At the recently held 7C Alliance Job SAW event, I presented a workshop on the Top 5 Challenges in applying for jobs online and the challenges that IT contractors face in getting through to the end-client and to interviews.
Presentation background
These challenges are from a number of market observations gathered by Matt Miller in recent years of working with IT contractors who have been brought together through the 7C Alliance, a professional association of contractors who are supported through Matt’s contractor coaching and supply chain support business, 7C Alliance. I verified these challenges through first-hand experience in my own job-hunting as well as from relevant information sourced from discussions taking place on LinkedIn and other online forums and blogs that I have participated in over the past three months since becoming a member of the 7C Alliance.
I thought it would be useful to summarise the feedback received from attendees at the workshop and to present this using the same key topic areas that were shown during the presentation and in the discussion that followed.
We identified the top 5 challenges as:
- Agencies’ keyword-driven tools
- Multiple agencies handling one job
- Bulk recruitment – first come, first served
- Lack of quality assurance of candidates
- Lack of quality assurance of contract requirements
Agencies’ keyword-driven tools
The audience seemed to strongly agree with the first challenge – that there is an over reliance on keyword searches and the process is geared towards simply matching these keywords against given requirements, often without further checks being performed to ensure these matches are indeed correct.
A couple of stories shared included:
- A friend of a participant was in the Special Air Service (S.A.S) and received a call for a SAS Programmer role.
- Another participant was aware of a chef getting a call for an SAP role. The end-client was bemused with receiving such a CV and contacted the agency to find out how. After much head scratching, it was worked out that the chef’s CV had noted ‘interested in jobs starting ASAP’ – and so the SAP of ASAP had been picked up by an automated keyword matching tool as making the chef “relevant”.
- Finally, my own experience with getting a Monster job match alert based on the fact that my CV contains the term NGO. I received an alert that I was a match for a job with Transport for London (TfL), and this seemed to be purely driven by a single keyword match. I did not meet any of the seven key criteria necessary for the role and was left wondering why I had received it in the first place – the power of the keyword!
Multiple agencies handling one job
There was very little feedback with regard to this area, although there was an overwhelming agreement that it was a problem. With multiple agencies handling one job, it was often hard to know which agency to deal with.
One experience mentioned was from a Business Analyst, Heather, who in the past had been told she was put forward for a job. She hadn’t heard back and in the meantime received a call from another recruiter who asked if she had been put forward for the role. She stated that she had but hadn’t yet heard back. The second recruiter offered to follow up for her and subsequently she found out that she hadn’t been put forward for the role as she had originally been told. The net outcome was that the second recruiter put her forward and she successfully got the role.
Bulk recruitment – first come, first served
With the sheer numbers of applications, recruiters have to manage responses in bulk which leads to a number of qualified candidates missing out on opportunities. Indeed, anecdotal evidence from some LinkedIn discussion groups indicates that some recruiters operate a ‘cut-off point’ and simply take the first 10 or 20 through the gate.
Further discussion arose from the fact that the recruitment process seems to be based on “how to reject a candidate” rather than how to accept ones based on meeting requirements. Often these rejections can be driven by arbitrary requirements and the process of rejection is performed by administrative staff based on a check-list of criteria, as they otherwise lack the technical experience to determine a genuinely suitable candidate.
An example was cited by a workshop participant who helped recruit for his replacement. 200 CVs were received and these were worked through by a secretary who discarded any CVs with a single typing mistake, incorrect grammar and the like. This resulted in a total of 12 CVs which were used to determine a shortlist. When the participant looked back on some of the discarded CVs, there were a number which would have been even more suitable than the 12 selected CVs. It was also noted that two of the 12 CVs were widely inappropriate and should never have got through this process of ‘selection by rejection’.
A further example was given by a workshop participant of applying for many roles where the skills required were a 100% match with her skills. Despite applying for many roles where this was the case, she never heard back from recruiters and there was no follow up. This has led to her simply playing the numbers game and sending off applications for many positions without necessarily following up with these applications.
Lack of quality assurance of candidates
With recruitment agents being rather busy, it was noted that there seems to be very little time for recruiters to assure that a candidate can perform as they say they can. As an additional thought, there was unanimous agreement that the lack of feedback from agents is also a big problem. It is very hard to make improvements ‘for next time’ without feedback!
Lack of quality assurance of contract requirement
This area focused on what is done, by either recruiters or end-clients themselves, to make sure that their vacancy or job description lists the complete set of skill-sets, experience, training and soft skills needed for doing the job.
Research has noted that a lot of time can be wasted in searching for the right people due to poor vacancy listings or poor job descriptions. Indeed, in some cases, no job description is available and a few lines on the advertised vacancy are all that the contractor has to go off!!
Often the contract requirements, which are the key things to be done by the contractor and stated on the vacancy advertisement or job description, are discovered during the recruitment process to be either:
- Insufficient for covering the scope of what needs to be done by the contractor; or
- Too broad for a single contractor to necessarily have the experience or capability to do.
Indeed, often these types of requirements are posted at a ridiculously low rate for capability expected – and so expectations of the end-client are unreasonable.
Where the contract requirements are insufficient, this has led to a lack of quality candidates. By contrast, where the requirements or over-stated – that is, demonstrate too many expectations for the role – and, worse, state a rate for the contract that does not reflect value of the capability in the market, there are often too few candidates. A few comments arose along the lines of:
- “The people who make the choice about which CVs are to go forward do not know enough about the role. Agents do not know the technology used in the role.”
- “There are often unreasonable requirements in job adverts”
- Mike, an Information Security Specialist, felt very strongly about the need to educate the end client in setting up contract requirements
- Often it can mean a long wait for the candidate who has gone for an interview – and only to find that the end-client has realised, in the course of the process, that they needed a different type of person or that “someone internally is capable of fulfilling this role” (and hence the ubiquitous response received “role has been filled internally”)
General Discussion
- Everybody was very keen on the idea of increasing human interaction and the feeling is strong that this interaction is widely lacking in the current recruitment process.
- There should be a version of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) for recruitment which is open source .
- Mike had received the suggestion to include your personality in business terms on your CV with focus on the following aspects:
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Who you are as a person so employers know what to expect
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Describe your personality
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Ensure your key skills are included, but these should be throughout your CV
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Make sure that your personality suggests a fit with the business culture
I hope the above information is useful and provides an insight into both the top challenges facing contractors when applying for roles and the type of workshops held at a 7C Alliance Job SAW. If you would like to know more about Job SAW, take a look at this earlier blog post.
If you are interested in attending a future 7C Alliance event (either a networking opportunity or a specific event) please visit the contact us page and submit a London IT Contractor Alliance Meetup request. There is also a 7C Alliance discussion group on LinkedIn, feel free to join if you are a contractor or are interested in contracting and want to participate in some great conversations around all manner of topics.
Finally, I’d like to thank Matt Miller, Adele Coetzee and Allan Keyzer for all their help in preparing for the presentation as well as their invaluable support and advice – thanks guys, I couldn’t have done it without you!
Written by Stuart Brown, a member of the 7C Alliance.
Tags: Challenges, Contractors, CV, Quality, Recruitment, Workshops
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