We talk a lot about showing vulnerability as part of building a great team and business culture.
There are plenty of Stephen Coveys and Harvard Business Studies that explain it better than I do so, I won’t bother here (google it). What I wanted to do though was demonstrate some.
I always feel some trepidation when taking you ‘inside the kitchen’ on anything that goes on at MorePeople. Not because I think it’s revolutionary or too shady or embarrassing – quite the contrary.
Like plenty of businesses, I think that we are a fairly simple beast and we do the simple things well. Over and over. Recruitment is like preparing a great meal. Start with high quality ingredients, keep your knife sharp and follow the recipe. We don’t have much in the way of proprietary IP to leak but I always consider whether speaking about internal stats elicits the response I want it to. ‘Gosh, that’s bad/good!’ or ‘Is that all?’.
Anyway, to the point…
2024 is bringing its unique challenges to the recruitment market. This being my 20th year, I have seen a few different scenarios.
What I am finding striking (even set against an awareness of my biases to seek the information that confirms my suspicions) is that we are experiencing a year with a greater number of what I would call ‘dropouts’.
A dropout is when a candidate has accepted a role and at some point in the journey through the ‘valley of death’ (the time between acceptance and start date), they change their mind. We’re always conscious of counter offers and we do our utmost to cover off that scenario throughout the recruitment process. And/or candidates accept a role, start the post, and then change their minds. Again, we do as much as we can in the first place to ensure that the right candidates are in the process and we’re always closing and overcoming objections and managing the ‘after sales’ during the probationary period (and for long after in most cases).
Trust me, we want to place perfect candidates who stay in their role forever. We hate it when things fall over. It’s embarrassing, frustrating and costs everyone involved a lot of time and money.
Having just completed the fantastic ‘The Bear’ on Disney+ (the kitchen metaphors make sense now yeah?), I feel sympathy for people who want to run a Michelin Star calibre business and find problems which make you want to smash the place up.
Problems always occur in any business or market. The goal in life is not to have no problems, it’s to have good problems.
Dropouts will always happen. Minimising them is key. We do track how many we experience. Thankfully (and owing to the fact that the team do a great job) it’s a small percentage of our total number of placements. But, as the team and business grow, the revenue number for these dropouts gets scary.
In addition, this year just feels worse. I think that we have come through the boom period which followed Covid and admittedly we officially slipped into a recession at the end of 2023 here in the UK (followed, more positively, by a couple of small GDP growth quarters in Q1 and Q2) but what is it about current candidate expectations which makes dropouts more prevalent? Maybe the client onboarding the candidate has to look in the mirror also? I know we do when things don’t work out with new people.
If we lived in a world with zero dropouts (never going to happen unfortunately), then we’d be in a great place. If the total of the dropouts was a biller, they’d be top three on the leaderboard! Think of that cousin!
Watching The Bear has inspired me in lots of ways (if you haven’t watched it yet, you should – especially if you like food), I’ve pre-ordered Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect and Coach K’s Leading with the Heart – I am a firm believer in that making marginal improvements and picking up more knowledge is always going to help you in life and work.
If anyone has any bright ideas or observations on how to minimise dropouts, I am happy to show my vulnerability and ask for help. Perhaps together we can reduce the number.
Let it rip.
