Why recruiting starts too late

Ask an HR department when a recruiting process begins, and the answer is almost always: with the job ad. Once the vacancy is approved, the posting goes out, the search runs, the screening starts. The process begins visibly, so that counts as its beginning.

That is the error in thinking. By the time the ad is up, the most important decisions have long been made, only unspoken. Whoever searches carries a picture of the role in their head. Three people carry three different pictures. No one has reconciled them. The search therefore does not begin from zero but on an unclarified foundation that no one has checked.

Pre-Recruiting moves the beginning one phase forward. Before the search, the role is built: what is it there for? On which single bottleneck does it tip over when filled wrong? What shows, after two years, whether the hire has held? Only once these questions are answered is it clear what is even being searched for.

The difference sounds small and is large. An ad that comes out of a clarified role describes not a wish list but a task. Candidates recognise early whether they fit. Selection runs along the requirements, not along gut feeling. And the people who later judge the hire judge the same picture, not three.

Why does this happen so rarely? Because the phase before has no name. What carries no name has no fixed place in the process. It is the first thing dropped under time pressure, because no one notices anything is missing. A job gets posted, the phase before it gets skipped, and the result is later called a search problem.

A name changes that. Pre-Recruiting turns a silent run-up into a discipline with a beginning, an end and a result. You can schedule it, demand it and check it. Recruiting then no longer begins with the ad, but where it always should have begun: with the role.

Michael von Hirschfeld, Pre-Recruiting pioneer