http://www.recruitingblogs.com/profiles/blog/show?id=502551%3ABlogPost%3A247774

It is interesting to see all the responses and thoughts.
All I can say is we hire people to do job. It up to the individual to give us the correct information throughout the interview process. The issue with all of this is people sometimes tell us what we want to hear and not necessarily the truth. In this case, it doesn’t matter how good the recruiting process is or how mature the retention programs are, it just won’t work out. We have the most unreliable product. A product that can think and make bad decisions.

Now all that being said, my opinion is biased because I am on the recruiting side and will never hold an HR position. But that is just me.

I suppose it is theoretically possible in an ideal organization to design a system which resolves this contradiction (and still pays its recruiters a lot of money), but I am not personally familiar with that organization.

Cheers,

In my experience, that has been outside of my area of influence. Do I as a recruiter become an enforcer of the process when in fact, I don’t own it?

I think it only makes sense to lump the two together, within the same department…i.e.,HR. There should be one manager over both and then that one person, should have a team dedicated to recruitment, and then other individuals who oversee the onboarding and retention process. This way communications between the two can happen, easily.

You wouldn’t have to recruit if you retained and you wouldn’t have to retain if you didn’t recruit. So…they are a direct effect of one another.

I agree with Richard. It’s clear that making adjustments in how you recruit can affect the retention process. So the teams need to work closely together and communicate.

For example, since learning about and then joining Climber.com, I can clearly see that job matching from the beginning of the recruiting process will make the retention process a heck of a lot easier. It’s why we’re in business. It’s why our client partners love our site. Job matching makes sense, it cuts turnover costs, lessens recruitment cycle times and will help retention efforts because you know you have the right fit from the beginning.

Each team can gain valuable insight from the other on their processes and if changes need to be made. Retention Team can offer a lot of insight as to what is broken in the recruiting process. The recruiting team can then gain valuable feedback from the Retention Team if things have changed within the organization and the Recruiting Team needs to change their ‘pitch’ to external candidates.

These two teams have to work closely and be overseen by the same person, otherwise you’ll have a major disconnect within the organization.

What is lost in that transaction is that the most important factors in job satisfaction are engagement and comfort. You can have the best skill set in the world, but if you like being left alone to do your work, and your company requires you to participate as part of a team, then you are definitely not the best fit.

As the article goes on to address, though, job match is the key to engagement, which is the key to retention. However, isn’t the act of recruiting finding the right person to match to the job? It’s my feeling that this relationship between recruiting and retention is absolutely vital and relevant. Though, it may be that they are not directly connected. Maybe it follows this logic statement: IF Recruiting affects Job Match AND Job Match affects Engagement AND Engagement affects Retention THEN Recruiting affects Retention.

Nice article to get the juices flowing though!

Job matching involves knowing ?what it takes? to perform well in each position (i.e. using formal job analysis), identifying individuals who have what it takes (i.e. conducting valid job-related assessments) and attracting job-matched talent with well founded expectations and mutually satisfactory ?employment deals?.

Job-matching drives job performance and job-matched performance boosts retention ? employees who perform well in positions that suit them tend to stay. When employees are ready for advancement, the same job-matching disciplines will underwrite successful promotions that further reinforce retention.

Employee engagement involves emotional connections between employees and their position/employer that lead to discretionary efforts on the job (i.e. more performance). Those same emotional connections also predispose employees to stay, long term (i.e. higher retention).

Employee engagement depends on individual and collective perceptions about the workplace and the employment deals. Financial compensation, time & flexibility, health & family benefits, learning & development, work climate and management climate all contribute, for better or worse. Hiring managers make huge differences, too, because talent tends to ?join good companies? and ?quit bad bosses?.

Job matching drives performance and retention. High levels of employee engagement also drive performance and retention. Job matching and employee engagement operate synergistically to deliver ever higher levels of performance and retention.

High levels of employee engagement also help to attract candidates who have what it takes. This happens several ways. Highly engaged employees like where they work and tell everyone they know. That creates well deserved favorable buzz for the employer’s employment brand. It also helps drive employee referrals ? an excellent source of talent (i.e. quality and quantity).

One thing for sure: talent will win the talent wars and only their employers of choice will share in the victory. Job-matched, highly engaged talent creates mutually reinforcing conditions for achieving high levels of performance and retention. In turn, that enables the perfect storm, by adding high levels of attraction (i.e. employer of choice) to high levels of organizational performance and talent retention.

It matters little how we slice and dice the relationship between recruiting and retention, as long as we job match and engage talent to deliver performance, retention and attraction, too! We have the tools to measure and manage job match and employee engagement, superbly. Seize the initiative! Reap all of the rewards!

The other aphorism? ‘People don’t leave companies; they leave managers.’ The broad range of retention issues goes way beyond onboarding and way beyond the honeymoon period in a new job, and in my experience the responsibility for those issues most often lies with management, not the recruiter.

If professional sporting teams/organisations (who, as Dr Sullivan is often reminding us, are normally using market leading recruitment philosophies and practices) don’t lump these two functions together then why do companies?

The process of bringing new talent into the organisation is not recruitment, it’s called recruitment & selection. Recruitment is the process of creating a pool of qualified talent to go forward into the selection process. Selection is about identifying the candidate with the best prediction of future on the job performance. These two activities are separate & distinct & require quite different skill sets & training.
Retention certainly starts & is included in the selection process. But if you consider that a good part of the qualifying phase of recruitment is involved with delivering a keen, eager & motivated candidate into final selection, then I think that recruitment also has a part to play in the wider view of retention by helping to get employees through that initial on-boarding period & into longer term retention activities.

To those who want to argue that the linkage between recruiting and retention is strong and direct, I will gladly agree that there is, indeed, some limited correlation between quality of hire and retention. However, as Harry demonstrated, the factors that influence the length of an employment relationship are much more complex than just being recruited and then staying there.

The answer to why recruiting is tagged with the negative aspects of retention is, as Dan stated, because recruiting is easier to blame than the HR folks responsible for training, compensation, benefits, employee relations, etc…all of which functions have at least as much impact on the tenure of an employee as the initial recruiting process did.

Look at any survey of why people change jobs and the reasons will be very much in line with those presented here by Harry. Has anyone seen a survey which reports that a major source of turnover is because individuals took the wrong job specifically because they were influenced to do so by a recruiter? Clearly, there’s considerably more involved in retention than just the initial recruiting process – so why allow ourselves to be held responsible for something beyond our control?

On the other hand, one could argue that most of what HR does (or should do) is support management–particularly when it comes to measuring what factors (de)motivate their staff. That’s data that’s useful for recruitment, retention, training, you name it.

One could also argue that many supervisors and managers are so busy simply trying to do their day-to-day work that they have little time to focus on issues like retention. That’s where internal consultants (HR) come in.

So if there’s something wrong with ‘Recruitment and Retention’ perhaps it’s that it’s not broad ENOUGH–particularly in small organizations that don’t have the resources to create separate functions. Perhaps the en vogue ‘talent management’ would be more appropriate.

But really, some very interesting points. These days a big push is to link performance management software to recruiting software- of placing quality of hire metrics in the laps of recruiters. I think recruiters do play an important role in quality control, but overall I am with you: there is way more to the ouput of employee performance than the input of raw material. Like blaming teachers for dumb kids- not bloody likely….

I do disagree with you on the notion that having recruiters spend time on internal movement activities and calling it ‘internal recruiting’ represents a misuse of a recruiter’s time.

Many firms are so large that the notional fact of being employed by that firm may mean little in interactions with other units/divisions when it comes to job duties and compensation. A fresh hire in other words if the company directory looks like a phone book.