In recruiting, to the extent analytics have been used, the focus has been on internal recruiting processes. Recruiting departments want to reduce cost-of-hire and time-to-fill and thus may apply some number-crunching to find where they can make improvements. However, the big payoff comes when recruiting can affect operations by improving quality of hire. The recruiting function needs to make the effort to shift its focus from the comfortable world of its own operations and instead spend more time in partnership with the business units to see how recruiting can make a difference there.

Nowhere is analytics more important than in the recruitment of front-line workforces. Robert Yerex, chief economist at the workforce-management vendor Kronos, points out that in many industries the number of front-line workers is so large that you can easily get enough data for sophisticated analysis, and even small improvements add up to very large savings. The recruiting function is a particularly important part of HR for the front-line workforce because these workers typically don’t stay that long. The organization is counting on recruiting to get people who hit the ground running and fit sufficiently well that they don’t leave after the first few weeks. If recruiting fails at this then it creates a huge cost for the organization.

There are many ways analytics can help recruiting functions improve the quality of front-line workers (and we’re getting into details in the April 2009 issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership). Let’s just look at one (as shown in the graphic above as an example) to give you a flavor.

A simple analysis of retention by source of hire can show recruiting how they should aim its sourcing efforts and even lead to quantifying how much extra value one source creates compared to another due to higher retention. This analysis might completely overturn conclusions of a typical cost per hire analysis since retention can be so valuable to a company that it overwhelms the different in cost in using a particular source.

Recruiting departments will continue to be under pressure to cut staff. Wayne Cascio, a professor of management at the University of Colorado in Denver, has done research on which approaches to downsizing work best. His research on downsizing can be found in his book Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs.

We asked Dr. Cascio to share his insights with ERE.

ERE: What is the single most powerful thing a recruiting department can do to protect its staff, even when the number of recruiting requisitions has fallen dramatically?

WC: One of the most enlightened things companies can do is redeploy people to other functions. If you think about recruiters, they are excellent salespeople. I’d think about redeploying them into sales and marketing, where at least they stay with the company.

Lincoln Electric, which makes arc welding equipment, is a great example of the power of redeployment. When hard times hit, it redeployed blue-collar workers to work in what they called “leopard teams.” They were called leopard teams because the goal was to find spots in the market that weren’t being served. These people were trained in sales and marketing then sent out to talk to customers. They discovered there was a market for home welding equipment. This was not a minor discovery; it’s now an $800 million a year business for Lincoln Electric.

If you redeploy recruiters to sales and marketing, not only do you beef up your sales force and hang on to some great recruiters, you will end up with even better recruiters because they will have learned so much about the company, its products, and its customers as part of the experience.

ERE: What else could the head of recruiting do?

WC: One great company to learn from is Reflexite; it makes reflective material like you see on highway signs. It created a “business decline contingency grid.” The grid described four stages of business decline and some key markers to identify each stage. It worked with employees to identify what actions they would take at each stage. The action of employee layoffs only occurred at the fourth stage, which it described as “code red.” Every two weeks, managers met with employees to give them an update as to where things stood.

It’s ideal to do this at a company level, but if that’s not happening there is no reason why the head of the recruiting function couldn’t create something similar for his or her department. There are two main things this does. One is that it creates very open communication and it makes clear that layoffs are a last resort. The other thing it does is engage the employees in finding solutions. People can get very creative when their jobs are at stake. One of the chief findings of my research was that companies should involve employees in finding ways to respond to a downturn, not make decisions behind closed doors.

ERE: Are there any other creative things you’ve seen for departments to minimize the pain of downsizing?

WC: A lot of polls have shown that people prefer to share the pain rather than see a few people get the axe. Xilinx, which makes programmable logic chips, once faced a dramatic collapse of its business, and after consultation with its employees, it cut costs through a mandatory two-week shutdown and some mandatory vacation. Other companies have encouraged people to take various kinds of furloughs or sabbaticals rather than simply fire them and lose the talent altogether.

I’ve also seen companies move people to work schedules where they only work for a few days a week and for the other days get some unemployment compensation. More and more state governments are receptive to these sorts of unemployment compensation agreements as an alternative to having people laid off altogether. This is certainly something recruiting leaders should look into in their state.

Delta Airlines set up employee advisory councils, and one of their insights was that many people join airlines because they like to travel, so instead of offering people severance in cash they gave them an option of taking the severance in terms of flight benefits. The point here is that your staff may have some very good ideas if you take the time to get them involved.

ERE: Do you have any final words of advice?

WC: I don’t want to make it sound like I’m always against layoffs because sometimes you have to get rid of headcount. But if you involve employees and are creative there are many ways you can minimize the damage. We’ve spent years talking about how hard it is to get the best talent; it’s foolish to now throw it overboard the first time the seas get rough.

Russia’s unique culture is — perhaps surprisingly — not such a big issue in recruiting there. In the U.S. we tend to think of Russia as a very foreign place, yet Moscow is in Europe and culturally is not so dramatically different from Western Europe. According to Julia Repryntseva, compensation & benefits and talent director for Alcoa Russia (a company profiled in depth in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), the cultural differences between Russia and Western Europe are no larger than those between, for example, Germany and the UK.

What might be a bigger surprise are the enormous differences in compensation between Moscow and the outlying areas. In the U.S. we expect salaries in the big cities to be higher than in rural areas, but managing regional salary differences is mainly a matter of fine-tuning. In Russia, pay levels in a village may be less than half what is paid in Moscow. Recruiters need to be very aware that the location of the job and the place the applicant is coming from will have a huge impact on what makes for an attractive starting salary.

As in the U.S., job boards are important for sourcing, although rather than Monster and CareerBuilder, the big boards in Russia are Headhunter and Jobs.ru. What is surprising is that it’s hard to find engineers using these job boards. Engineers typically work in the plants, not offices, and as a result are not as plugged into the Internet as we would expect. Other sourcing methods, such as newspaper ads, are needed to reach engineering applicants.

It’s hard to predict how recruiting in a foreign market will differ from recruiting in your home country. The key is to recognize that basic assumptions (such as that all engineers will be Internet-savvy) may prove false in other markets. Going in with an open mind and speaking to people with experience on the ground is essential for successful recruiting outside the U.S.