Hiring Process and Matchmaking in the Workplace with Andrea Berkholtz

The COVID-19 pandemic may have subsided in some countries, but the "great resignation" trend is still causing major staffing and hiring difficulties for many companies. Matching employees with the right job can bring about numerous benefits, including increased motivation. What are the effective ways for businesses to connect with job candidates during the hiring process? Join me as I sit down with Metier Executive Management Co-Founder, Andrea Berkholtz. She is an expert in finding exceptional jobs for exceptional people. With her skills in interpersonal and social skills, Andrea has helped both clients and candidates find the perfect match for the position, salary, and company culture. Whether you are looking to build the perfect team for your company, this podcast has something to offer you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Hiring Process and Matchmaking in the Workplace with Andrea Berkholtz Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the most interesting things about our current time is that we live in a world that’s more connected than ever yet making those connections seems harder than ever before. The internet connected everyone to everything but anyone that’s tried to find some of the staples of life, a job, a romantic partner, even friendships and certain experiences, knows that sometimes this overload of different options out there has created a challenge for a lot of people, especially people who don’t know exactly what they want. My guest today, Andrea Berkholtz is an executive recruiter for a lot of small businesses and startups with her company, Metier Executive Management. --- Andrea, welcome to the program. Hi, how you doin’? Good, and I hope I said that right. As someone who speaks English and some Spanish, the French phrase, metier, can sometimes trip me up so hopefully I got it right. You know, you’re not alone in that. When we originally started our company, the idea was Metier is a French word that means the occupation that one was born to do or excels and it’s the perfect word for what we’re doing but it does sometimes trip people up a little with pronunciation. So, I have no problem with however it gets said, it gets said. Yeah, but metier is like an important aspect of your business, right? I mean, it’s like what you’re actually trying to do. We help build tech teams for startups. So, for us, it was a word that really translated what we do, which is we are looking to find the right perfect people who were born to do that role that these companies are looking for. What goes wrong in a lot of these recruiting processes with the record lengths of time and number of applications it takes people to find a job and still get people, in a lot of situations, not satisfied with their hires, a lot of turnovers, a lot of things that don’t work out? Sure. I mean, there’s a lot of ways that the process can go awry. There’s essentially three people involved in this decision making process, it’s myself, the candidate, and the client, and there has to be a perfect fit between the two to really make things work. So a lot of times, perhaps, if the client takes a bit too long to get back to me with feedback, then the candidates can sometimes feel ignored or they’re more in the hot of the moment, like they need the job now so they need answers now so, sometimes, that’s something that happens quite frequently is a lack of communication, I suppose, on expected timelines. So, we’re always trying to make that really clear for all parties when we start a project together, but that’s definitely one of the things that pops up. Yeah, so there’s like a timing mismatch. And one of the things as someone who’s done a good amount of job searching in my time, every company acts differently. One, you’ll hear from 15 minutes after the end of the interview was the most extreme example that I’ve gotten, and another where, four months later, you’ll suddenly get a job offer out of the blue when you’ve already moved on and like written that off because you didn’t hear anything from them, even from your two weeks later follow-up note. Yeah. And I always think that’s so ridiculous. So, for me, one of my main points of pride is the communication, to both clients and candidates, but especially candidates, because people need to be engaged to feel interested in the process and there’s nothing worse than spending all this time applying for a job, filling everything out, talking to me or some other recruiter just to get ghosted or not hear anything. So, that’s a big complaint in our industry and that’s something that doesn’t stand for me, both in my personal life and my professional life. I think we hear a lot about the difficulty in finding a job as a candidate but what about people who are looking for a candidate, the company, and they have a candidate they really like, do they ever get ghosted by the candidate? Sometimes, that does happen and then, of course, I’m sitting there screaming with my hair on fire, like, “Oh, my gosh, what just happened?” You know, I myself get ghosted a lot too, which is frustrating because you set aside times to speak with people, I typically give a five-minute grace window and then if somebody doesn’t show up, I’ll reach out and say, “Hey, what happened?” but it is kind of shocking how prevalent ghosting has become in today’s world. I think that’s one of the downfalls of having so much technology is it’s easy to hide behind your screen or sometimes people forget things and it just happens and that’s totally fine. But, yeah, there’s ghosting all around the world right now. I was reading an article about someone who had written letters in the 1890s and started writing letters about why they weren’t getting like response letters back from their --- I think it was called pen pals back before the internet, you’d write letters back and forth, and I realized, okay, well, maybe ghosting isn’t exactly new but it definitely exploded somewhere around 2008 to 2012, the beginning of an era that I don’t necessarily always appreciate. One thing I tried to reflect on at the end of last year as the New Year happened was that most people who ghost someone are doing so because they’re overwhelmed in some kind of way because of life. But is there a solution? Is there some way that we can get beyond this? Because ghosting does represent a pretty poor communication pattern and it does represent something is like not really respectful so there has to be a better way to go about exiting a situation or whatever without ghosting. Sure. And to me, it can be so simple. It can just be a one liner in a LinkedIn message or an email, all you really got to do if you can’t make it is just send an apology or just one sentence on why you may not be there. You don’t need to tell me your life story, unless you want to. But I think it’s just so simple as taking 10 seconds just to type out a message that says, “Hey, I’m really sorry, I’ve changed my mind,” or, “Hey, I’m sorry, this is not a good time,” just opening the communication channels really is all it takes. Yeah, so just saying to someone, “I’m not interested.” I sometimes get LinkedIn messages about jobs and, every once in a while, I try to be 100 percent upfront, like I got a LinkedIn message about a job that the recruiter thought was right for me but it required five days a week on site, which I’m not looking to go back to that rigid work schedule of the past where some companies still have that. I don’t know if this would be respectful or not, I just said, “Look, I’m just not ready to do five days on site right now,” and kind of just gave them a little hinting of a reason as well as communication that this was the end of this correspondence. Sure, and you know what, that’s totally fine because, to be frank, that’s actually really helpful because that not only lets us as recruiters know, “Hey, this person’s not interested,” and that’s fine, I appreciate that, I like candor. But also it gives us the weapons to go back to the client and say, “Look, we’re getting a lot of pushback. People don’t want to come into the office all the time and I’ve heard this from numerous people who are qualified for the position,” so actually, really, at the end of the day, honesty is the best policy and, frankly, I’d rather be told, I appreciate that, I respect it as opposed to just silence. And what do you think prevents people from being honest? Do you think people are just being selfish and not willing to take out 30 seconds of their time to write out that sort of thought-out one-line email or do you think people are actually afraid of some sort of response they’re going to get? I think with the way --- you know, I love LinkedIn but, to a certain degree, it is becoming a little more Facebook-ish and everything because people are sharing personal things about themselves, which I think is great because it helps make bigger, better, stronger connections. I do think people are afraid to respond, just in case, you know, they don’t want to burn a bridge, which, actually, they’re ending up burning the bridge by not responding sometimes, but I think it’s a fear of saying the wrong thing and upsetting the wrong person in case that is someone that you may need to reach out to again at some point. Ah. So would you then say that someone might be afraid, okay, I might upset the wrong person, but that it is more upsetting to just be ghosted than it is to have that one line of candor say, even if it is like, “Sorry, this job doesn’t match what I want,” even if they don’t want to put all the details in of saying like, well, this responsibility, that responsibility, that type of thing, just providing that one little bit would provide,...