Over the last few years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people about applying to jobs from all walks of life. Between talking to colleagues, recruiting myself, or my work as a coach, if nothing else, I have learned how people think the job search process works. It has amazed me that, almost independent of the amount of experience people have or even their closeness to the HR space, what many people think they know is wrong. In fact, hearing some of the same misconceptions so frequently even made me question myself – so I wanted to talk to an expert about how this process really works.
I recently had a conversation with Chris Mannion, Founder of Recruit CoPilot, a technology company with a suite of AI-driven tools designed to streamline candidate screening and enhance talent acquisition. It’s a super interesting company, it’s worth checking out here. Prior to founding this company, Chris spent 3 years at Wayfair as the Global Head of Campus Recruiting as well as Head of Talent Acquisition Process Innovation. Needless to say, there are few people out there with a better understanding of the recruiting landscape and the tools being used than him.
There is so much valuable information for job seekers of all types and experience levels, I would suggest reading the whole thing. However, if you’re just looking for what is most relevant to you, feel free to skip to the section that works for you. The last section includes Chris and my three top mistakes people make in the job search. I hope you enjoy the conversation!
Background and Initial Impressions of Recruiting
Let’s start at the beginning – your career didn’t start in HR. Can you tell me about where you started your career and that transition process into recruiting? What prompted that move?
After my MBA, I got an offer from Wayfair to join their Supply Chain Analytics team. That was exciting because they were just starting to build out this new team. It was a lot of fun because over the two years I was on the team, the company scaled its warehouse volume by 4x. But by 2018, I’d realized that to meet the demand of the business we actually had to hire more people…but we weren’t able to hire anyone. Graduating undergrad in The Great Recession I’m like, ‘Well, this can’t be that hard to hire people – surely everyone’s looking for a job right now’. I chose to go into recruiting because it seemed like the most interesting problem at the time.
So you’re in this position where you want to hire people but you can’t get enough people in the door. What kind of bottlenecks were you seeing at the time?
Most people go through a job search process where they apply for a job, go to an interview, and if they perform well, they get selected. From the recruiting side, this process works well if there are a lot of quality applicants. What I found was either the volume itself or the lack of quality candidates for the roles that were posted made it hard to build a true funnel, so recruiters had to manually source candidates – which takes exponentially longer.
But now, if you log on to LinkedIn, you see every job has like 3000 applications and you said recruiters were literally reading through resumes and struggling to find good candidates. Can you tell me about how you get from that huge group of applicants that apply to a job to that first crop of people that to call? Is it so overwhelming that recruiters say “I can’t even go through all of this stuff. I’m just going to go find people myself”?
I think that for many roles that was actually the end result. We can’t physically go through 3,000 applicants for this role, so it’s easier to do the search on linkedin where we actually have better filtering capabilities and can find the people that we think we want. I think the LinkedIn-based approach is more for experienced hires who are a few years into their career. For the early career hiring and hourly hiring the inbound process was still like the primary way to hire people.
Advice for Campus Recruiting
So let’s talk about that process of filtering for early-career or campus recruiting…
We had to think about how to be more strategic about the way that we target candidates so that we almost pre-qualified them before they got into the funnel. There were a few things that we did, such as require a pre-application questionnaire inside of the application. We take their application, their resume, but we also have them answer a couple of questions. The goal was to filter out the people who are just clicking apply to everything and increasing the quality of the candidates that were applying.
Then part of it would be analyzing where our best candidates had come from previously. How quickly do people get promoted, how likely are they to stay…and then where did these people come from and what did they have in common? On the campus recruiting side, it allowed us to target specific schools that had quality candidates and the volume necessary to fill all the roles.
What advice would you give that person who goes to a non-target school so that the campus recruiting team will call them?
I think there’s two ways of looking at it. If you rely solely on the resume, then that’s a gamble. If you check the boxes that the recruiters are looking for and that they filter on, you may move forward. But there are other ways.
The second thing we look for is students that opt in to actually demonstrate interest and capability. Going to hackathons, conferences, internships, events that the company sponsors or participates in make a big difference. Finding a way to get in front of the recruiter
So should they reach out to them directly?
I think that’s challenging because, generally, recruiters are really busy. And you probably don’t even know which recruiter is working the role that you want. So for roles like this you want them to be made aware of you but they’re not really going through their email or Linkedin flagging people. What they’re doing is when they go to in-person events or when they hold webinars, they’re looking for people who are asking interesting questions. So it’s less about getting your face or name known and more about demonstrating that you’re interested and adding value into the process.
Advice for Experienced Hires
What about experienced hires?
This process is different for experienced hires where the recruiters aren’t necessarily looking through thousands of resumes. They’re actually trying to build relationships with a small group of people, so if you’ve already spoken to a recruiter there then continuing to build that relationship will just mean that you’re top of mind.
What we often see is that if a candidate has been interviewed for one role, that would generally lead to other opportunities within the company, as long as they were able to showcase their skills.
Why Do I Get Rejected Automatically?
There are a lot of people out there who believe that applicant tracking systems are using AI to determine whether or not they are a good fit for the job and rejecting them on the spot. In your experience, is that how things normally work?
There are definitely features in ATS’s that allow you to reject someone that doesn’t meet the minimum qualification criteria. One of the first things you do is try to define requirements whether it’s a degree type, minimum GPA, or years of experience.
Another reason is a lag in doing the admin work. There are times when the role online can still be open, but the actual job has been filled…but it takes a minute to actually take the posting down.
I think the action item is not to get discouraged by that – it means you’re not wasting any time by moving further into the process for a role you may not have been a serious contender for.
What about key words? I know that is something recruiters do on LinkedIn to find candidates, but is that something that happens within the applicant tracking system itself, to help filter after the first set of screening questions?
It’s a good question. I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten deep enough to build searching on applicants like that. Generally if you have software like Beamery or Phenom, they are working on developing the ability to search people already in your database. I don’t know if it already exists in many of the ATS systems that are currently in use. I haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Advice for People Making a Career Change
What if you are someone who’s trying to make a career change? Even if it’s a smaller one, say from Recruiter to a different part of HR, where the path isn’t completely linear. Given this filtering mechanism, how do you go about making that transition?
I think the key is that it’s not about demonstrating that you’ve done the role before, because obviously you haven’t. Instead, the better approach is to look for transferable skills and think about the traits and competencies that make someone successful in a role.
If you’re thinking about a transition from a recruiter to an HRBP role, that’s a really interesting transition because you’re changing from talking to candidates as your main customer to staying with an executive and helping them make strategic talent decisions. I would argue that recruiters are very good at doing that. It’s really about understanding what are the day to day needs of that role and framing your resume and story around that.
Have you done stakeholder management before? Yes, as a recruiter clearly they have.
Have you advised on the right way to build teams? Yes.
Can you handle hard conversations with executives? Of course.
So instead of saying “I hired 100 people in 2023 and my time to hire was 30 days”, even if that is impressive, it’s not as relevant to the HRBP role. It’s more about “Adopted a new interview process to improve quality of hires”.
And is it fair to assume that if you’re trying to make that transition, you will probably need to put in more effort into the networking process than simply hitting the apply button and crossing your fingers?
Yes. I mean there are things you can do to improve your resume – look at job descriptions, your current resume, and find the gap.
But I think a more important approach is to start the coffee chat process with people who are already doing that role – get a thorough understanding of what the day to day looks like, since we all know what the job description says and the actual job are often very different. The second benefit is that if a role comes open and you’ve been talking to them, you might be in their mind and they may refer you.
What People Get Wrong in Their Job Search Process
I’ve met a lot of people, especially early in their career, whose approach to the job search is “I’m going to apply for literally anything – I’m going to hit the apply button as many time as I possibly can”. What would you say to people who are doing that?
We talked about the “auto-reject” – that is the reason it exists. If you are making minimal effort to actually find what is the best fit for you, tailor your resume, and network, then you should expect minimal results.
I understand the way people look at it. If the odds of getting a job are 100 to 1, then I should apply to 100 jobs and I may get one. But that’s not actually the way it works because the people who are doing that are actually in the lower quartile of profiles for that specific role, so more likely to get rejected.
Even if you are flexible and any type of job will do – it’s better to be very mindful, identify 10 to 15 companies you would be excited to work for, and take the time to figure out how you can stand out. Build relationships, customize the resume, and even if it takes more time in upfront investment, I would argue the total time to hire from the candidate side would actually be much lower because you are more likely to get through each stage of the process.
One last question here: based on your experience, what is the thing that candidates get wrong most often?
The main thing I saw a lot was when candidates came in with a preconceived notion of what I was trying to find out. It’s very clear when someone comes in and they have an agenda where they are trying to sell you based on the things that they believe are important to you.
The candidates that have the stronger performance are those with a more curious mindset – they know their background and can talk about any of their skills – but they haven’t drafted a list of things that they want to cover because they looked at the job description and it said these ten things. Having a more conversational approach, asking interesting questions that show they’ve done research, but also being thoughtful in the moment and being adaptable.
The other thing I’ve noticed recently is a lot of candidates have started to use ChatGPT to pre-generate answers for things. And while that can be helpful as a starting point, just taking the output verbatim and thinking that’s good enough is never going to win. When you’re on the other side of the table and talking to hundreds of people a month and you see half of them giving the same answers with the same examples for a set of questions, it’s very clear they’ve used the same process. I would rather see someone be thoughtful, even if the quality of the answer is slightly less high-quality, because you can see that they’re thinking.