• Corporate recruiters have access to tens of thousands of active candidates via job boards and specialized career sites.
• Corporate recruiters have access to information about tens of thousands of inactive candidates via a variety of Web tools ranging from Google to ZoomInfo to LinkedIn.
• Thousands of corporate recruiters have been certified in advanced sourcing techniques from firms like AIRS and the Adler Group.
• ATS and hiring management systems not only house customized resume databases, but they also enable recruitment processes to be streamlined so that recruiters are able to spend less time on operational details and more time delivering value-added services to hiring managers.
• Once the sole resource of search firms, research, and sourcing firms provide rapid candidate generation services to corporate recruiters at affordable prices.

…Why aren’t search firms out of business?

Out of Business? Search is Thriving!

In the face of all of this, the executive search Industry is not only nowhere near close to going under, it’s thriving. (The current economic downturn will temporarily halt this, but overall growth in the search industry has been explosive over the last 10 years.)

Consider this:

• Kennedy Information reports that the global market for executive search services is $6-8 billion annually, and that growth in that industry since 1990 has been “staggering.”
• Korn/Ferry produced record revenues and earnings in Fiscal Year 2008 ($790 million/38%), an increase of just under 50% from 2006.
• The average placement fee at Heidrick & Struggles reached $114,900 in 2007, up from 2003’s average of $81,100. That, coupled with growth in total search assignments, created 2007 revenues that increased 95% from 2003.
• According to ExecuNet, search firm recruiting assignments rose 24% in 2007, and 25% were adding staff at the end of last year.
• Average compensation for a search consultant can range between $200-$600,000+ annually.

That the search industry has been growing may not be surprising, but the speed at which it is skyrocketing is, especially in the face of all the investment made over that same period into internal recruiting functions.

After all, it wasn’t too many years ago that staffing industry pundits were predicting the demise of the search industry, in the same manner that real estate brokers and stock brokers were supposed to disappear, thanks to the power of the Internet and its open access to information. After all, who needs a third party when all of their previously proprietary information is available for free or inexpensively on the Web?

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

There is an old axiom in the search business about competition that goes like this: “Other search firms aren’t our competition — competent internal recruiting functions are.”

When an internal function is competent and able to fill openings effectively, there’s no need to hire external firms. Therefore, as internal competence grows, more and more difficult positions are serviced in-house and fewer (or no) roles require external assistance. As a result, the market for external search shrinks as fewer positions make their way to external firms.

But this is in fact the opposite of what has happened: the demand for external firms has increased exponentially. This phenomenal growth in the search business tell us that search firms do a better job, or at least that they are perceived to do a better job, by the executives who choose to engage them over their own internal recruiting group.

Now before you pummel me with negative commentary, understand that I wish there were another conclusion to draw. But there really isn’t, and facing our shortfalls is the first step toward fixing the problem.

The recruiting service that is perceived to be the most valuable by executives is recruiting the top roles. This is easily proven by looking at the high fees executives are willing to pay for a single hire. The average search fee of $110,000 for one hire is more than most corporate recruiters make in an entire year.

The reason that executives are willing to pay high fees for search services — and worse, to not even consider giving search assignments to many internal functions — is because they perceive the external provider to be a more credible, capable, and more reliable source of talent. Why is this so?

It’s All About the Methods

There are several key differentiators for search firms that clearly distinguish them from the typical internal recruiting function. Although there are more, here are the top five that internal recruiting functions can adapt that will improve their outcomes dramatically. And, these can be integrated into most recruiting functions quickly and easily:

Run the assignment like a project and dictate methods

The first thing that search firms do differently from most corporate functions is to take absolute control of the project. This includes a documented project plan, timelines, and crystal-clear delineations of roles, responsibilities, and mutual deliverables.

It also includes getting the client to agree to follow the search firm’s project methodology, not the client’s. A critical mistake we often see corporate recruiting teams make is asking higher-ranking leaders how they would like to see the project unfold. Expert service providers dictate methods so that they can guarantee the results. Insisting on following the correct methodology is a key step that is too often missed by internal teams.

Force the client to define their hiring requirement in light of market realities

A good search consultant will excel at making sure the hiring requirement is specific, realistic, and actionable in the talent market.

This can be challenging since managers often provide requirements that read more like a wish list rather than a carefully considered formula for success. We have observed internal recruiters accepting assignments that contain so many hiring requirements that they cannot be fulfilled in the market.

Recruiters should take an active role in helping to build the hiring requirement right from the outset. It may be necessary to challenge the hiring manager on unrealistic requirements, too many requirements, or too broad a requirements set.

Secure the proper level of project funding

Why do we fund search firms with high fees, while internal organizations are forced to continually drive down the costs of recruiting to lower levels?

In some ways, internal organizations themselves are to blame because they have positioned their value equation in terms of cost reductions. They brag about reducing cost-per-hire and total recruiting spend. Yet, the reality is that some positions will cost more — and perhaps dramatically more — to fill than the average.

No search firm would accept an assignment for less than the cost of delivery. Internal teams shouldn’t either. To gain approvals for higher levels of funding, make the value of the service crystal clear and avoid focusing on the cost of the service.

Hire top recruiters with deep industry experience/subject-matter expertise

The most clearly visible difference between search firms and internal functions is the level of recruiter working in each.

In the course of our consulting work, we’ve met plenty of excellent internal recruiters. Unfortunately, we have met many more who really aren’t qualified for recruiting roles. Worse, we’ve meet some recruiting leaders who really don’t have much of a background in recruiting.

To really excel at recruiting, internal functions should take a lesson in staffing their recruiting functions with strong, industry-savvy recruiters who possess foundation knowledge in recruiting as a profession. Start by hiring a seasoned recruitment leader who understands talent markets, marketing principles, selling, internal consulting, and knowledge transfer. Select staff members who have been trained in the recruiting industry at some point in their careers and have enjoyed success in contingent/search roles but also understand the realities and limitations of internal recruiting functions.

Continually work a database of industry contacts/potential future hires

This is straight out of Recruiting 101, but let’s face it; search firms do a better job of building and maintaining recruiting networks than internal functions.

Part of the reason, of course, is that fees give them ample funding to do so. But another large part is that they are serious about recruiting for the long haul, and internal organizations are serious about recruiting to fill the open req in front of them.

This difference in focus changes everything about their behavior. When recruiters are pressured to fill today’s openings, they have little time to focus on cultivating tomorrow’s potential hires.

Most companies have plenty of resumes in the ATS/hiring management systems but have not built the capability or the know-how to stay abreast of who’s who and who’s where in the target talent markets critical to their growth. Building a robust database of key talent targets, engaging those targets in meaningful dialogue, and nursing relationships over time will pay big recruiting dividends over the long haul.

If corporate recruiting functions were truly great at recruiting and had the credibility they seek with top executives, then there would be limited need for third-party search firms. Realistically, there will always be a need for competent search firms. But the accelerated growth of this industry over the last 5-10 years indicates that internal functions are failing to deliver the most critical, and arguably the most valuable, recruiting services in a way that puts internal functions on equal footing with our external counterparts.

It’s time we took a hard look at why.

The findings (full report available) are interesting. For example:

• 95% of organizations are operating without a dedicated sourcing function. Further, 28% of organizations reported that their recruiters are performing all of the sourcing.
• 44% of organizations are engaged in some level of recruitment outsourcing. However, 82% of these organizations outsource less than 25% of their total positions.
• The biggest impediments to recruitment success are the ability to find quality candidates and process delays caused by hiring managers.
• Only 21% of organizations are using Web 2.0 tools for recruiting, with only 1% considering themselves experts. LinkedIn and industry-specific sites were reported as being the most effective.
• The most commonly tracked recruiting metrics are time-to-fill, time-to-start, first-year turnover, manager satisfaction, and cost-per-hire. Few organizations reported tracking more sophisticated measures.

The survey’s overall results show that recruiting is a function in transition from older practices to more modern ones.

First, with 44% of companies engaged in some degree of outsourced partnerships for recruitment services, RPO is gaining increasing traction as a viable option for solving recruitment challenges. In most (82%) cases, companies are outsourcing less than 25% of their openings, showing a trend to move slowly into outsourcing partnerships. With 62% of companies reporting that they intend to maintain that level of outsourcing within the next 12 months, it seems likely that companies will continue to adopt RPO solutions in select areas but on a somewhat limited basis.

This data also points out just how much room there is in the marketplace for the RPO industry to expand.

With 47% of companies reporting all of their recruiting work is still executed by direct employees, it will be telling to watch over the next two years how much of that work moves to outsourced partners, and how fast.

Secondly, it is clear that talent management is in its formative years as a function, with implementations ranging from fully formed, to partially formed, to unformed. Interestingly, there is little integration (only 13%) of the external recruiting function within talent management. It seems to us that knowing the external talent landscape is a critical data input for making informed, accurate internal talent management decisions, and we are surprised that many firms are making critical internal decisions with seemingly little or no regard to the external talent market.

We expect that as talent management matures and grows more robust, we will see companies move to models that fully integrate internal talent movement, talent management, and external recruitment, and that data from all sources will be considered fundamental to forming effective and accurate workforce planning strategies.

There are interesting paradoxes in some of the recruiting staff deployment data. For example, the No. 1 challenge that inhibits recruitment success is the inability to source and find qualified candidates for critical, hard-to-fill positions. These positions, in most cases, account for 25-50% of a recruiter’s workload.
Yet, nearly all companies have recruiters working on positions that are filled with internal and external candidates. On the face, time spent handling internal movement takes away valuable time for external sourcing and relationship development that is critical for finding high-demand talent. So, in a very real sense, recruiting functions are architecting their way into delivery problems.

Another paradoxical finding was that although sourcing was cited as the No. 1 issue, only 5% of companies have dedicated sourcing functions. It seems obvious that if sourcing is the number one issue, but no staff is dedicated to sourcing, then the problem will persist, and perhaps worsen. This is especially true when recruiters are unable to focus 100% on the external market.

The data also revealed a relatively slow adaptation of Web 2.0 tools and methods, with less than a quarter of companies regularly using any Web 2.0 or social networking tool in their recruiting solution. Additionally, most companies report that they are measuring only the most fundamental of staffing metrics. This could be due in large part to the fact that most of recruiting’s key systems come with difficult-to-use or very limited reporting capabilities. The effective adaptation of Web 2.0 technologies and better analytics tools into daily recruiting delivery practice looks like the next significant technology challenge for recruiting functions.

Overall, the data seems to reflect that recruiting is experiencing an unsettled period. With RPO and Talent Management in their infancy, increasing competition for top talent creating sourcing issues, a lack of clarity around the best resourcing approaches to address the sourcing challenges, and the continuing need to adapt new technologies, leaders of recruiting functions are juggling a host of moving parts.

The companies that most accurately tie their recruiting functions to their business goals and build the solution set that enables efficient and effective recruitment delivery will fair well in this changing environment.

Over the past few years, the term “recruiting” has increasingly become almost automatically appended with “and retention.”

The titles of VP, Director, or Manager of Recruiting & Retention have become pretty common, and many industry commentators clump the two together, almost perfunctorily.

I don’t get the connection.

Most organizations carelessly use these terms, so it may help to gain some clarity by agreeing on our definitions.

First, “recruiting” refers to those activities that are undertaken to convince employees of other companies to leave their current job in favor of a new one. By definition, the end result of this process should be the addition of new workers to our payroll who were not on that payroll the day before we recruited them. In other words, recruiting results in the influx of new talent into a company.

An important point here: this definition renders the phrase “internal recruitment” oxymoronic, and properly so. There is no such thing as internal recruitment, since you cannot, by definition, recruit someone to join the company who is already an employee. You can internally move, redeploy, reassign, or transfer them, but you cannot recruit them. Having recruiters spend time on internal movement activities and calling it “internal recruiting” represents a misuse of a recruiter’s time that will decrease the effectiveness of a function’s ability to actually recruit new talent into the company.

On the other hand, “retention” refers to those activities that a company undertakes to keep its highly valued current employees engaged and committed to the company. In other words, after workers are recruited, hired, trained, and productive, we initiate certain actions and engage in certain behaviors to encourage their ongoing loyalty to our firm.

Many companies do a nice job of making new employees feel welcome and provide excellent onboarding programs to assist with boosting retention from the employee’s first day. But these also occur after a new employee has been recruited, and after recruiting has moved on to finding candidates to fill the next requisition.

Separate and Distinct

If “recruiting” focuses on external talent who does not yet work here, and “retention” focuses on keeping the employees who are already here, aren’t these two activities separate and distinct at their core? Don’t they require vastly different activities and different skill sets to accomplish? Why do we automatically lump these activities together?

The most common thinking, of course, ties the quality of recruiting to retention performance using the argument that if the recruiting function hires the right people in the first place, our workers will have higher engagement, will be more career-oriented, and will stick around longer. But there are a few big problems with this argument.

First, in all but a few rare cases, recruiting doesn’t make the hire; the hiring manager does. Almost universally, the most the recruiting function can do is create the slate of finalist candidates (if they even do that), and the manager takes it from there.

Recruiting may have a vote, but it is rarely a veto. And on those rare occasions when it is a veto, it is not an override veto: recruiting may be able to stop a hire, but it can never force one on a hiring manager who doesn’t want the candidate, no matter how poor the manager’s reasoning.

Turnover’s Fuzzy Logic

The other problem with the argument is that it reflects fuzzy logic about the prime causes of turnover. While a good recruiter should be able to increase the quality of the candidate slate, and therefore increase the quality of the final hire, a bad line manager, poor management practices, and unkind co-workers can frustrate the greatest hire in the world, causing them to leave in record time.

Does a recruiter have control over any of these factors? I have never read a study that links attrition to recruiting practices. I have read hundreds of studies, though, that clearly link attrition with bad management practices, poor selection practices (remember, the manager makes that decision), bad bosses, boring work, lack of career-enhancing opportunities, and unsatisfactory compensation opportunities. Notice that none of these qualities have anything to do with recruiting.

Another challenge in merging these functions is that the capabilities required to be a great recruiter have little overlap with the skills required to build impactful, measurable retention programs.

Great recruiters have an external focus on the market of people who do not work here and may not have ever thought about working here. Retention initiatives are internally focused on people who have already decided to work here. Why would we think that one human being would be good at or be able to split their time between the two worlds? In fact, both roles are large enough to ensure that if you are doing one well you are almost certainly under-delivering in the other.

Interestingly, when we ask recruiting leaders who have this title to enumerate the scope of their retention activities, it is typically limited to ensuring the quality of candidates in the pipeline, sometimes providing marketplace feedback on competitive talent practices (usually compensation and talent management schemes at direct competitors), and marketplace feedback on the company’s market reputation.

Recruiting can certainly increase attrition through poor recruiting practices. Recruiters could, for example, misrepresent actual job duties, fail to eliminate habitual job-changers, or fail to stand firm with hiring managers about best hiring practices. But these are recruiting failures, not retention failures.

Look at it this way: assuming that recruiting does its job right, retention of that employee is no longer up to the recruiting function once that hire becomes an employee. It is up to HR and to line management to ensure their long-term success and loyalty.

After all, consider that line managers:

• Make the final hiring decision.
• Are primarily responsible, along with HR, for onboarding/new hire integration.
• Direct employees’ day-to-day work.
• Set the tone of the work unit.
• Lead the career development, along with HR, of direct reports.
• With assistance from HR, provide performance feedback/direction.
• Using HR programs, are responsible for promotions, both within their work groups and throughout the organization.

Let’s stop pretending that recruiting and retention are natural soul mates. Even more importantly, let’s put the retention focus where it properly belongs: in the hands of HR for overarching programs and in the hands of line managers for day-to-day delivery.

Let’s make first-year retention performance and top talent retention performance part of line managers’ key performance objectives. Let’s measure HR business value in terms of their demonstrated effectiveness at impacting workforce engagement and key employee retention.

Let recruiting focus on bringing us the best new talent on the market.

Then recruiting and retention will have the space they need to improve.

One of my favorite recent hot topics in recruiting is employer branding.

The concept goes like this: All employers have a brand for the product or service they provide. So, too, they can develop a brand as a place to work. Everyone in the recruitment advertising world stands ready to help us build employer brands, including job boards (delivery vehicles for electronic employment advertising). Some firms have even devised ways to measure employer brand awareness and incorporate these results into targeted branding campaigns.

There’s only one catch to all of this brand happiness: Most employers really don’t have employer brands. At least not in the way the term is currently used.

The Branding Illusion

I recently attended a conference where a newly appointed recruiting manager proudly presented his new branding campaign. The company needed to promote its employer brand, he explained, because the company was a solid place to work but a well-kept secret in its industry. This was hurting recruiting results at a time when they were growing aggressively.

His recruitment advertising firm had created a new set of ads with new messaging, new artwork, a new internal referral program, and new external media placement. All in, the campaign cost a little over $200,000.

This manager was happy to report that as a result of his campaign, resume intake had risen and the company’s brand awareness was on the rise. His applicant tracking system was abuzz with newfound talent.

I found this hard to believe, so for fun, I tested this claim. One day at lunch, I stood outside of this firm’s offices in downtown Philadelphia with a clipboard and asked random pedestrians three questions about the company:

• Do you know what the company does?
• Can you name any of its products?
• Do you know what it’s like to work there?

For all questions, less than 10% of the respondents had anything close to the correct answer. Over 60% of all respondents answered with a plain “don’t know.” And remember, this unscientific survey was taken right outside of the company’s main office.

Killer question: Where’s the brand?

A Real Brand

To understand the power of a brand, let’s look at a product that rates high on anyone’s brand awareness chart: Coca-Cola.

Here’s a simple way to rate the power of that brand:

• What colors comprise this brand’s logo?
• What is the shape and feel of this product’s bottle?
• What is this brand’s tagline, advertising theme, or jingle?
• What is the price of a 12-ounce can of Coke from the typical vending machine?

Chances are that everyone you know will answer these questions correctly. And chances are that you could ask these questions to anyone in any developed country (and many under-developed ones, too) and still nearly everyone will get them right.

That’s a brand: universal recognition fueled by relentless promotion; strong consumer opinion shaped by first-hand customer experience; the promise of something to meet a consumer’s need; and the consistent, predictable delivery of that something.

Coke spends more than $1 billion annually on advertising, and more on overall marketing activities. That’s about $115,000 per hour, all day, every day, to maintain a brand that is already the strongest in the world.

How much branding mileage do you think the rookie recruiting manager really received from his $200,000 campaign?

The Real Corporate Employment Brand

The simple fact is that, in recruitment, we don’t have the budget to brand anything. If you eliminate ineffective mass-marketing jargon from the employment-branding discussion, things get really simple and very clear.

All companies already have a company brand: it’s their earned reputation for how they treat their employees. This “brand” is not built through clever ads on job posting sites, nor through multi-channel ‘branding’ campaigns, nor any other promotional method. A corporate brand is shaped primarily by three things:

• How a company actually treats its employees.
• What those employees say to other people about how they are being treated.
• What the company’s ex-workers say about how they were treated while they were employees.

A select number of larger employers (Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Kellogg’s, SAS, etc) can have employer brands that are shaped my national media coverage, but this is a rarified breed.

For most companies, employer brands are simply earned reputations. Those reputations usually exist narrowly in industry niches, occupational specialties, or in multiple slices of demographic clusters that are either geographically or occupationally close to the company.

Some Examples

A large pharmaceutical firm advertises that its cutting-edge research offers accelerated career opportunities. Its reputation is that it is a slow, risk-adverse, old-school corporation offering a rich benefits package, easy nine-to-five jobs, and a preponderance of highly paid, mediocre talent.

A large community hospital launches a branding campaign directed at RNs about its quality-of-care mission, hoping to appeal to nurses driven to provide the best patient care and remind them why they got into nursing in the first place. The hospital’s reputation is that it is a poorly run institution with lots of turnover, unreasonable overtime expectations, and a mediocre-to-above-average salary structure.

An energy company launches a campaign to lure women into non-traditional jobs as line workers, cable-stringers, and tree-limb removers. The word on the street is that the company favors referrals and relatives of current employees. But it is worth trying to break into because its union-avoidance strategy is to offer excellent salaries, a generous benefits package, a pension plan, and nearly guaranteed employment for life.

In all three cases, and countless others that we could recite, these “branding” campaigns affect no chance in the employers’ marketplace reputations. We need to stop kidding ourselves.

Another killer question: How much of a “branding” budget would you need to change these earned reputations? Corollary question: How long would it take?

The most effective way to change your brand is to change your practices around people. The answer to the question of “How do I become known as a great employer?” is simple: Be a great employer. Word will spread. And it’s free.

Final killer question: Could it be that all this happy talk about building employer brands is actually good branding by the recruitment advertising industry to promote their services?

Recruiting seems to be an eternal problem for companies. It was a problem in the 80s, in nursing and technology; it was a problem during the widespread economic expansion of the 90s; and it is a problem now in many industries, even with the economy in its current state of retrogression.

The truth is that with demographics stacking up against employers, finding enough top talent will continue to be a problem in many high-skilled industries, whether or not we experience a drawn-out recession.

Here’s a great question: Why is finding enough of the right talent such a chronically difficult endeavor for organizations of all sizes? Why do CEOs continuously report that finding and retaining top talent is a core challenge to growing their businesses?

The answers to these questions are often lost in discussions about tactical problems with sourcing, process efficiency, metrics, or “creative” recruiting methodology. Sometimes, it’s as simple as getting the basics right.

In working with several hundred clients, we have found there are five fundamental mistakes that can repeatedly lead to the failure of the recruiting function to meet the needs of the business.

It all begins with addressing a basic question: Is your organization committed to making staffing a success?

Here’s how to tell if an organization is not committed:

1. Staffing functions in many organizations are severely underfunded. Companies have a bad habit of viewing recruiting as an expense, not an investment. Therefore, there is constant pressure to reduce overall recruiting spending. Without the proper funding, however, recruiting will always play from behind, unable to deploy the resources to effectively source talent, hire enough recruiters to process the work it creates, or hire the right recruiters in the first place. To make funding matters worse, recruiting managers often feed into the problem by accepting the charge to reduce the overall cost of recruiting and hiring (i.e., reducing cost-per-hire). At the core, reducing recruiting costs for the sake of cost reduction is a misguided attempt to accomplish two impossible feats. The first “mission impossible” is to find and recruit the best, most guarded talent by using the most inexpensive (read as “passive”), methods, thus reducing sourcing and process costs. This is misguided because top talent is generally passive, rarely caught with equally passive recruiting methods. So, the more an underfunded recruiting function tries to find inactive candidates using passive recruiting methods, the more inept it appears. The second impossible feat is trying to hire top talent at market-averaged salaries. This doesn’t work for a simple economic reason: in a free market, you get what you pay for. And top talent, like any high-quality product, always costs more than average talent. Simply put, you cannot hire top performers with average performers’ salaries. Companies need to think about recruiting the same way they think about marketing. Forward-thinking organizations are very clear about the “right” cost to acquire a new customer and fund marketing initiatives accordingly. Similarly, there is a proper cost for acquiring talent, where that cost is justified in the value of making the right hire at the right time. Failing to acquire customers is not an acceptable outcome for marketing. Neither should failing to acquire talent for the recruiting function.
2. Recruiting is usually insufficiently/ineffectively resourced. Most recruiting functions we’ve assessed have one or both of these challenges: too few recruiters, or the wrong recruiters, to get the job done. We’ve seen numerous situations where recruiters have 40 to 50 or more requisitions each. Research studies commonly find that the optimal requisition load is 20 to 25 openings for exempt roles and 25 to 35 openings for non-exempt roles (depending on the number of repetitive or similar roles). Why do recruiting functions continue to accept unmanageable workloads? Perhaps they are afraid to fight or don’t know how to fight for proper levels of resourcing. Until recruiting managers learn to make a business case using cost/benefit analysis methodology, they will continue to be under-resourced. The second resourcing problem is that companies hire the wrong people to do recruiting in the first place. It’s amazing how few people working in the recruiting function possess a foundation of experience in the profession. This occurs because companies vastly underestimate the importance of recruiting experience and knowledge. Would anyone ever hire an accountant without accounting experience? A good example of how this happens lies in healthcare. For years, many healthcare providers have moved nurses into recruiting roles. The justification is that prospective nursing hires would respond well to being recruited by other nurses. The problem is that lacking foundation knowledge, a nurse can’t effectively become a recruiter overnight, just as a recruiter couldn’t become a nurse overnight. Neither can an accountant, customer service rep, pharmaceutical sales rep, or anyone else who hasn’t been trained as a professional recruiter.
3. HR generalists are often too involved in the process. A common model for staffing is to have the recruiter interface with an HR generalist, then have the HR generalist interface with the hiring manager. This doesn’t work, for several reasons. In addition to the simple fact that adding another person into any process creates unnecessary hand-offs and potential process delays, HR generalists often have little experience in recruiting. Second, the skill set that makes HR generalist great at HR are the same skills that will make them fail at recruiting. Recruiters, at heart, are deal-makers, hunters, talkers, and closers. HR professionals, at heart, are mediators, gatherers, listeners, and problem resolvers. Ask any accomplished HR professional if they like doing the work of recruiters, and they will invariably tell you why they are better suited to be in an HR role. Finally, HR professionals are rightly focused on what happens inside their companies and spend very little time in the general talent market. This internal focus creates a skewed view of expectations around things like candidate behavior (candidates don’t behave like employees do), candidate negotiations (candidates are sometimes hard negotiators who make demands), and manager expectations (managers often require a skill set that isn’t available in the general market or at the price the manager is willing to pay). As a result, HR generalists can add more heat than light to difficult searches.
4. Recruiting organizations are operationally unfocused. Many staffing organizations have been set up to focus too much on the transactional processing elements of the recruiting process rather than to meet the business objectives that drive recruiting needs. After a recruiting process is built, everyone in the organization is trained on the process, and very quickly recruiters become process keepers instead of talent problem solvers. A clear symptom of this is when recruiters spend more time at their computers than actually talking to managers or candidates. Another sign is when recruiters are spending more time filling internal jobs than recruiting new talent into the company. The purpose of recruiting is to find talent that does not currently work at the company, not shuffle our existing talent around. A good rule of thumb: if a recruiter isn’t increasing the net talent pool of the company, they aren’t recruiting.
5. Measurement is weak and myopic. When you ask business leaders if their staffing functions are connected to the business, the answer is typically no. Believe it or not, most staffing functions still can only produce basic measurement data, if any. And those basic measures, such as time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, only describe the operational performance of staffing. They fail at linking staffing performance to business outcomes. The secret to creating meaningful business metrics is simple: the language of business is dollars and cents. Any measure that fails to carry the math all the way through to a dollar impact misses the point. To tie staffing impact to business, metrics should express themselves in dollars. Some quick examples: it is one thing to know that our sales openings average 75 days to fill. It’s another thing to know that the difference between filling them in 75 vs. 50 days costs us $30 million revenue. Or, that a 20% improvement in quality-of-hire will result in $18 million productivity improvement. Given the technology tools that recruitment functions have available today, it is relatively easy to produce a robust set of meaningful performance data. And it is becoming increasingly unacceptable not to do so.

There are others ways to get the basics right, but these five issues represent the most common impediments to staffing success. Getting them right will go a long way toward strengthening your recruitment results.