The Goldilocks Phenomenon (Employee Engagement Insights from a Successful Job Search 1)

The Goldilocks Phenomenon (Employee Engagement Insights from a Successful Job Search 1)

Why hiring and job-searching for employee engagement makes sense

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Earlier this month, I successfully completed a job search when I accepted a new, employee engagement-focused position with a global HR consultancy. I’ll share more about the firm and my role in a later post, but suffice it to say that I am EXTREMELY excited to be embarking on this next phase of my career with my new team.

This job search looked remarkably different than my last job search four years ago, from both sides of the table. Recruiters screened me for 19 jobs over eight months, and I spoke with with hiring managers and other team members for over a dozen of these roles.  I called, drove, flew and Skype-d for interviews; I took personality tests and spoke with industrial psychologists; I went through a roller coaster of emotions regarding the search process and within my role with my prior firm. In other words, it was a long, careful, deliberate (=frustrating) matching process on both sides, sometimes interrupted by uncontrollable external forces. 

I was, of course, invested in the outcome of the search process. I was also interested to observe what the process told me about my own engagement and how to optimize it for my current and next position. Too, it was an amazing opportunity to speak to professionals in over a dozen organizations about their views on employee engagement and its role in business today. I look forward to sharing what I think it all means to job seekers, business leaders and HR professionals in several upcoming posts, starting with what I call The Goldilocks Phenomena, which is another way of saying that employers and candidates are hiring for employee engagement.

The Goldilocks Phenomena: why hiring and job-searching for employee engagement makes sense

Many believe that carpet-bombing employers with resumes is an effective job search tactic. The idea is that high volume increases your probability of response. I won’t argue that logic if you need a job and any job will do. But if you are motivated (not desperate) to find your next right role, this strategy can result in a lot of false hits – meaning interviews that are a waste of time for both the organization and the candidate.

“So what if there are a lot of conversations that don’t pan out?” one might wonder. "It's good interview practice, right?" Maybe, but there is a cost on both sides. 

For candidates, it’s discouraging, tiring and expensive to spend ones time, energy, gas and vacation days interviewing for roles only to be told you aren’t “the right fit.” Worse, what if you end up in a job wherein you aren’t engaged? You’ll just have to go through the process again.

For organizations, it is time-consuming and distracting to call in teams of five to six highly-compensated business professionals to interview a candidate who has a resume gap, is over-qualified (and thus a flight risk), or culturally better suited elsewhere. In other words, organizations only want to hire if the conditions are right for long-term employee engagement. And as we know, increasing the cost of job searches makes companies even more cautious about hiring in only the right fit, which slows down the process even further.

Reading between the lines, companies and job seekers are / should be more discerning than ever about fitting for employee engagement. For job seekers, this means more research before application to increase interviews for roles you really want. For organizations, this means further defining the conditions that lead to engagement in your team and incorporating evaluation of these into the screening process.

The good news is, the process can work. I found exactly the next right role for me, and my new team found a highly engaged, highly-qualified expert to build out a practice. But I also see it as good news for business, in that we have the potential to improve the recruiting process by seeing it through an engagement lens.