When I ask my colleagues what they like most about working at Collegewise, most of us agree that it’s the people. We love looking around the room at our annual retreat and being reminded once again just how many amazing folks are here that we’re proud to call coworkers. Why do so many great people, most of whom likely had plenty of other employment options, end up here? The truth is that while there is no substitute for creating a great place to work that’s worthy of great people joining it, the way we treat the process of finding and securing an employee sets a tone that draws in the kind of people who thrive here and repels those who just won’t. The best way to describe our secret is that we don’t actually hire people. We recruit people.
Hiring vs. recruiting
Hiring is a means to an end. Hiring says, “We have an open position, we need to fill it quickly, so let’s find someone who needs a job and seems like they can do this one.” Hiring is faster and easier than recruiting. You can run a help wanted ad that reads like all the others. You can post it in as many places as possible. You can make it easy to apply—just send us your existing resume and cover letter; no need to do any extra work to be considered. You can churn all those people through a formulaic process that treats applicants like numbers.
If your goal is to fill open spots quickly with people who need a job and have the skills to do this one, hiring works! But you don’t build the kind of remarkable team we’ve assembled here by hiring. To do that, you have to recruit.
Recruiting is a thoughtful, slow, and deliberate effort to find the very best person for each role.
Recruiting doesn’t just look for someone who can do the job—it also looks for the right attitude and fit. Recruiting requires that someone invest their own time, thought, and energy to apply. It weeds out people who are interested in a job more than they are in this job. Recruiting can get the right person to stop what they’re doing today and come join us.
Recruiting also recognizes that a candidate isn’t just evaluating the potential job that waits on the other side; they’re also evaluating the company they’d potentially be working for. So recruiting demands that we treat every interaction as if we’re on stage.
How do our employment ads read? How do we communicate with people once they’ve applied? How do we interact with them during the interview process? How do we treat them when we make a decision? Do we leave those that we offer a job feeling like they’ve found a home? Do we leave those that we didn’t offer a job feeling like we’re a good company who treated them with respect? Hiring doesn’t care about any of those things. But recruiting does.
The price of recruiting is that it takes more effort, more energy, and more time. It also means that we’ll pass on good but not great people, and positions can go unfilled longer than we’d like them to. But the patience almost always pays off with hires who thrive at Collegewise.
Is it worth it?
The stakes are very high when you offer someone a job. When you make a bad hire, it doesn’t just affect you. It affects your team, it affects the trainers, it affects the managers, it affects the customers, it affects the coworkers, it affects the company, and it affects the person you hired. That’s a hefty long-term price that a lot of people have to pay.
But if we take the time to find, attract, and invest in the very best people, then we’ll end up with a larger version of the team we have now—a group of a passionate, talented, remarkable folks who are enrolled in the journey we’re on together. It’s a lot harder to recruit, but a lot more likely we’ll build something even more extraordinary if we do.
If you’re in a hurry to assemble a group of people who can do the work, then you should hire. But you won’t attract remarkable people with an unremarkable process. Hiring gets faster short-term results, but recruiting gets more remarkable long-term results.
Care to join us?
This January, we’ll be in recruiting mode again and looking to add great new additions to our work family in a variety of roles. If you’d like us to reach out and tell you when those positions are officially posted, first, take a look at what life at Collegewise looks like. And if that piques your interest, just fill out this short form. We’ll send you an email in early January with a link where you can view our open positions and apply if you choose. I hope we’ll hear from you.