Post and Pray Is a Failing Strategy

Jared Black learned what bad hiring looks like before he ever sold a placement. He was importing flowers into Miami, building bouquets for grocery stores, and renting his warehouse labor from staffing agencies. The people who showed up were a lottery.

"I had people showing up to work with like a sticky note and they would say, it's just my first name on it. They had no idea what their job was. They had no idea what they're supposed to be doing," he says. Some arrived in shorts for a job inside a refrigerator. "They were working in 35 degree coolers with shorts and tank tops," he says. They would look at the cooler, turn around, and walk back out.

When he called the agency, he got a shrug. "So zero accountability and you know, you can't run a business like that. So something had to change."

The flower business does not forgive that kind of week. Labor was the second biggest cost after product, and the season is short. "Flowers is basically, have Valentine's, you have Mother's Day, and maybe you have Christmas season," Black says. "if you fail those two out of three of those holidays, your business is done." The agencies, meanwhile, were operating on a batting average. "it's kinda like in baseball where you can strike out seven out of 10 times and you're still a good hitter, right?"

So he called colleagues in the flower space to ask how they were staffing. Everyone was using the same vendors and getting the same results. That was the opening. He launched New Vine Employment Group and went back to the same people he had been selling flowers to, telling them he knew their business better than anybody else and asking for a shot.

Today the company does mostly direct placement for skilled, high impact roles, and Black has the same conversation with clients ten or twelve times a week. Their process is broken, and the broken process has a name. Post and pray. "You post on a job board and you pray that the right person is going to find it," Black says. It barely worked in 2015 and it does not work now, because the math is against it. He calls it fishing in the smallest, least populated pond available, since the people worth hiring already have jobs. "Nearly 80 percent of the total talent market today is passive talent."

Passive means working, performing, not scrolling job boards, and still open if the right thing lands in front of them. You have to find them, engage them, and offer something their current employer cannot. Post and pray fails in two directions instead. Either nobody applies, or the wrong people apply by the hundreds and somebody on staff burns days reading resumes that were never going to work. Either way the seat stays open and the bill goes unwritten.

Black puts a number on that bill. A mishire "could cost six figures depending on the role," he says, and the research he last checked put the average professional mishire somewhere between 250 and 350 thousand dollars once you count training, department time, and revenue lost while the seat is cold. "It's the largest, most hidden cost that most businesses never see."

His fix is a five step method, and he runs it on his own team before he sells it to anyone. "I drink the Kool-Aid. Whatever I pitch to my clients, I do the exact same thing." The steps are the X factor that makes a specific person great at a specific job, verified skills, values, personality, and growth.

Verification is where he gets blunt. "Most people just take the CV as truth, right? Like, it's Bible. Who says it's Bible? It's because they gave it to you?" So he puts candidates in the environment for a dry run. Values are where he says most hires quietly die, personality is where he has three and a half years of assessment data showing the people who stay share traits by department, and growth is the one nobody solves for. If the title a candidate wants is one you cannot give, they are already leaving.

The AI part of his business, a product called Vine, sits on top of all of that rather than replacing it. It identifies and ranks talent in minutes so his team spends its hours on outreach instead of discovery. Black is careful about how much credit he gives the software. "I look at AI as a tool, nothing more," he says.

He learned the limit of tools in a hotel parking lot in Colorado at five in the morning. His prebooked Uber never came. No drivers, no cabs, a flight closing. He started calling local limo companies off Google until a man picked up. "I'm stuck, I need to get to the airport in the next 30 minutes, can you help me? And he goes, I'll get you there." Fifteen minutes later a car pulled up and Black made his gate. "no matter how great technology is and how convenient it could feel for us, nothing will replace a human and the service of a human being."

Process over pressure every time.