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Are You Paying the Right People to Do the Right Things?

Nov 12, 2007

Stop. Listen. Learn. Take a look at how you and your teams are spending their time, and make sure you are paying the right people to do the right things, whether it is sourcing, scheduling, arranging travel, or generating offer letters.

As an avid benchmarker, I spend a lot of time talking with members of recruiting organizations comparing recruiting strategies and processes. I was happy to oblige when I received a call from a director of recruiting at a major financial institution wanting to talk about the ideal requisition workbench for recruiters and how to optimize recruiting resources. For ease of explanation, I’ll call this benchmarker Mary.

“Our target workbench for recruiting team members is between 25 and 30 requisitions, depending on position type,” I explained.

“Really?” Mary replied, “I’m surprised your recruiters handle that type of workload.” I explained how our recruiting team was enabled by an in-house sourcing team with deep functional expertise focused solely on talent identification. She was still surprised at the workload.

I was surprised that she was surprised, so I began to probe further. “What is your current target workbench?” I asked.

“No more than 10 requisitions, regardless of position type,” she answered.

Surprised again! Surely we strive to keep workbenches at optimal workloads because, as we know anecdotally and metrics tell us, the higher the requisition loads, the lower customer satisfaction is and the longer it takes to fill jobs. But a max of 10 requisitions at any given time for non-executive positions? I had not benchmarked with anyone whose targets were that low for an in-house recruiting team (regardless of whether they were enabled by an in-house sourcing team). I completely understood Mary’s quandary of having to handle increasing requisition loads without being able to add staff.

“Tell me how you came up with a target workbench of 10,” I asked. Mary explained that she and a team of recruiters mapped the entire recruiting process for a requisition, from identifying the steps to determining how long each step takes. So far so good; I agreed with her logic.

Mary then explained that they came up with a total hours-per-week metric for each requisition and divided this by 40 hours in a week to come up with the workbench target of 10. I was now having trouble understanding why each recruiter would be spending an average of four hours per requisition per week with sourcing support; it seemed excessive. I then asked Mary what the team’s average time to fill was. “Eleven weeks,” she replied.

“So that means your recruiters are spending an average of 44 hours on each requisition?” I asked.

“Yes, I guess that’s what it comes to,” she stated, noting she had never looked at it this way.

“Walk me through your high-level process,” I asked. She e-mailed me a process map as we were on the phone. As soon as I opened and scanned it, something caught my eye. “Mary,” I stated, “It appears that your recruiter manages nearly every step in the process.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” she said.

I began to read how her recruiters were involved in everything from pre-screening resumes presented by the sourcing team to scheduling interviews, arranging candidate travel, and typing up offer letters. A familiar saying coined by my colleague Adam came to mind. “Mary, are you paying the right people to do the right things?” My question was met with a silent pause.

I then explained to her how it might be beneficial to reallocate the workload among different types of individuals to ensure she was realizing a maximum return on investment for her resources. I suggested she consider using administrative professionals to manage the administrative tasks of recruiting (such as scheduling, arranging travel, and creating offer letters), which would free up the recruiters to handle the more core-competency recruiting work of assessing and qualifying candidate slates, participating on interview teams and working closely with hiring managers to ensure the candidate pools meet their needs. “You don’t want to pay recruiters $45 to $55 per hour and have them spend nearly half their time on administration,” I offered.

Mary then went on to explain how recruiters handled many other “nonprocess” tasks, such as responding to unsolicited resumes, filling out new hire forms, and managing job folders.

We then began strategizing ways she could segregate the work and remove much of the administration from her recruiters’ plates, which would lead to reduced time to fill, higher capacity, and even greater satisfaction among the recruiting team. “Not only do I think it would make for a more optimized workforce,” Mary commented, “but I imagine our recruiters would be delighted to shed the administrivia.” I couldn’t agree with her more.

That conversation prompted me to initiate a conversation with my colleagues in Johnson & Johnson Recruiting, resulting in a full review of our end-to-end processes to ensure we are paying the right people to do the right things. This review stemmed all the way from the leadership team, who should be focusing the majority of their time helping set the course for talent acquisition for the enterprise, to the coordinator team which steadfastly handles the administration that a compliant hiring process entails. In between are our recruiters and sourcers, who are focused on the core competencies of talent acquisition, although admittedly there is some administrivia that is part of their roles that we just can’t seem to shed. (They are not alone; I assure you, we all suffer from it!)

Once again, benchmarking yielded benefits for both benchmarker (Mary) and “benchmarkee” (me). It was an invaluable conversation, and Mary and I have talked several times since, always starting out with our mantra (courtesy of Adam): Are you paying the right people to do the right things?

Stop. Listen. Learn. Take a look at how you and your teams are spending their time, and make sure you are paying the right people to do the right things.

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