Recruiting is not the same as hiring.  Putting an ad in the local paper, checking for a pulse during an interview, and throwing the newly hired applicant on the floor is hiring.  Recruiting is finding the right talent for the right job at the right time. 

I conducted a two hour corporate training session a couple of weeks ago to an audience comprised of strategic managers.  As we were playing my Employee Hold’em card game, the issue of a company’s selection process came up.  This particular company is in a very competitive industry, both for customers and employees. 

This industry is in dire need of engineers.  Colleges can’t graduate enough kids quickly enough to fill the current need, and the needs continue to climb.  So, the harder a company makes it for an applicant to join a company, the less applicants the company has to choose from.

If a company requires applicants to complete pre-employment assessments, to go through multiple or behavioral interviews, to “show their work” as part of the recruiting process, they have less choice on the back-end, as fewer applicants will overcome those hurdles.  And, when the current supply doesn’t even meet today’s needs, it’s hard to make things purposefully harder.

So, we talked about the other side.  Overselling a job or a company in order to hire a really good candidate.  Not a bad recruitment strategy (for the short term), but a horrible retention strategy.  Once these new employees understand they were sold a bill of goods, they’ll leave in a minute, and they’ll tell all their friends about what the organization did. I learned today there is another reason not to play this shell game:

“Avoiding Truth-in-Hiring Lawsuits”.  Eek.  Enough to make you stop watching Oprah.  It seems there are legal implications to playing this game as well.  “These lawsuits are tort claims, and damages may include economic damages that may be almost unlimited,” says Peter Golden, partner in the Atlanta office of Hunton & Williams.

Damages may cover lost job opportunities and lost salary. In addition, there may be compensatory awards for damage to reputation and emotional distress. In the most extreme cases, where a jury finds the statements made in the hiring process were clearly made in bad faith, there may be punitive damages intended to send a message to other employers.

“We’ve definitely seen a rise in the number of truth-in-hiring lawsuits,” Golden says.    Two trends are driving the increase. First, because top-notch candidates are in high demand, employers are competing aggressively for the best applicants and recruiters feel pressured to “sell” the company when they talk to candidates. “Misrepresentation claims arise out of these situations,” Golden notes.

Second, the employment-at-will doctrine has become so strong in many states that employees who have been terminated often have no recourse stemming from the termination itself, so they reach for other vehicles that do not fall within the bounds of employment-at-will.  “They go back and look at the employment situation from the very beginning and turn to tort claims,” Golden says. Many truth-in-hiring lawsuits arise after employment has been terminated.

Yet another reason to ensure that your organization is doing a great job in Recruiting.