Viewing February, 2010 Archive
Your 2010 Talent Acquisition Dictionary
This year, as you listen to pundits, experts and talking heads tell you about all the changes that need to be made in recruiting to bring respect and admiration for our profession (overhaul your process, embrace every new technology, restructure your department, add a sourcing team, etc.), you will no doubt be intimidated by the scope of these recommended changes in the face of flat or reduced resources. It is my assertion that this “recommending the extreme” has stymied our growth as an industry.
However, sometimes the biggest changes can occur by simply changing the words we use both internally (within our departments) and externally (with our candidates/customers and hiring managers). Many a book has been written about how changing words leads to changes in perception, performance and promotion. For example:
What does the word “overwhelmed” represent?
- “I have little or no power at the office”
- “My problems are bigger than I am”
- “There’s no hope for relief and it will never change”
What would you be saying and thinking if you switched to saying “In Demand” instead?
- “I’m important”
- “I’m needed”
- “I’m choosing where to give my time and talents”
- “I’m proud”
Yes, words matter, so here is your 2010 Talent Acquisition Dictionary. Start with this and see what changes come simply by changing the words you use every day.
Old: Pipeline
2010: Talent Pool
The word “pipeline” has been many a recruiter’s enemy. Hiring managers consider a pipeline to mean a bucket of interview-ready candidates you simply toss a net into and pull out a never ending supply of candidate choices. The word “pipeline” begs the question “who else do you have?” from a hiring manager. A Talent Pool represents a group of people from which you may be able to find a candidate or two based on the quality of your ongoing relationship with them.
Old: CPH
2010: QOH
Cost-per-hire is a meaningless statistic to anyone who understands the nuances of recruiting. What goes into this measurement is of great debate and a high CPH is not a bad thing if you are hiring key talent, just as a low CPH is not a good thing if you are keeping costs low at the expense of quality. QOH is harder to measure but significantly more meaningful to the business. Simply put, higher quality is better than lower quality regardless of price or time (which is coming next). If you reward your recruiters on QOH instead of CPH the department will flourish.
Old: TTF (I told you it was coming!)
2010: ROH
Time-to-fill has run its course and is no longer (if it ever was) a meaningful measurement to anyone but a recruiter being measured on it. ROH (Retention of Hire) actually means something to your business partners. This should seem self evident yet when you talk about retention with recruiters they are very quick to point fingers at managers, culture etc. (all of which a good recruiter knows about and screens applicants for by the way!). So let me put these in context; if my recruiters have a very low TTF and the “company” has a high turnover rate, why are we measuring TTF? Any business person understands that taking longer to hire the RIGHT person (who stays, performs and is promoted) is significantly preferable to hiring the wrong person (who gets trained, complains and quits or is let go) faster. Really? You want to argue this one?
Old: Applicant (or Candidate)
2010: Customer
The world is flat. No, I didn’t write it, but it’s true. It’s also true that you no longer control your employer brand. Sure, you can pay for awards (remember, I’ve spent 18 years in this business, I know what “branding” means in most recruiting organizations), publish logos from organizations on your career site and talk a great game, all the while, treating people applying for jobs, interviewing for jobs and even getting jobs like cows in a production dairy farm. Guess what? People talk, twitter, Facebook, blog, etc. at increasing rates and what are they talking about? Your terrible “candidate” experience. This one is simple – treat every “applicant” (cold call, networking call etc. for you sourcers out there) like a potential customer of your company and all the above is still true but the talk becomes positive. Again, this one is a no brainer but way too many recruiting departments are “too busy” to attend to the applicant pools they attract and are hurting their companies – watch it, marketing will find out about this as will sales and the C-suite.
And the final entry for today:
Old: Customer (is the hiring manager)
2010: Customer (is the candidate)
In any process development or improvement methodology (I use Tatham) the first step is to define the customer. Same holds true when you start a business – “who is your customer?” is a fundamental step 1. Step 2 is that you CAN NOT have more than one customer! So if you have an existing recruiting process with the “customer” defined as your hiring managers – you cannot be successful in recruiting top talent. This is a simple fact that, once explored with an open mind, becomes obvious. Now let me calm your nerves and tell you that I built my career in Corporate America so I understand the idea that recruiting supports the business units they are assigned to. But let’s not confuse “support” with the definition of “customer”. Yes, you support the Marketing group in their recruiting efforts but if the marketing team is your “customer” then you must have a process that revolves around their needs and wishes, even if those needs and wishes tie your recruiting efforts to the post.
Ok, you need an example. Here’s a poignant one from one of the most respected recruiting leaders in the country today. At this person’s company, the Sr. Leadership was clamoring that they weren’t seeing enough candidates from one of their top competitors (company A) and the pressure was on for the whole recruiting staff to up the ante in pilfering this competitor of top talent. However, my well respected colleague took the initiative to do some research and discovered that in the recent year, of the candidates from Company A that were presented, only 22% were actually hired. And of those, 78% turned over in the first year! So, if this recruiting leader allowed his department to serve the Hiring Manager as customer, his team would be viewed as a complete failure (especially using our new “words” above). Serve the candidate as customer and align your hiring managers as partners and you’ll find more success than you can imagine.
Ok, now simply try using some of these new words in your meetings, discussions and plans in your department and the change that so inspired dread in you as you read the pundits’ advice will come much easier this year.
Silver Bullets
Most of you are familiar with “Silver Bullets” – whether you are a fan of The Lone Ranger (who used them) or of folklore where silver bullets were the only way to kill a werewolf, witch or other monster – everyone knows what silver bullets are.
But today, I’ll be using the idiomatic definition as defined in Wikipedia:
The term has been adopted into a general metaphor, where “silver bullet” refers to any straightforward solution perceived to have extreme effectiveness. The phrase typically appears with an expectation that some new technology or practice will easily cure a major prevailing problem.
This is a fitting definition for folks in recruiting departments across the world. I’ve not run into a Recruiter or Sourcer this year who didn’t look at every technology as a “silver bullet”. First the internet, then Google, Linkedin, and now social networking – you name it and chances are that the hopes and fears of recruiters will have rested on it at one time.
I’m not sure why our profession is always in search of “silver bullets”. I wonder if surgeons are always looking for a silver bullet – that technology or practice that will miraculously make their jobs easy and stress free? Maybe construction folks thought the pneumatic nail gun was their “silver bullet” – after all, no hammering – hooray! No nail pouches around my waist? YES! Finally, my job will be a breeze. And then on Monday, they are back to crawling around 2×4 beams in freezing weather and they finally realize “hey, my job is hard – sure this new tool makes one part of it easier but overall, my job is hard.” There are no silver bullets in recruiting. Recruiting is hard work.
I believe that recruiting should be hard work. Somewhere, with all the technology silver bullets we have at our disposal, the concept of recruiting being hard work got lost on many recruiters. I know of “Recruiters” who harvest applicants from their ATS or simply get finalists referred to them by the hiring managers, process offers, put together hiring packets and move to the next one. Recruiting? I think not. Somewhere we’ve blurred the lines of the verbs “recruiting” and “hiring”. If you are taking pre-packaged applicants and simply moving them through a process to on boarding – you are NOT a recruiter, you are a staffing person or recruiting coordinator or some other version of an HR person. Sure your job may be busy but it’s not hard.
A true recruiter works very hard for their money. Not frantically hard like, “I’ve had to process over 20 offers this week” but rather emotionally hard like, “I spoke to my candidate’s husband last night and he grilled me on the career path his wife would have should she accept our SVP offer” or mentally hard like, “I cold called 27 candidates and got 25 “no’s” before I found my two candidates”. Recruiting is and always will be a unique mix of art and science and those people who do it and do it well will attest to it being hard work.
As always, the genesis of the movement to processing rather than recruiting lies solely in what the organization measures and rewards in their staff. What you measure you promote. Measuring and rewarding recruiters on time-to-fill, number of hires made in a year etc. drive processing. To drive recruiting, you need to measure and reward things like quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires.
Measuring quality-of-hire, retention and business impact of hires is “hard” you say? No Silver Bullets – I told you, recruiting (and managing recruiters) is hard work!
