previously were in process with someone else and finally reached the goal of a job offer from them.
Make it 72 hours – and you now lose some 30%.
Make it a week – be sure you will be losing 50%. And you know what? You will be losing the best 50% of your inflow, as the rule of “all good ones are already taken” would be a perfect fit here.
No smart company has a privilege now to do things wrong on hiring.
If you want good talent – you got to adjust. Your hiring managers got to devote a priority (even on their internal commitments) to the recruiting process. As when your peer will wait for a day or two, your best candidates won’t.