Hating on cover letters and the costs of hiring bad; when non-competes are a huge red flag, and how early-stage startups rarely have moats – (loose relationships are not moats)
A couple of discussions I had this week got me thinking about how to get the best people for your organisation to want to talk to you. And how our recruitment practices are so broken, whether you are looking for work or hiring for your company.
Hiring mistakes are enormously costly and disruptive to the business, the team and the employee.
Someone mentioned that they’d prefer if prospective employees brought much more of themselves into the interview rather than just giving cookie-cutter answers they think the recruiter wants to hear. Hard to disagree with this. It isn’t easy to assess whether someone would fit into your team if you can’t get to know them because of the mask they wear (figuratively) or the cliches they tell you. I am not a fan of the ‘be authentic’ approach, I much prefer professionalism, but cliches and pre-prepared answers tell me nothing about the candidate other than they prepared to interview. Which is not the same as doing the job.
Then someone (an HR professional) highlighted the uselessness of cover letters – hard agree with this too. Send a tailored CV. Otherwise, I don’t want someone fawning over the company and putting hours into creating a letter that won’t give me more information than a good CV would. Once they are invited to an interview that’s the time to really prepare – but even then I don’t like to hear cliches about the company. Hear me out. (Also, I am not an HR professional, my perspective is purely that of a business leader.)
I want to hear what this person has to offer. Their experience, their skills, their journey, their plans. I think it is unfair to expect candidates before they have even met anyone from the company to explain why they are a fit. Mostly, because you absolutely cannot tell what the culture of the business is like from a website and a few social accounts - and that is mostly what candidates have access to. They can only guess or give cliches. You need meetings (virtual or real life) to figure this out. Only those inside will know what the culture of a company is like.
Naturally, if the job requires a certain set of technical skills, then the prospective employee needs to possess those and demonstrate such on a CV. But beyond that – it is about culture, personalities, values, needs, likes and dislikes.
I cannot tell you how many times I have seen technically great people not fitting into a business and not being able to contribute the best they had to offer because they were a bad cultural fit for the organisation.
Even if it’s no one’s fault, hiring mistakes are costly. Having to let someone go and then hire a replacement costs time, energy and money. Not to mention the disruption to the employee’s career and life. And the disruption to the team or the business function.
Value clashes, personality clashes – these are more important than we’d like to pretend. It’s the case in big business, but especially so in startups and organisations going through fast growth or transformation.
Then there is AI. More and more businesses and HR departments use AI to weed through CVs and cover letters.
I am all for efficiencies and I am not scared of AI. But if we consider