Recruit Where the Best Candidates Hang Out
Nick invites readers to submit their toughest questions about job hunting and hiring. He will select the best for this column.
Question
Some weeks I spend hours poring over resumes and interviewing candidates. I'm thinking that I should start charging candidates for my time!
The resumes often look great. The candidates appear to have the requisite skills, attitude, and experience “on paper.” Alas, a few minutes into the interview I quickly realize that many candidates have either over-stated their skills or else fabricated them entirely. It seems that most candidates overstate their qualifications. It became such a problem that I started adding a line to the requests that candidates must have demonstrable experience with the requested skill, not just "know about" or "have worked with" it. This is especially important in foodservice.
What can I do?
Nick’s Advice
Does it occur to you that the problem starts with employers using job advertising methods that solicit and encourage lots and lots of people to apply? Employers turn on the fire hose, then complain they get flooded. Too many applicants to process. Too much overhead cost. There are so many ways to game the hiring algorithms that it’s hard for the best applicants to stand out.
My suggestion: Just cut it out. You're spending hours poring over resumes because you get too many, and that’s because you indiscriminately solicit any and all job seekers.
So why not try recruiting yourself. You know, actually going out into the foodservice community and meeting people to develop healthy, long-term relationships that will turn into trusted sources for referrals when you need them. My guess is you'd love to, if your employer recognized the value of using judgment rather than algorithms to make the first cut of candidates. Making the first cut means approaching and soliciting only people who might actually be a good fit.
You don’t concoct a fine new sauce by dumping every ingredient on your shelf into a stock pot, and then removing everything that doesn’t make a good sauce. So why do you dump “the volume of all the spam resumes you receive on your desk and start recruiting by removing all the wrong ones?
Don’t solicit all the wrong candidates just because some job board lets you. Narrow your search from the start!
Hang out where the right talent gathers
Figure out where your best potential candidates hang out. Go there. Posting a job online is like standing in a shopping mall handing out flyers to hire a sous chef. I don’t need to tell you that not many takers can explain how they’d train and supervise your kitchen staff, or demonstrate any knowledge of food safety regulations.
Here’s a specific example of “go where the people you’d most like to interview hang out”: Sign up one of your employees for an appropriate culinary training workshop, with instructions to bring back names of attendees that are likely candidates for your operation?
As a headhunter, that’s where I go to find the best candidates for my clients. Once you start thinking about it this way, you’ll come up with many more good sources for the right kinds of candidates.
Here are a few other places where the right professionals hang out — and where you should regularly join them:
Professional Networks and Events
Culinary expos
Food festivals
Industry conferences
Online Communities
LinkedIn (skip the profiles–participate in the discussions)
Reddit (e.g., r/Culinary)
Facebook groups dedicated to food service professionals (e.g., Facebook Chef Memes)
Local Culinary Schools
Check my suggestion above, about sending out an emissary.
Restaurants and Cafés
After work, these are natural places for food professionals to gather. Get your team together to brainstorm about which of these might be productive recruiting sites.
Volunteer Opportunities
Community kitchens
Food-themed fundraisers where local food service professionals showcase their skills
Food drives
By hanging out with the right people, the “first cut” of potential hires is already made for you and you won’t have to remove the wrong spices from the sauce. You’ll also make new professional friends you can turn to again and again for credible referrals.
Let me know if any of you have tried this or, if you do, how it works out. I’d love to hear real-world tales.
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