"All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion" -- so begins Tolstoy's great novel, Anna Karenina.*
Our (sadly, less literary) equivalent for the world of talent acquisition runs as follows:
"When hirers do talent acquisition well, they can be very original; but when they don't, they tend just to fall into the same pitfalls as other people."
Corollary for recruiters
It follows that when hirers do those things that they shouldn't do, or fail to do those things that they should do, such pitfalls tend to be predictable.
For example, when writing a person specification, it's natural to want to include all the things that one would ideally want of a new hire; but if the remuneration package isn't benchmarked against market rates, this can result, through a lack of alignment between requirement and offer, in failure to recruit.
This is where experience proves valuable. In the 11+ years since our foundation, in 2009, we've observed that certain pitfalls recur frequently.
Comms as a solution
Our conclusion is that a key function of a talent agency is communication -- specifically communication about how to anticipate the pitfalls.
And so one of our resolutions for 2021 is to broaden our comms programme by means of a variety of media, to include
print, which we find (perhaps contrary to popular opinion) still an important role in professional comms
online written-word
audio-visual, especially in the form of podcasts
online interactive (in particular, webinars)
For the details of our forthcoming offers, watch this space. :)
* As translated by Rosemary Edmonds in the Penguin Classics edition (1954).