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Revamping Recruiting
Today's turbulent economy poses a special set of strategic hiring challenges for human resource executives, none so perplexing as how to attract the top talent currently being driven into the labor market by lay-offs, acquisitions and buy-outs. These are candidates who may have been out of reach before and would be outstanding employees for your organization. Or, perhaps they are not right for your company but you won't know until you interview them. The best HR professionals seize these times to assess their talent benches, identify the skill gaps and align their recruitment strategy with the business. Not only will this help your company weather today's economic storm but it will increase its long-term competitive advantage by allowing the business to capitalize on top talent now and as the economy recovers. Before you can execute on a strategy to secure the right talent for your organization, however, you need to ensure you have a sound recruiting methodology in place. We all know that good hiring decisions positively impact an organization and drive up business results -- and bad hiring decisions negatively influence productivity and drive down quality and morale. The thing to note is that it costs the same amount of money to make a good hire as to make a bad hire. The trick to good hiring is the interview process. Organizations that spend more time up-front preparing for and conducting interviews see a positive return on their investment by making better hires. Organizations that don't invest in interviewing often end up spending far more time and resources managing and resolving issues related to a bad hire. So, how do you ensure your recruiting team is hiring for success? First, ask yourself some critical questions: * Do you have a sourcing strategy? * Do you have the right recruiters in the right roles? * Are you hiring based on agreed-upon success profiles that are aligned with business goals? * Do recruiters have the skills or knowledge needed to hire for technical roles or do they need training? * What's the candidate experience like with your organization? * Are your recruiters true partners with the hiring managers with whom they work? If you don't know the answer to these questions, then the first step is assessing your internal recruiting processes and recruiter skill levels. This is a key component toward developing effective recruiting plans that significantly impact the business. Granted, this step can be daunting, but it's important. Let's take a real-life example. A few years ago, I was an HR executive for a global financial services firm that was experiencing 120 percent turnover -- translating into more than 800 open positions a month and an average of 100 open requisitions per technical recruiter. In addition, hiring managers were constantly complaining to HR about the recruiting process. Hiring managers said the average candidate experience was so poor it was damaging the organization's employment brand. They bemoaned the recruiters' lack of knowledge and understanding of the technology used for candidate management. They hated the fact that the recruiting process created a "black hole" into which potential candidates disappeared but were later hired by competitors. Their questions were endless. Why can't we attract the right talent? Why didn't we see this candidate sooner? Why did that candidate turn us down in the final interview? When we asked ourselves the hard questions above, we quickly realized we had organizational-design issues, technology-training needs and candidate-management flaws that needed to be addressed. It was clear we had to overhaul our recruiting process. We started to do so by adopting the following four strategic recruiting practices: 1. Create service-level agreements with hiring managers. Creating SLAs between the recruiter and the hiring manager sets a solid foundation for hiring top employees. This agreement must outline the hiring profile for the position -- such as what are the key deliverables expected of this role -- both in the short- and long-term; what does success look like; and what behaviors, skills and attitudes has the hiring manager found to be most effective in this role, etc. In the case mentioned above, we also identified the number of interviews each candidate should go through, and who would participate in each interview and at what stage in the process. We ensured there was agreement between the recruiter and hiring manager on their respective roles in the process and on the messaging to candidates around the position. A critical component of an SLA is to ensure that there is data integration between all parties. Having a formal process where the interview team can review and analyze the information obtained on each candidate ensures the best hiring decision will be made. 2. Communicate the value proposition. Remember, everything a candidate experiences during the hiring process leaves an impression and works to define your company and the value of the opportunity for the candidate. In our case, our ineffective communication and lack of process was damaging our employment brand. We worked to improve the defects by establishing a hotline where candidates could call for automated updates on open positions and request to speak to a live person. We also shortened our response times to candidates once resumes were submitted and/or hiring decisions were made. Lastly, we worked with our company's advertising agency to ensure that our job descriptions and messaging would attract our target candidates. Other best practices around communicating the value proposition or the "what's in it for me?" factor include setting proper expectations, explaining your hiring process on your Web site, researching corresponding compensation structures and clearly communicating to the candidate any opportunities for growth and skill development in the position, as well as the company culture and benefits. 3. Align the HR team with business goals. All leaders know that you need the right people in the right seats to compete effectively. In the case described above, our recruiters were spending too much time sourcing candidates and not enough on interviewing to make successful hires. In addition, most of our recruiters were not technical specialists in the areas in which they recruited. If we were ever going to successfully decrease turnover, we needed to examine the allocation of responsibilities and increase our recruiters' skills. We hired three full-time sourcing specialists who had expertise in the fields they were sourcing for; these employees were able to look at a resume and know if a candidate's experience was a fit for the job. This took all the responsibility of sourcing off the recruiter and ensured that the more qualified candidates were moved into the interview process. Oftentimes, when it comes to hiring technical positions such as IT staff, recruiters lack the knowledge and understanding of IT to adequately meet hiring manager needs. Some straightforward ways to get around this are to offer IT recruitment training and access to reference tools that allow recruiters to stay abreast of changes in the industry -- enabling them to provide better sourcing and screening and to work more effectively with managers to ensure expectations are realistic. 4. Develop behavioral-interview guides.
Developing behavioral-interview guides that were geared toward the particular positions we were recruiting for was an essential step toward achieving our goals. These guides, created by the recruiter and hiring manager, outlined the type of information needed from the candidate (as agreed upon in the SLA) and questions that should be asked to obtain this information. For each of these questions, we had the candidate describe a specific situation that was applicable to the question, the action he/she took in the situation, and the results -- what happened -- as a result of the action he/she took. This sounds easy, but oftentimes you only get part of the information from a candidate. Don't allow your recruiters or hiring managers to move on to the next question, until the candidate has clearly explained the situation, action and results. Candidates may describe a situation and then say, "we did" or "the team did." This is where your team needs to emphasize the need to know what the candidate specifically did in that situation. When using behavioral interviews, make sure hiring managers have realistic expectations. For example, IT managers may want someone with seven years' experience with a particular software when, in fact, that software has only been around a year or two. Using behavioral-interview guides enables the organization to obtain the specific behavioral information needed to accurately predict future performance. Having a consistent, behavioral-based approach ensures each candidate undergoes the same process and is evaluated across the same criteria. It also ensures that the process is legally credible and defensible. Our results were impressive. Within one year of employing these four basic strategic staffing components, the average number of open positions per technical recruiter dropped from 100 to between 25 and 30 positions. Complaints from hiring managers ceased, elevating the perception of staffing throughout the organization. We also took the time to review the overall effectiveness of our recruiting organization -- from skill sets of the recruiting team to the utilization and effectiveness of the technology platform supporting the recruiting organization and the impact of the candidate experience on our employment brand. So, the lesson here is that, in today's tough economic times, you need to do all you can to ensure that when your organization can hire, that the candidates selected are the best choices for your organization. And, the best way to do this is to ensure you have sound, behavioral-based recruiting and selection processes in place to support the hiring needs of the business.
Sandra Lowe is a vice president at Veritude, a Boston-based staffing firm, where she is responsible for leading recruiting projects for the company's Consulting Services team as well as serving as lead consultant and relationship manager for Veritude clients. She has more than 25 years of experience in consulting, corporate human resources and HR operations. She holds both a B.S. and M.B.A. from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Lowe is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a Certified Staffing Professional (American Staffing Association).
March 2, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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