When pitching a new role to a candidate, what is the most important factor to them?
Is it money? The cost of living, and Auckland house prices especially, would suggest that this would be the logical answer. And certainly, when you’re recruiting recruiters, many of these bon viveurs have particularly costly “recreational tastes”. However, studies, which bloggers more academic than I are prone to quote, would suggest that cold, hard cash is surprisingly far down the list when it comes to both attracting and retaining staff.
What about the actual role?
Nope. I’m not having this one either. Contrary to most position descriptions, most recruiters can summarise the intricacies of a role in three sentences. Getting a candidate interested in a role is easy. Likewise, your actual role on month three is often very different to the one initially sold. When asked by our clients to present a shortlist of candidates without disclosing their brand to said candidates, this shortlist is always subject to last minute change once the candidates find out who the client actually is.
So it’s the actual brand right?
Wrong again. If my recent experiences are anything to go by, and to paraphrase a line used by our embarrassing cousins in real estate, the three most important things to a candidate when pitching a new role in Auckland are;
Location
Location
Location
Maybe it’s the extra 30 minutes in bed, the proximity to day care, or the ability to pop home at lunchtime to check the iron is off, but my candidates lurve working up the road. Give me a recruitment admin job on the corner of his street, and I’ll have Greg Savage with you first thing Monday morning. I’m currently recruiting some fantastic roles right now, and the biggest reason that I’m using the present-tense and not past participle is largely based on location. I have great candidates, all of whom live in the wrong f*cking suburb.
This week, some of the team here at Rice/Joyn attended the PwC Herald Talks – “Business & Bots” event, hosted by one-time recruitment luminary turned AI guru Josh Comrie. Amongst many interesting topics covered, Josh made a point that building traditional transport infrastructure to solve traffic problems won’t prove to be the solution. In the fifteen plus years it’ll take to construct these major projects, technology via ride sharing apps, AI, and a host of things we can’t currently conceive, will make them largely redundant. Our current location-focused obsession will become obsolete. Like life in Jurassic Park, Technology will find a way. Well… I wish it would hurry up. Many of my clients talk about flexible working and cloud based applicant tracking systems. However, their adoption of these principals, and the actual ability to deliver against some bold promises made during the interview process, seems to be growing slower than the queue of cars waiting at the harbour bridge on-ramps. As much as we perceive technology to be a remote-working enabler, our perception that Auckland traffic is getting worse is currently greater. I’m sure futurologists are right however. Even if the growth of traffic seems faster than the growth of technology solutions, the world of tech has a habit of explosive exponential growth. It will happen, it’s just a question of “when?”. Similarly to getting to Penrose, it looks like it’s a waiting game.
I’m sure Josh covered many other interesting points in his talk. However, I wouldn’t know as I wasn’t actually there.
I live out West and the traffic is a nightmare at that time of the morning.
^SW
