by
Lou Adler Jun 30, 2006
We’re into the third week of our eight-week program on becoming a top 10% recruiter. Aside from reading the two previous articles, there were four other things you had to do to get to this point: 1) take the online recruiter diagnostic to see where you are today; 2) email me (lou@adlerconcepts.com) about the biggest change you need to make to become a better recruiter; 3) sign up for a comprehensive survey; and 4) begin tackling the reading list presented in the previous article. Now you’re ready to find some top candidates.
The recruiting and hiring process can be divided into three basic categories: attraction, assessment, and acceptance. These are the three big As. What some people fail to recognize is that you must be good at all three to have great hiring results. Being great at one or two and weak in the third will result in failure. On the other hand, you don’t even need to be great at all three: Being good enough in all three can provide great results. Good enough is good enough. What a lot of HR and organizational-development people and other so-called experts fail to see is that hiring top people is a three-part system. For example, sometimes a great assessment tool can minimize the number of top people who apply because the tool is boring or demeaning.
A behavioral interview or competency model actually might be useful, but not if managers find it too cumbersome to use or if candidates can game it. Designing subsystems that defeat the objective of the main system is called suboptimization, and it’s a common problem that good recruiters have to fight every day. The underlying theme of this eight-part series is to give recruiters the tools to deal with the bureaucrats who forget that the real objective is hiring great people every time. In this week’s session, we’ll focus on the attraction piece: what it takes to find top people who might actually use the Internet, job boards, and career websites to look for jobs. While it shouldn’t be your dominant focus, sourcing active candidates should represent about 25-35% (resume databases and advertising) of your total sourcing efforts. This is shown in the following chart.
Total Candidate Pool by Major Sourcing Channel
Many in HR proclaim a desire to be more strategic, yet most doom themselves by not acting any differently than everyone else. A clear indication of this can be seen in the speed by which documented best practices are mimicked and improved. Benchmarking has become a common practice in the profession of recruiting, which most organizations use to identify what must be done to emulate those who do something better. Unfortunately, most stop there with emulation, and that may doom them to mediocrity forever. The business world once moved at a significantly slower pace, a pace that made benchmarking and emulating best practices prudent activities. However, things no longer move so slowly! By the time firms benchmark a best practice today, the situation that warranted the development or implementation of the best practice might have changed or may no longer be present. Instead of systematizing an effort to consistently follow the leader and mimic the soon-to-be-obsolete practices of others, I recommend adopting a proactive approach, one in which you develop your own “next generation” of best practices. I call these “next practices.”
Next Practice Development Is More Common in Other Business Functions
Next practice development isn’t about making something more efficient; instead, it is about a fundamental transformation of the core business activity. For example, Apple has long been a participant in the computer industry, in which the core best practices are predominately focused on refinement of manufacturing technologies that enable computers to do more. While Apple could have easily jumped on the performance bandwagon, it instead opted to develop next practices in the areas of product packaging and service. With the introduction of the iMac, Apple demonstrated that computers don’t have to be beige and gray boxes. With the introduction of the iPod and iMusic service, Apple demonstrated that product companies can develop sustainable long-term relationships with consumers. It abandoned efforts to compete on the nature of performance, long a computer-industry challenge, and reinvented the game with best practices that were unique to its business.
Next Practices Help You Create the Future
Best practices only allow you to do what you are currently doing a little better, while next practices increase your organization’s capability to do things that it could never have done before. By jumping a level up to next practices, you’re taking a giant step in that you are actually creating your future recruiting capabilities, rather than relying on the innovation of others.
Examples of Next Practices
If you are not sure of the distinction between best and next practices, here are some examples in several HR areas: Practice Area: College Recruiting
- Average practice: Visit the top schools within your state.
keep reading…
by
Kevin Wheeler Apr 26, 2006
Managers ask us to bring them the best talent we can find. We say that quality of hire is our most important metric and that it is tied directly to the kind of talent we can attract. Yet while we bandy about the term “talent,” we have no real definition of it. For many recruiters, talent is synonymous with “anyone who says yes.” For others, it is any hire that stays for six months or a year. And for still others, it is any hire that a manager finds satisfactory.
I think we should define “talent” as those employees whose contributions are vital to our ability to produce our product or deliver our service. Excellent talent then refers to those who produce an above-average amount of our product and poor talent means those who do much less than average. Sports teams measure talent this way all the time. When a team manager speaks of quality talent, he is talking about those individuals who make the most points, block the other team most often, or who the fans and players identify as essential for success. Almost all organizations rate and rank their sales forces. They know that above-average performers generate more sales than average performers. McKinsey, in its Talent War 2000 study, has also documented this. Those surveyed by McKinsey were asked to assess how much more a high-performer in a P&L position generates than a mid-performer. They estimated the difference at 49 percent, and they said that the high-performer should be paid 42 percent more.
When you think about what 49 percent means, it is astounding. That means that a high-performer brings in almost twice as much business as an average-performer or produces twice as much. If you, as a recruiter, could identify potential high-performers, how much more respect would you get? How much better would your reputation be? Defining quality of hire is not the hardest part, though. You should be able to sit down with hiring managers and get some agreement on quantifiable performance measures for most positions. For recruiters it could be simply the time it takes to present qualified candidates or it could be the number of candidates that you present who get an offer. Both measures are easy to track and directly measure your ability to source and qualify candidates and sell those candidates to the hiring manager. Here are four things you could do to improve the quality of hires you bring in and thereby clearly define what good talent looks like.
- Together with hiring managers, work to identify what characterizes a high performer. Is it quantity of output, amount of time spent, number of defects created, or is it the amount of revenue their group has generated? This is hard work and there aren’t a lot of benchmarks to go by, but we all know more or less who contributes the most to our organizations. Our task is to quantify that.
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I recommend referrals as the foundation of any excellent recruiting program, followed by employment branding and then recruiting at professional events. However, I must warn the reader that referral programs are not all created equal, and a good number of them (well over 50 percent) provide no better than mediocre results because they have inherent design flaws. These design flaws occur because the directors of these programs invariably copy what others do as opposed to using metrics and data to tell them what works, why it works, and what doesn’t work.
Basic Characteristics of Excellent Programs
In order to gather the “right” metrics about a referral program, you need to know upfront what the critical design elements are that turn good referral programs into great ones. Next, you need to have metrics that cover each of these critical areas if you expect to continually improve your results:
- On-the-job performance. The primary reason for using referrals is because they produce better performers (quality of hire). Metrics must be developed to compare the performance of referrals versus new hires from other sources.
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