ERE.net

By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

On Wednesday, November 12, 2008, more than 900 members of the ERE community converged online for a webinar led by ERE author, Dr. John Sullivan. The webinar focused on updating your employee referral program. The popularity of the topic during a time when many staffing organizations are facing tough situations speaks to the immense role employee referral programs now play in the modern staffing function.

While several questions were fielded throughout the interactive webinar, participants submitted more than 70 questions on issues relating to program design, program operations, reward trends, and impact on organizational diversity.

To drive better understanding of world-class employee referral program practices and support continuous improvement of a sourcing channel that has become the dominant source of quality hires for many organizations, our response to the questions submitted throughout the webinar will be featured in five separate articles this week. (Where possible, similar questions were combined to reduce duplication.) The first five questions are included below, and there are 38 questions total.

Our responses to the questions proposed draw upon our advisory experience with more than 200 global organizations, an in-depth research study detailing the practices of more than 240 organizations, and an end-user research study that examined the experience of more than 7,400 employees and their respective referrals from 28 different organizations. More detailed guidance on program design can be found in a Design Workbook written by Dr. John Sullivan and available at drjohnsullivan.com.

Those interested in truly developing a world-class program may also want to check out these past ERE articles:
Operating Referral Programs on a Limited Budget
Upgrading or Reenergizing Your Employee Referral Program
Employee Referral Program Killers
Budgeting for a World-Class Employee Referral Program
Metrics for Improving Employee Referral Program Effectiveness

ERE Community Q&A

The questions proposed during the webinar covered a great many aspects of operating an employee referral program including:

• World-Class Program Design and Features
• Program Reward/Bonus Trends
• Diversity Impact
• Using Technology to Support the Employee Referral Program
• Specific Program Mentioned During the Webinar

keep reading…

The most-used recruiting metrics, from a new study by The Newman Group, in conjunction with ERE, of 500 recruiting and staffing professionals of varying company size.

keep reading…

Some reflections on the HR Tech Conference in Chicago that ended Friday:

• Talent management technology will be to the next five years what the ATS was to the last;
• Recruiters need to engage with line supervisors on a regular basis, and not just when a req comes through, because you will be measured on how well your hires do;
• For the same reason, recruiters need to play as big a role in the selection of HRMS tools as every other HR division;
• All HR professionals must become more proactive in identifying and implementing tools to help workers better engage with each other and the company and, for that matter, with their peers in the wide world.

The need for HR to take a more aggressive role was made so very clear in a conversation I had with a bank personnel officer on the last day of the conference.

keep reading…

Why should a recruiter care about talent management programs? If you don’t have a good answer, consider this: the talent those systems help a company manage is talent you had a hand in bringing on board.

With the increasing awareness of CEOs and HR executives that quality of hire is part of the evaluation equation for recruiting programs, how those hires are performing is a metric no recruiter can afford to ignore.

“When recruiters can be measured on quality, some recruiters will simply be better than others at bringing in high impact, more productive, and longer tenured employees,” said Dave Lefkow, CEO of consultant talentspark and a veteran recruiter, in an article more than three years ago.

Comprehensive talent management systems do more, of course, than assess and track employee performance. Coupled with succession planning modules, they can make identifying promising internal talent a snap and in doing so encourage internal recruitment. The more sophisticated of these systems can also flag employees who are at risk of leaving, spot talent shortages and replacement gaps, suggest and track training, and lots more.

If your company doesn’t have a talent management system now, it could very soon. The market for these is growing strongly as if in inverse proportion to the U.S. economy. Authoria (profile; site) had a 93 percent growth in bookings for the first half of this year over last. Pleateau, whose recent release of its Plateau Talent Management 5.8 Service Pack 5 prompted this article, reported 2007 revenues that were 58 percent higher than the previous year. The 450 attendees at its user conference last week was the largest turnout in the company’s history.

During a demo of the new release Frank Leff, Plateau’s Pre-Sales Product Consultant, observed that companies can easily assign fields to individual employee profiles, identifying such things as source of hire, recruiter who had the req, and whatever else might be useful. He, and Dennis Gullotti, Director of Product Marketing, showed how easily a recruiter could find in-house talent before having to go outside the company.

But as we watched the demo unfold, we saw how easy it would be to identify the recruiters whose hires were making the biggest impact. Plateau’s competency comparison, intended to identify potential successors and assist with skills gap analysis, could also be used as a quality-of-hire metric.

Is that happening? Absolutely, Gullotti told us. People are “coming out of the talent management silo,” he said. As systems like Plateau’s are increasingly linked to other enterprise software, “We,” he said, meaning HR as a whole, “are connecting the recruiting silo to the performance silo to the other systems.”

That’s closing the feedback loop that will inevitably make quality of hire as important and common a metric to be weighed as time and cost to hire are now.

In the quest for quality hires, talent acquisition leaders often spend considerable time extracting DNA from the company’s top performers in hopes of cloning the outstanding workers. After reviewing performance goals and synthesizing multiple data inputs, line managers and recruiters collaborate to craft tightly honed hiring profiles for each position. Next, it’s up to the recruiter to source the candidates, which is a critical step in the process, because sourcing plays a vital role in achieving quality of hire (a topic explored in depth in the October Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership).

Targeted sourcing is the second step in hiring top performers, as shown in this chart (click to enlarge) illustrating the complete quality of hire process, from Taleo Research.

Most recruiters instinctively return to the same source when searching for candidates, because historically the source has produced a quick response from a large number of prospects with the required skills. But a deeper dive into employee turnover statistics and performance ratings might result in some surprises about the quality of the candidates secured through each source, according to Andrew Carges, vice president of worldwide talent acquisition for Success Factors.

Carges says that he found first-year turnover was high for employees sourced through agencies, during his experience at SuccessFactors and in his previous roles as a talent leader. A closer review as to why those employees left revealed that many had a history of job-hopping, and he concluded that employees represented by recruiters were frequently hunting for new opportunities and had easy access to other positions. Now he evaluates source effectiveness and its impact on quality of hire.

“To drive quality of hire, compare the employee’s first-year performance rating to their hiring source and the cost of hire,” says Carges. “It’s something every company can do to evaluate the effectiveness of the hiring source in delivering top performers and value.”

(See the example of hiring-source analysis provided by SuccessFactors.)

Managers frequently request candidates with previous industry experience because they believe it’s a predictor of on-the-job success. That hiring criteria often limits the sources recruiters can tap to find experienced prospects. A review of the employees’ actual performance ratings and the competencies possessed by top performers might be the first step in shifting the hiring paradigm, which in turn opens the door for new sources of hire.

At R.L. Polk & Co., a review of the company’s top performers revealed that previous industry experience had little correlation to job performance, according to Jay Marshall, manager of talent acquisition. In fact, the requirement accelerated the cost of hire because candidates came from a boutique industry and often had to be enticed with higher salaries.

And at the same time, industry dynamics were changing, forcing employees into more business-facing roles that required different skills. As Marshall dug a bit deeper into what was really making employees successful, an entirely new profile began to emerge.

“When I looked at the behavior behind the performance, it was driven by teamwork,” says Marshall. “The bottom line is that it really altered what we were looking for, and now we look for team players with strong business acumen. That opened up many new candidate sources, and our average cost of hire has dropped $10,000 in the last 24 months.”

Today, Marshall says he no longer worries about how long it takes his team to hire new employees or how much a new hire costs, because by focusing on quality of hire, he has improved all the recruiting metrics at Polk.

Last month, DoubleStar conducted a survey to determine the current state of recruiting practices in a cross-section of organizations. The survey was sent to recruiting leaders and decision makers in mid- to large-sized organizations across all industries. The results are not a summary of best practices but a snapshot of current actual practices as they exist today.

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.

keep reading…

Stephen Lowisz, author of Six Good Metrics, isn’t fond of some of the most common measures of recruiting success. He talks about one company that’s doing it differently; how to measure whether recruiters are “just passing paper”; and the “biggest buzz” right now in recruiting metrics.

keep reading…

Cost has always been central to recruiting. One of the most popular (though not the most useful) metrics is cost-per-hire.

But demonstrating the value of recruiting is difficult. The reasons are simple enough — recruiting costs are tangible; the benefits less so. It takes time for new hires to become productive, and their contributions are difficult to measure with any precision. Furthermore, it is impossible to attribute an employee’s performance to the recruiter’s skill at getting the right fit, in the right place and time. Consequently, tying recruiting results to cost is nearly impossible. Few even try. So recruiting managers usually find themselves under pressure to “manage” costs better — which usually means do more with less. Some companies have just given up trying and handed over their recruiting to an RPO vendor.

RPO has its own issues, but one benefit of RPO may just be that recruiting managers begin to understand costs, and how to manage them to their advantage. I don’t mean “manage” as in “limit” (although that’s a very fine thing), I mean structuring costs to maximize flexibility, leverage in-house expertise, and limit cutbacks during down cycles. This is the “manage” they teach in B-school.

keep reading…

Quality of Hire Measurement
Reporting and metrics is always a hot topic for recruiting, but so few companies do it right. In my research over the years, most companies measure time-to-hire and cost-per-hire but ignore quality-of-hire. Lisa Shapiro Mendell is an exception. She is interested in adding this key performance indicator to her recruitment metric dashboard and wants to know what other companies have done the same.

Ravi Subramanian recommends hiring manager surveys and assessments. Michael Chernesky asks a very relevant question…who is accountable? Bonita Martin says recruiters and Steven Yeong says hiring managers. Joshua Letourneau offered some great insight based on his experiences. While many of his clients do measure quality of hire, their process often fails because of one of three problems. They don’t measure quality of hire beyond the first day; the hiring manager survey turns into a game since “recruiters are incentivized to make the survey look good”; or feuds spark between HR and the hiring manager. Josh’s solution to overcome these challenges lies in performance assessments that measure expected versus actual performance. Anyone out there having great success measuring QOH? Share your story; we would love to hear it.

Wednesday’s Question of the Day
Anna Patterson’s latest Internet search engine, Cuil, is backed by $33 million in venture capital and expected to outshine Google. I read negative reviews of Cuil and wanted to know if anyone is using it and seeing results. Glenn Gutmacher, Sourcer extraordinaire, is not a fan…it is slow and produces poor quality results. Without launching an alpha or beta version, Glenn believes they “set high expectations and they ‘way’ underdelivered.” T Tallis agrees. Amanda Blazo is more optimistic. She acknowledges Cuil’s shortcomings but encourages us to give it time.

Phone Screening Candidates
Diane Propsner wonders: before a third-party recruiter sends a resume to a corporate recruiter, How much time should he or she spend on phone screening and what questions should be asked? She gave us an overview of her process and the questions included. Andrew Stone agrees with Diane that 10-15 minutes is not enough time for building a relationship with a candidate. Tania Murray recommends “tailoring your cover sheet to your client to focus on just what they (candidate) told you is important to them.” According to Tania, it is critical to know the candidates goals and motivations. Joy Naui offers a different approach by suggesting that third-party recruiters first contact the hiring manager. The phone screening should include key points based on that conversation. Questions should include more than technical skill questions. If a candidate recognizes that you are genuine about finding them the right job, they will agree to answer more questions.

Thursday’s Question of the Week
After hearing Dr. Wendell Williams’ Selection and Assessment webinar on July 23, an attendee wanted to know if behavioral or situational screening questions are better and why. I thought I would ask you. Joe Payne is in favor of behavioral questions since they are a good indicator of past actions and can allow interviewers to dig deeper. Matt Cooper brings up an interesting point that most candidates are too prepared for behavioral questions with the amount of information available on the Internet including examples and preparation tools. Interviewers need to be creative and get more specific. KT Connor agrees with Matt and also cautions against self-reporting assessments instead recommending objective decision tools.

Are Job Boards Becoming Obsolete?
This is a hot topic of debate, check it out!

For as long as HR has been a separate function from the business, there has always existed a certain tension when it comes to who is primarily responsible for influencing employee retention.

Business management often argues that recruiters are not presenting the right candidates, and in perfect “hiring hindsight” find fault on the basis of candidate education level, character attributes, work experience, technical skills, compensation, etc.

Recruiters are quick to remind management that they present, but do not select, candidates for hire, and that most employees who leave a position do so because of other issues such as training, keep reading…

Recruiting metrics require a number of characteristics to be considered effective and reliable:

• Metrics must be predictive and actionable. Statistics need to provide information that can be acted upon by providing data to indicate trends.
• Metrics must be tracked over time in order to generate internal benchmarks and analyze internal performance.
• Recruitment metrics should include both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Time and cost obviously comprise the quantitative aspects of recruitment metrics, while productivity, retention, efficiency, and candidate performance comprise the qualitative aspects.

Metrics of the Past

Ten years ago recruiting was often seen as a steppingstone to an HR generalist role. Recruiters were trained to “screen out” applicants, thus making their positions transactionally focused. This led to the two most commonly used metrics: cost-per-hire and time-to-fill.

keep reading…

Corporate recruiting is an interesting field. There are no books entitled The Theory of Recruiting or Principles of Strategic Recruiting. As a result, most individuals in recruiting tend to make it up as they go rather than follow a more defined set of rules or principles.

There is no formal body in recruiting that “codifies” the established practices. In this article, I am attempting to help resolve that problem by compiling a list (from my 35-plus years of experience in the field) that can serve as a foundation for your actions.

Of course, principles are guidelines to point you in the right direction. Remember to vary your direction depending on your business situation and global location.

20 Principles of Recruiting and Talent Management

The following is a list of 20 principles, laws, or guidelines to help you design and implement effective recruiting strategies and approaches:

1. A well-defined strategy. The foundation of any recruiting effort is a clearly defined and communicated strategy that illustrates the brand message, target candidates, primary sources, and most-effective closing approaches (the who, what, when, and how). Poorly defined or communicated strategy elements results in wasted resources and weak hires. In addition, the best strategies have the capability of “shifting” as the economy and the demand for candidates change.
2. Pipeline approach. The most effective recruiting approach is to build a steady stream of applicants (a pipeline). In order to build a continuous “talent pipeline,” use a “pre-need” approach that includes workforce planning, branding, continuous sourcing, and onboarding.
3. Competitive. The most effective recruiting approaches are compared against and are clearly superior to those of a firm’s talent competitors. Because competitors will quickly copy your most effective approaches, a continuous side-by-side assessment of “yours versus theirs” is necessary. A sub-principle applies to candidates: because the very best are always in high demand, if you don’t have to literally “fight” for a candidate, in most cases, you do not have the best candidate in the field.
4. Employment branding. The approach with the highest impact and the only long-term recruiting strategy is employment branding, the process of building your external image as an excellent place to work. By proactively making it easy for potential applicants to read, hear, or see the factors that make working at your firm exciting, you can dramatically increase the number and quality of your applicants over a long period.
5. Global. For jobs that require top talent, the process must have a global recruiting capability. This is because the very best talent is unlikely to live within commuting distance of your job.
6. Target employed “non-lookers.” The best recruiting processes are designed to identify and successfully hire currently employed top performers. This means that the process needs the capability of identifying and convincing employed individuals who work at your competitors and may not be actively looking for a position. Unfortunately, most corporate recruiting approaches are designed to attract “active” candidates.
7. Speed. Making fast hiring decisions is essential whenever a candidate in high demand decides to make a job switch. Top candidates must be hired using “their” decision timetable. Research shows that top candidates are off the market in less than half of the normal corporate time to fill.
8. Sourcing is critical. If you don’t utilize sources that attract a high percentage of top performers, it is unlikely you will make a quality hire. After employment branding, effective sourcing is the most critical element of the recruiting process. Generally, the most effective source is employee referrals. Other effective but under-used sources include recruiting at professional events and contests. Using ineffective sources means that you must spend inordinate amounts of time and money on candidate screening in order to avoid a weak hire. The source that is used must be shift, depending on the type of candidate required for that position. Unfortunately, many recruiters use the same exact sourcing scheme for every job.
9. Data-based decisions. Base decisions on sources, screening tools, and which individual to hire on facts and data, not emotion or even common practices. Making decisions based on objective data helps eliminate biases and causes the recruiting process to produce more consistent, reliable, and high-quality results. It’s also true that in a fast-changing world, “what works” changes quickly so recruiting practices become obsolete quickly. Unfortunately, rather than being a small part of recruiting decisions, emotions and “it’s the way we’ve always done it” tend to dominate corporate decision-making.
10. Build a recruiting culture. The most effective approaches build a corporate-wide “cultural of recruiting” where every manager and employee is a recruiter. Because of their continuous contact and interaction with outside talent, everyone must play an important supplemental role in identifying talent and in spreading the employment brand. The most effective recruiting strategies convince employees to be 24/7 talent scouts, making every employee a recruiter.
11. A candidate-centric approach. Focus the process on the candidate’s needs, their job selection criteria, and the candidate experience. A significant part of recruiting is “selling” the candidate on applying for and accepting the job. At least in part, recruiting must follow the customer relationship management (CRM) and the sales and marketing models. Often, the number-one reason why candidates reject job offers is the way that they were treated during the hiring process. It’s also important to note that candidates may be current or future customers, so treating them poorly can directly impact future revenue.
12. Prioritize jobs and targets. Effective recruiting processes maximize resource utilization by identifying and focusing on the positions with the highest business impact. That generally means revenue-producing and revenue-impact jobs, as well as jobs in high margin and rapid growth business units. The process should also target high-impact individuals known as top performers, innovators, and gamechangers.
13. Managers are the delivery system. Although corporate recruiting designs the process, managers “deliver” and execute a significant part of that process. As a result, hiring managers must understand its elements and support its precise execution. You must effectively demonstrate to individual hiring managers that they will suffer whenever a bad or “butts in chairs” hire is made. Therefore, recruiting must make a strong business case to individual hiring managers that convinces them of the importance of executing the process precisely. The most effective way of influencing hiring managers is by converting recruiting results into their dollar impact on that individual manager’s revenue and profit.
14. Diversity. An effective recruiting process must include enough variation and personalization to meet the unique needs of diverse individuals from around the world. Diversity and inclusiveness are becoming not just legal terms but critical components in building global sales.
15. Selling applicants. The very best recruiting processes builds “relationships” with potential applicants over time in order to increase their level of trust and interest. Unfortunately, no amount of benefits or job features will be convincing to high-demand applicants without this level of trust. Because all candidate-screening processes have flaws, stretching out the assessment process over time allows you to learn more about the candidate and decrease the chances of making a bad hire. The best approaches are designed to take advantage of the fact that a target candidate’s willingness to consider a new job changes quite rapidly, as a result of changes in their own job and organization.
16. Technology. The best processes rely heavily on technology and the Web in all aspects of the recruiting process. Technology can improve screening, increased hiring speed, cut costs, and provide the firm with the capability of hiring globally.
17. Integration. Recruiting processes must be integrated with other HR processes. Those recruiting processes that operate independently rather than in unison with other HR functions like relocation and compensation will produce diminished results.
18. Talent shortages. Although industries often face talent shortages, individual firms can actually have a surplus of candidates if they have a strong employment brand, a great referral program, and a candidate-friendly hiring approach. For example, handsome movie stars seldom have difficulty getting “dates” even when the average “Joe” can’t find a single one. Talent shortages are relative and depend on your image and what you have to offer.
19. Remote work options. Offering candidates remote work options dramatically increases the candidate pool. Firms that have the capability of managing candidates who work from remote locations have a distinct competitive advantage. They can attract the top performer who doesn’t live in the area, who desires working at home, or who isn’t willing to make a long commute.
20. Metrics and rewards impact recruiting. Every aspect of recruiting improves dramatically when managers and employees are measured, recognized, and rewarded for their contribution to recruiting. By convincing senior management and HR to place metrics and rewards on key aspects of recruiting, you send a clear message about its importance.

Final Thoughts

Almost every business function has come to realize that if you want consistency and excellent results, you must clearly define the rules of the game. There are, of course, exceptions and perhaps even additions that can be made to the principles outlined above.

But, after working with recruiters and recruiting managers from hundreds of companies, I found that these guidelines will give you a pretty good idea of the essential laws of recruiting and where to focus your efforts if you want superior recruiting results.

Corporate recruiting is lucky.

We are the piece of any corporate HR function that can show our business hard and fast data around spending and savings. We can show you, Mr. Hiring Manager, how much you spent last year per hire, how quickly we filled your need, the quality of those candidates, and exactly where we found them, plus about 37 other data points. Wow. We’re good. Recruiters, not usually a shy bunch, will market our successes to you relentlessly. We run staffing like a business and we like to make sure you get that.

So, how is it that we measure every molecule of a full-time hire, and continue to drive down cost per hire, but know little about the “other” side of staffing. I present to you contractors. Shady sort. And a little scary, if you remember the Microsoft fiasco a few years ago. Co-employment is not your friend. This uneasy feeling may have something to do with our lack of touch on them, or their price tag. But, you can’t really run a business without them.

It used to be that once a contractor requisition was approved, it was automatically distributed to our vendors. We chose these vendors based on information they provided that they (a) could provide us the best rates while (b) guaranteeing excellent quality ( c) from their “unique” databases where they’d have access to people no one else could find. Cool. Except that we spent $7M last year on contractors. Not cool.

keep reading…

Time and again I read recommendations for evaluating quality of hire. Ask the managers, ask the employees, ask an astrologer. None of these things will ever give you more than a subjective opinion about the kind of information you need to improve the quality of hire. Here’s why.

Imagine advertising for superheroes. There are a dozen steroid-pumped, ego-centric applicants sitting in your waiting room wearing masks, capes, and tights. Each hero claims to have saved the world at one time or another. You hire three of them. Six months later, how do you evaluate your quality of hire?

Evaluating quality of hire requires looking at performance in a different way. It requires mentally separating the “how” from “what.” The “how” represents what the superhero says or does and “what” represents the outcome. Here is the hard part to accept: evaluating quality of hire depends almost entirely on evaluating “how” the hero performed the job, not the outcome. Regardless of opinions to the contrary, “how” is the only part of the job under the hero’s control. It is the only thing separating one hero from another.

Here is an example that may explain this idea.

It’s a particularly bad time on earth. Asteroid showers are occurring periodically, keeping the super-heroes busy. When he was on duty, Clock-Man reacted by turning back time. On her shift, Wonder Woman pulled the asteroids into new orbits with her lasso. And when it was his turn, Superman flew faster than a speeding bullet, smashing them into smithereens. The “what” was the same for all three: reversing time. Using lassos and brute force were all examples of “how.”

keep reading…

By Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

The subject of analytics is often discussed but rarely executed well, even in the most well-established talent management functions.

keep reading…

It’s all about performance. Over the past four or five years, I have seen a steady increase in organizations spending time and effort to define and measure employee performance. Firms like Success Factors, DDI, and Authoria have had good commercial success in providing the tools and processes that make this easier to do. Oracle and SAP offer modules that ease the process of defining competencies and measuring employees on their contributions.

As the economy heads into a recession and profits are under scrutiny, this will become even more important. No organization can afford people who do not contribute and who cannot perform consistently at a high level.

keep reading…

Despite the stated importance of attracting and hiring quality talent, many recruiters and recruiting managers continue to face challenges in getting managers to adequately prioritize their roles in recruiting or securing a budget that makes world-class recruiting possible.

As a result, recruiters learn to do more with less, often at the initial expense of the candidate experience and the long-term expense of the organization’s employment brand. Many recruiting leaders have tried to counter this trend with approaches that run the gamut of possibilities, yet most have failed. During this interactive webinar with world-renowned HR strategist, Dr. John Sullivan (sponsored by Previsor), learn the top-10 metrics recruiting organizations can use to demonstrate the impact of effective world-class recruiting. This isn’t a session about transactional analytics, most of which have no value to line managers, but rather metrics that focus on recruiting effectiveness and bottom-line impact.

| View | Upload your own

I am an unabashed follower of the HR philosophy of Jack Welch, former CEO of GE. He is a proponent of a “business-like” approach to HR that emphasizes its critical role in impacting organizational results. Welch is certainly controversial in HR circles because he advocates many things that “softies” in HR regale against, including differentiation in treatment, honest and direct performance appraisals, stretch assignments, and yes, routine firing of individuals who don’t produce or fit the system.

His latest foray into HR deals with measuring your “hiring batting average.” By advocating the direct measurement of hiring quality, he adds even more credibility to counter the “silly” list of arguments that many in recruiting make against measuring quality of hire.

keep reading…

There is nothing more important in the business world than demonstrating the dollar impact of what you do. Every major business function from marketing, sales, finance, supply chain, customer service, and production routinely demonstrate their return on investment. However, as with many aspects of corporate life, HR tends to be the exception to the rule.

Over the course of my career I have routinely heard complaints of the recruiting function being underfunded, underappreciated, and not taken seriously. Such poor treatment should hardly be a surprise given that most recruiting managers have historically not been willing or able to convert what they do into the universal language of business?dollar impact on revenue. What could be more fundamental and important than demonstrating to senior management the dollar impact of hiring top performers versus average ones? To me, it’s the single most egregious error in recruiting.

keep reading…

When reading the thoughts of my peers in the recruiting profession, I have to admit I become a little surprised at how many have really had a chance to hire people. While aside from a couple of assistants in recruiting groups I have managed, I actually have never hired anyone. Usually that has been the hiring manager’s job.

Recruiters play a vital role in the process that includes:

keep reading…