‘Disconnects, friction’ in Canada’s hiring practices

There is a huge problem in the hiring market today: employers and job seekers don’t understand each other well, according to a recent report.

In today’s rapidly changing workplace, employers often don’t have a true understanding of the skills they are looking for, and candidates have trouble describing how and why they are a good fit, reports the Canada West Foundation.

“Employers create these job descriptions based on the tasks of the job… but they don't necessarily understand what it takes to be able to do those tasks,” said Janet Lane, director of human capital centre, Canada West Foundation, and co-author of the report. “Employers quite often will throw as much at the wall as they possibly can, because they want the best person possible.”

“Meanwhile, the job candidates… twist themselves into a little pretzel to meet the needs of the employer… But they don't understand either what it is that they really can do that is of value to the employer.”

Miscommunication in hiring process

This system is no longer working for employers, said Jeff Griffiths, WorkForce Strategies International co-founder and co-author of the report, in the same interview.

“Zooming between what I can do or what I have done and what I've learned and everything else; what your job requirements are, how you post that; and then also what the learning providers are doing… They can all be saying the same thing, but never in the same way. 

“So there's always these disconnects, and there's friction in the system, and it's always been there. And employers have always used various proxies to try and determine whether someone is skilled or not. And those proxies were reasonable at some point in the past, and they're becoming less and less relevant now, because of changes in the world of work, because of the half life of skills.”

The miscommunication in the hiring process causes a problem which manifests in multiple ways, according to the report titled Matching People with Jobs & Jobs with People:

• Mismatch between the skills needed by jobs and those held by the workforce.
• Miscommunication between the labour market’s players.
• Many employers do not fully understand what skills and knowledge are required to perform jobs well and how they are transferable between jobs.
• Learning providers have difficulty keeping up with the vast array of skills, knowledge and competencies required.

With an average of nearly 400 applicants for every job ad after a week of posting, the city of Doha in Qatar emerged as the most competitive job market in the world, according to a previous report from Resume.io.

The cost of a bad hire

The miscommunication results in a bad hire, which is costly for employers. With the current process, “there's a lot of friction and there's a lot of error built into the system,” said Griffiths.  

“And we accept it because, up until now, there has not been another way of figuring it out. And so we accept the fact that… in many cases, 50% or more of our hires are going to turn out to be the wrong people. And we're either going to get rid of them, or they're going to get rid of us. And I'm gonna have to go through the whole process again. It’s very inefficient.”

The cost of a bad hire is rising, according to a previous report.

Competencies-based hiring is the answer

Competencies-based hiring could be the solution to the problem, said Lane.

“Competencies are the answer. They better describe what the job requires a person to be able to do.

“What competency-based hiring does is give all the players – employers, jobseekers, team leaders – a language to say: ‘Okay, this person isn't necessarily a fit in the job for which we thought we were hiring them, but they would be so good over here’. Or ‘If we use their skills properly, we could perhaps start doing something else that we have not yet been able to do’. And this comes from really understanding the people that you work with.”

This helps employers in the hiring process, said Griffiths.

“If you properly articulated the competencies and properly articulated what the evidence of competent performance looks like, and design your hiring process to test for it, then the advantages that you gain are better fit, faster integration of an employee into your business and a working environment that suits not only you, but also suits the employee.”

With this hiring approach, the underlying components of workplace performance will no longer be buried under an avalanche of information, according to the report.

Recommendations for better recruitment

Lane and Griffiths shared the following recommendations to employers:

• Reconstruct current job/role descriptions along measurable competency lines and align them with the criteria established by the e Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standards.
• Encourage adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning systems (Oracle, SAP, etc.) that are compatible with the IEEE data model.
• Conduct thoughtful exercises around what data is truly proprietary, in preparation for open data environments and Web 3.0.
• Insist that learning providers in talent supply chains articulate the outputs of courses and programs in competency terms, compatible with the IEEE standards.