More and more companies are having difficulty recruiting candidates who meet their expectations. What if they were on the wrong track by adopting an outdated view of recruitment?
The classic recruitment process, as presented in human resources reference manuals, requires that the search for candidates (sourcing) and their selection be preceded by a serious study of the position to be filled. This involves precisely determining the skills profile that it will be necessary to look for among candidates. The stakes would be high given that “the vast majority of recruitment errors are due to poor job definition”, as Jean-Marie Peretti writes.
Of course, this common sense approach remains useful. A candidate with technical and behavioral skills (hard skills and soft skills) suited to the position will have a better chance of success in their job. But the science of recruitment is complex and subtle, it takes place in a particular temporal and social context and does not stop with the signing of the employment contract. Three arguments will be presented in the following lines encouraging us to put into perspective the importance of searching for a match between candidate and position to be filled during recruitment.
Skill shortages
The first argument is based on the current shortage of qualified and experienced candidates in many professions. The annual surveys on labor needs carried out by France Travail very clearly show an increase, in recent years, in the proportion of recruitments anticipated as difficult by the employers surveyed. A historic peak was reached in the 2023 survey with 61% of recruitment projects. For 2024, this rate has lost 3.6 points, undoubtedly partly influenced by the reduction in recruitment intentions, but it remains at a particularly high level. The reasons for these difficulties, according to employers, are first and foremost the shortage and mismatch of skills available on the job market. These tensions do not only concern digital or health professions, many manual professions and services are also affected.
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Faced with these new constraints, many employers find themselves obliged to lower their skill requirements and therefore hire candidates with a profile less suited to the position. In a reversal of the balance of power, these employers are forced to practice more open recruitment and to adapt to candidates, except, as in nearly 7% of these cases, to abandon their recruitment project.
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New employees recruited in this context will undoubtedly be less quickly operational and will require a greater training effort, but they will not necessarily be less efficient in the long term. Especially since with operational preparation for employment (POE), which can be associated with on-the-job training actions (AFEST), employers have “tools” to train their future employee, upstream from hiring, to the skills specifically required by the position.
Recruit for the organization as much as for the position
The second argument consists of a shift from the search for suitability of the position to the organization. Thus, for certain authors, the increasingly changing context in which companies operate, which requires them to adapt very quickly, as well as the blurring of boundaries between jobs mean that “it is now necessary to hire for the organization and not just for a specific position” (Michaud et al., 2016). It is on this basis that a field of research dealing with the match between the person and the organization (person-organization fit) has developed. Researchers have identified and tested several criteria that can facilitate the search for matching a candidate with the organization: values, personality, culture, objectives or even interests (Barrick & Parks-Leduc, 2019). It would seem that it is the criterion of values which offers the most convincing results.
It is therefore a question of identifying, through more or less elaborate specific methods, what is the personal scale of values of the candidates and of comparing them to the main organizational values which prevail within the recruiting company. For candidates, we can, for example, rely on the typology of 15 professional values identified by Donald Super and, for organizations, on the 34 organizational values resulting from Quebec research. A candidate who places “the working atmosphere” at the top of his scale of professional values will undoubtedly integrate more easily into an organization which prioritizes “the climate and satisfaction of its employees”, “interpersonal relations” and ” respect for the person” rather than in another which gives priority to “the achievement of set objectives”, “performance”” or “return for shareholders”. A match can also be sought on security values or creativity.
The place of organizational values
Despite the numerous biases that can taint the sincerity and precision of the values presented by both parties, various studies have shown that this type of adequacy has a positive influence on employee satisfaction, their involvement, their performance as well as their loyalty to the company. In the current context where the quest for meaning at work is widely shared, values can serve as support. Indeed, among the three pillars of meaning at work which are social utility, ethical coherence and capacity for development (Coutrot and Perez, 2022), values play a significant role. Many companies have understood this well and give organizational values a prominent place in the definition of their employer brand, hoping to strengthen their attractiveness.
But, in this area, the risk lies in too consensual a definition of the employer brand by choosing the most popular values. Indeed, the success of an employer brand relies on the precision and consistency of messages as well as their ability to distinguish the company from others (Viot and Benraïss-Noailles, 2021).
Strategic integration phase
The third argument likely to put into perspective the importance of the search for a match between person and position to be filled is based on a move downstream in the recruitment process, that is to say towards the integration phase of the new or the new employee. The efforts of recruiters, internal employees or external stakeholders, too often tend to focus on the sourcing, evaluation and selection phases of candidates, yet we have already known for a long time that 50% of the success of a recruitment is plays in the integration phase, as shown by Perrot and Lacaze, 2010. It is therefore of little relevance to invest a lot of time, money and energy to find the ideal candidate, most in line with the position to be filled, if it is to then neglect the stage of its integration into the company. At best the new employee will not be able to deploy all of his abilities, at worst he will leave the company prematurely after having caused damage within the collective and costly recruitment will have to be restarted.
The integration phase begins as soon as the candidate is informed of their selection and ends at the earliest at the end of the trial period. The essentials are: maintaining communication with the future employee while awaiting their actual arrival, careful logistical and human preparation for their arrival, a welcome in conditions facilitating integration within the collective and strong support both through the manager than by other resource people (tutor, peer, mentor, etc.). The practice of the astonishment report and the scrupulous respect of the “psychological contract” concluded with the new employee before their hiring are also important levers. Beyond these classic practices, the numerous research studies on organizational socialization provide additional avenues that can promote the learning necessary for the newcomer “to assume a role in an organization” according to the expression of (Sauvezon, 2016).
Let us cite, for example, the promotion of informal exchanges, the richness and variety of socializing agents or even a positive attitude of those around them towards the integration strategies of new recruits (requests for information, observations, proposals for innovation) (Bargues-Bourlier, 2009).
Even if the recruitment process will necessarily be influenced by the degree of technicality of the position to be filled, it will be a question of moving from a search for the “ideal candidate” to that of a meeting and successful integration of a person within a work group. In this new context, shortened selection processes should be favored, focusing on taking care of the candidate experience, giving pride of place to real-life scenarios and less to the decontextualized assessment of skills. Skills to be considered as potentialities, in a dynamic vision rather than as acquired skills, in a static vision.
