Because of the disruptions in the economy, I plan to periodically share updates on what we are seeing in the local job market. I am not claiming to speak for the whole job market, just for the senior staff level of the association and nonprofit sector in the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. We conduct more searches in that sector than most search firms, and from our years of experience, we know what the numbers normally look like.

The hiring process can be a nauseating rollercoaster of emotions—from the emotional high you feel when a top candidate enthusiastically accepts your job offer, to the sickening corkscrew of misery when:

Whether you are the hiring manager or the candidate being interviewed, hiring is personal, now more than ever. Candidate behavior has changed more in the past 5 years than at any time in the past 30 years, but few employers have updated their hiring practices. This creates some real challenges on both sides of the interview desk, and more than a few opportunities to gain a real competitive advantage.

Big data in hiring is all the rage, but don’t be fooled into thinking that big data is just for Silicon Valley technology companies or large organizations. The use of data and science to make management decisions benefits small organizations every bit as much as large firms. The only difference is the higher amount of press coverage large firms get for their innovative HR decisions.

Some executives mistakenly think of hiring as an HR function. But hiring cannot be thought of as solely an HR issue, as something separate from the "real work" of the department. Whenever a new hire fails to make a significant business impact, it is a business problem.

The hiring process seems familiar to most managers. Everyone has been through the process. It seems like hiring should be simple---everyone involved wants the same thing. Executives want to hire the best people. Candidates want a job where they can be successful. Everyone wants a recruiting process that accurately predicts performance on the job...and yet hiring is often disappointing.

A hiring process does not fail suddenly and for completely mysterious reasons. Most searches fail for fairly predictable reasons, with quite a few warning signs along the way. Or, as Ernest Hemingway put it in The Sun Also Rises:

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

If you are still posting job advertisements today the same way you did five years ago, I would not be surprised if your hiring process results are disappointing. And there’s a good reason why. Candidate behavior has changed more in the past 5 years than at any other time in the past 30 -- especially when it comes to how everyone uses smartphones and tablets. People are on their phones more than ever. According to Comscore, smartphone usage alone now exceeds total internet usage 4 years ago.

Do you use a smart phone? Read restaurant reviews on Yelp? Search for things on Google? Of course you do. Today, Google, mobile devices, and reputation sites are just part of your day. But 15 years ago, smartphones and reputation sites didn’t even exist, and Google was still largely unknown.  Unfortunately, the recruiting practices at most organizations are trapped in a time warp. Most HR teams recruit about the same way they did in 1999. But these now-familiar technologies have fundamentally changed your behavior...and the behavior of your current and future employees.

With the rise of employer reputation sites like Glassdoor, overwhelming dread has overcome HR and senior leadership -- a feeling of Glassdoor Angst. Anonymous reviewers are publicly posting "insider information" outside of management’s control.  In 2014, most CEOs we spoke with didn’t seem to know or care about Glassdoor. But now more than half of the CEOs we speak with mention their Glassdoor reviews in our first meeting.