In fact, not too long ago I was a reluctant participant in the over-structuring of recruiting processes in what had been a highly-successful TPR firm. The result was that the real recruiters (sales people) became slaves to the process and many lost sight of the art. But those recruiters who resisted were still successful, presenting a conundrum that management understood but didn’t know how to resolve. The successes of the ‘artists’ provided negative reinforcement for others who were inclined to resist, resulting in an overall failure of the firm to embrace what might have worked. Provided it been instituted in a judicious, properly paced time frame.

In a nut shell, we never heard admiration from candidates for our processes – they accepted positions because they were convinced of the quality of the opportunities and emotionally charged. Our standing joke in the office was about how IT candidates evaluated opportunities by subjecting them to the same rigor they used in their work – intense analysis, qualification, quantification, etc. And when they finally concluded this exercise, they made an emotional decision. Now that might seem off-the-wall, but that’s more truth to that than you might think.

Dr. Sullivan is right on the mark about management and metrics, too. Many times we’ve tried to dazzle our clients with metrics on our efforts in their behalf which was most usually met with a yawn. But they never, ever forget the star that you helped them capture, and will often use that person as the standard for future hires. We’ve had account managers who built years-long relationships with clients based on a single great hire. Great recruiters make this a repeatable process, and that’s an art.

Happy Holidays

I honor what you say about the value of relationships and that recruiting is an art. In fact we have integrated SPOKE into our recruiting organization to maximize our networking capabilities. Yet at a macro level what I am trying to communicate is, if the technology and process is broken then the people can’t do what they were hired to to, that is recruit… What happens is the ‘art of recruiting’ or those critical skills a recruiter was hired for, begin to atrophy.

Rich, this is a systemic problem – that cannot be fixed ONLY with better recruiting skills. WE must address things more holistically and look at the combination of people, process and technology.

I can speak to this first hand. I pride myself on being a strong recruiting professional. I recently was a staffing manager within an org. where the technology and process was broken. No matter how strong my skills were, they got masked with the pivot tables and excel reports needed to defend ‘why’ certain things were not happening. Whereas, here within the EDS Outsourcing practice, I own technology. We have a business intelligence application that integrates with all of our HR systems. We can begin to look at an organization and truely understand what needs to be pipelined, what needs to be fixed and how best to source / recruit for a hard to fill position. The recruiters that we support can leverage this data real time through a recruiter dashboard, and give hiring managers a report that cannot be argued with. It fosters better relationships, trust and a better quality of hire.

While Recruiters must have excellent skills, these skills die if the organization does not have the infrastructure to support them in their jobs. We need an integrated technology infrastructure to get recruiters out of the job as high paid administrators and back into a true recruiting role. Then we can begin to hone in on networking, cold calling, internet mining, etc.

Tracey

Technology is not the only step in the transformation process, but it is an imperative fundamental upon which all other true progress will be built.

In an ideal world the vast majority of hires should be entry level through referrals.
With the occassional fresh blood from another set of best practices. ATS while helpful is relied on to mask the lack of true people skills.

Rich Goldberg

While I chuckled at the content of your article -it also frustrated me. For years as leaders we have blamed it on the recruiter and your article continues that cycle.

As recruiting leaders we need to take a step back and look at the Staffing Function as an integrated component within Talent Management.
At the enterprise level, we need to re-explore the value of People, Process and Technology.

What is missing today is:
1. Integrated HR technology framework
2. True business analytics, that allows us to pull data simutaneously from multiple systems to really get true understanding of attrition, quality talent, management capabilities, diversity(real time). Instead we have lots of excel spread sheets, with bad, disparate data that is a min. of 1 month old.
3. An integrated solution that manages the talent process from prospect through employee. An ATS only manages a piece of the process. Today recruiters are still using multiple systems to manage the rest. It is called multi-tasking at its best.
4. Better process. Get recruiters out of the volume or administrative business and integrate technology solutions that automate the volume aspects of recruiting. Let recruiters focus on positions that have impact in the boardroom.
5. People: Change Management: Technology and leveraging technology requires a change in skill sets. Once the technology infrastructure is put in place to support, hiring, retention, better workforce analytics, then you can pick on the recruiting profession.

We as a profession have quite a bit of work in front of us. The recruitment process outsourcing association that is being formed to address these issues. HR Outsourcing firms are addressing this from an entire HR Platform and according to the Human Resources Institute Trend Watcher, Outsourcing is seen as the super highway to achieving these challenges listed above.
Instead of talking about how bad recruiters are, we need to talk about re-tooling our people, process and technologies.

Tracey Friend