The End of the Talent Shortage
For a decade, recruiting meant competing for people who were hard to find. You wrote adverts to attract. You benchmarked salaries upwards. You paid an agency for access to candidates you could not reach on your own. That era is over.
A client of ours in Redditch advertised an office administrator role in August. They received 90 applications in the first week. They read about 30 of them. The risk was never that the right person would not apply, it was that she was number 31.
Three Reasons Volume Is Costing You
1. The Forty-CV Ceiling
The impact: Nobody with a full-time job reads all of those applications properly. They read the first forty, and the shortlist that follows is a sample rather than a selection. The quality of your hire becomes roughly as good as chance allowed.
What to do: Decide before you advertise who is reading, and when. Put it in a diary. An unbooked two days of reading is not a plan, and the applications will arrive whether you have the time or not.
2. The Small-Business Squeeze
The impact: 89% of Worcestershire businesses employ fewer than ten people, and 78% employ fewer than five. There is no talent function waiting to receive 200 applications; there is an inbox and somebody who already has a job.
What to do: Be honest about capacity before the advert goes live. If nobody has three or four hours a week to give it, the process will stall, and a fortnight’s delay is usually the whole difference between hiring your first choice and losing them.
3. The Second Recruitment
The impact: When a rushed hire does not work out, you recruit again, more slowly, because the team has become sceptical about the role, and more expensively, because you have lost several months of whatever the job was supposed to deliver.
What to do: Treat the first recruitment as the cheap one. Most of the roles we fill are somebody’s second attempt, and almost all of them would have been easier the first time.
The Arden Edge
We are not selling you access to candidates. You have too many. We are selling you a shortlist and your time back, and evidence about which of them will still be there in two years.
We read all of them
On that administrator role, as an example, we would read all of the applications, shortlist, and put forward the most suitable candidates only.
We verify before you meet
Availability, salary expectations, reason for leaving, and anything that needs explaining are all settled before a shortlist reaches you. You should never learn about a three-month notice period at offer stage.
We give you evidence, not impressions
We use McQuaig behavioural profiling to compare how somebody naturally works against what the job actually demands. It is one input alongside the interview and the references, but it turns a good feeling into something you can examine.
One Question Worth Asking
When you are next handed a shortlist – by us, by anyone, or by your own inbox – ask whether you would be content to hire any of the people on it?
If the answer is yes, it is a shortlist. If two of them are there to make the others look reasonable, it is a longlist with a better name, and the reading has not been done. It has simply been moved to your desk.