In-house recruitment professionals must concentrate on being honest and not wasting their time "making the entrance to the funnel [ie. the hiring process] bigger" so that unsuitable candidates apply, an online talent community boss yesterday [22 October] told the TruLondon recruitment unconference, attended by Recruiter.

“There's a lot of lying going on," said Joel Spolsky, the chief executive of programming Q&A site Stack Overflow, which has 20m programmers worldwide access it each month and generates its revenue through an allied job site.

He suggested that a tendency in recruitment to focus on getting people to apply for your jobs by whatever means necessary, rather than actually working how to target applicants who would have cultural and business fit, is eventually just a drain on resources. 

“If you widen the entry of the funnel to include hippies and you're the US Marine Corps, you're not going to hire hippies." The hippies, or whichever other type of inopportune applicant group, "just waste time in the pipeline".

Spolsky gave two examples of how corporate careers websites frequently are either misleading, or at the very least do not actually drill down into what the company really is all about. First was the ubiquitous photos of employees smiling in a meeting, always showing a good representation of people from minority ethnic backgrounds, which serves a certain purpose of claiming you are an inclusive employer, but does not really tell you anything unique about the business.

The second was something done he said by a lot of management consultancy firms in particular – listing the major world cities you had offices in, when the reality is that you will end up working not in those cities, but on site with clients in much less glamorous locations.

Having arrived halfway through the conference on a flight from his New York base, at the start of his presentation Spolsky asked the audience "how much have you talked [today so far] about the workplace, and how much have you talked about getting people into the workplace?". The latter for the most part, the attendees responded. 

Spolsky in turn suggested this demonstrated that an in-house recruitment team must be sure to always keep in mind how it, as company, actually operates on a day-to-day basis and the real individual value it would offer a potential employee.

"In general, if you're doing something, you need to find people who have that passion because they're going to be really easy to hire,” he said, arguing that this was in particular true for the programmers in his community, but also works across sectors in various roles “for highly-talented individuals who create demand in the market”.