"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Henry Ford
I must confess that I am a bit of a sucker for a meaningful quote and can be guilty of shoe-horning in a vaguely relevant meaning to a quote just so that I can relentlessly keep quoting said quote. My dear friend and co-founder, Ed Godwin, will testify to this, most recently with the words, “My God, Ed’s been reading a book again,” or something along those lines.
In the case of this Henry Ford quote, though, there is no shoe-horning required. At least, not in my opinion. I recently got asked to join the panel of a Belazu Connects event at the White Horse in Mayfair to discuss recruitment and retention challenges in the hospitality sector. After drinks and delicious olives, my fellow panelists and I discussed the current problems the sector is facing and the available solutions.
What was clear to me was that hospitality has many challenges to overcome, in reality I don’t recall a time when it didn’t, but that those who work in the sector have a hugely positive attitude towards tackling those challenges, to finding a way forward whilst ensuring that employees and customers are always kept front of mind.
Coming away from the event though, with the delicious taste of slow-roasted lamb belly still on my tongue, I did start to ponder on our tendency often, when faced with a challenge, is to just do more of the same but perhaps faster or bigger or wider or with more money or with more resource behind it.
It’s a bit like sitting in your house with the window open, wearing a t-shirt in winter and, rather than putting on a jumper and closing the window, you keep turning the heating up. You might feel a tiny bit warmer but you’ll have spent a fortune getting there.
The more sensible approach would be to stop and consider, what you could do differently, in this case to get warmer but you can apply this equally to hiring your ideal staff member dramatically more quickly. Of course shutting the window and putting on one or more jumpers would be the best approach.
So why the Henry Ford quote? Applicants now have a vast array of tools at their fingertips to quickly apply for roles, from writing their CV with ChatGPT, filling it with hidden keywords and pressing Easy Apply to fire their applications off to multiple companies at once. You could argue that applicants have found themselves a faster horse as a response to regularly hearing nothing when they apply for a job. Now recruiters are overwhelmed with CVs that they have to trawl through as quickly as possible to get to the best candidates before their competitors do.
As a recruiter, you might decide to opt for one of the many “Ai badged” products that are prevalent in the market. Sure, they may help a little bit but all they are likely to do is match some keywords for you, leaving you to trawl through the countless CVs that the search function pulls up, trying to find those candidates that actually have the qualities and behaviours that you’re looking for. What the recruiter has done in this case is opt for the recruiting equivalent of a faster horse.
In my career, I have never taken the easy route. Sometimes I reflect on where I could have been and wish that I had! Not for too long though. I like to take the harder route, often putting myself and my team out on a limb, but knowing that the end result will be far better, far more efficient, far more effective and far more profitable. To build on the Henry Ford analogy, I have never wanted a faster horse. That said, I understand why people do. It’s far easier and far less risky personally to just do more of the same, but slightly quicker or slightly faster and maybe even slightly cheaper.
Just as almost everyone gave up on using a horse to get from A to B, the same will ultimately apply to recruitment. Businesses will realise that the faster horse no longer cuts it, that the competition are doing something different and, guess what, they are getting different results, better results, quicker results and, what’s more, more profitable results.
It might seem like the harder route now but it could just be the difference between being a pioneer or being a sheep.
