Article by Kevin Wheeler
Original found at: http://www.ere.net/2010/06/17/disruptive-recruiting-rethinking-what-recruiting-is-all-about/
They always say time changes
things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy
Warhol
It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to
reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally
successful in procuring high-performing employees.
Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools
starting with applicant
tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting
websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad
fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions
than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is
deluged with unqualified candidates.
It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire
recruiting process. Let's start by asking dumb questions: why does
recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given
our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and
select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule
interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to
the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact
through the products and services you offer, through fellow
employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location.
What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably
minimal.
So, then, how can recruiters add value?Automation and
Process Simplification
The recruiting process is made up of somewhere around 10
sub-processes which include employment branding,
communicating with a hiring manager and developing a position
description, sourcing, screening, assessment,
candidate communication, and marketing (CRM), offer negotiation and
presentation, closing, and in some cases onboarding.
Each of these sub-processes need to be examined and assessed for
their efficiency and value. You should ask yourself whether that
process needs to be done at all, and if so should it be done by a
recruiter, and if not, by who? You should also ask whether that
step could be automated, even partially, and even if it would be
less than ideal. You need to apply the 80/20 rule to recruiting
automation: if a tool, system, program, or application can do at
least 80% of what a recruiter does, than you should switch to the
automated process.
I believe that much of what the average recruiter does can
either be simplified, eliminated altogether, or be done by
automated systems. For example, is it really necessary to interview
all candidates? Why can't you develop and use a screening test of
some sort and rely on that alone? Why does every potential
candidate need to complete the usual intensive application process
when all you need to know are one or two things in order to move
the candidate forward? Why can't you develop and use good CRM
techniques and processes to ease the communication problem. There
is a lot of room for improvement in the basic processes we follow
rather blindly. By adopting a simplified and more automated
approach, you free up recruiters so that they can really add value
and improve the reputation and significance of the recruiting
function.
Redefine the Need
Recruiting should not be a reactive function, only responding to
the mandates of hiring managers. Recruiting needs to be the talent
partner within the organization. It needs to have the labor market
and available skills knowledge to help managers make the best
decisions of the type of people to hire.
The model recruiting functions should work very closely with
hiring managers, human resources, and other internal professionals
to redefine the positions most commonly open. One method is to
interview good employees, as defined by hiring managers and
performance reviews, and then construct profiles of these employees
that can, in turn, be used to construct screening questions.
Building a profile of success saves hundreds of hours of recruiting
trial and error. This process also affirms which roles are really
important and which ones may be less so. Less-critical positions
can be outsourced or put on a lower priority. Many times this
process identifies changes that need to be made in the skills,
competencies, or experience required for a particular role. Looking
at the positions that you are being asked to fill in a constructive
but positive way, adds to your credibility and aligns the needs
more closely to the market.
Workforce Planning
The next step has little to do with traditional recruiting and
is usually called workforce
planning. It the skill of building forecasting capability and
ensuring that the organization has, or can quickly get, the talent
it needs to achieve its business objectives.
It requires some knowledge of demographic, economic, and
business trends. It also requires a deep knowledge of the talent
marketplace and familiarity with the level of education and
experience available in the appropriate geography. It means
collaborating with the internal training function, senior
management, compensation, and human resources in general to agree
on which talent is best sought externally, which is best sourced
and promoted internally, and which needs to be developed by the
company, because recruiting them is difficult and expensive. These
tradeoffs and discussions have almost never happened in the past,
yet they are becoming what differentiate a great recruiting
function from an ordinary one.
Predicting who you will need, what skills will be important, or
what experience will be best aligned with needs is not possible.
What you can do by combing workforce planning with a talent
community is build the potential - a capability to meet future
needs - that did not exist before.
Building Talent Communities
Following all of this, only then is it productive to start
sourcing and attracting potential candidates to a talent community.
My article last week
pointed out how a community differs from a talent pool or a
database, and the distinction is significant. Talent pools are
inefficient and in the end leave you where you started - with a
large pool of unknown people who need to be further screened and
qualified. A true community screens by the way people interact, by
how they communicate, and by who they are connected to.
When an organization has a talent community, it has a dynamic
and ever-changing pool of talent, skill, and experience to meet
almost any need that might arise.
Recruiting is in dire need of change. Disruptive recruiting will
showcase technology and apply it in a practical way toward
improving and simplifying the processes that make up recruiting.
Disruptive recruiting will also mean that recruiters need different
skills, including those of networking and community-building.