Excellence in Recruitment

By Morag Malloy Mar 2009

Definitions Excellence: Possessing good qualities in high degree An outstanding feature In business is a goal to be pursed

Recruitment: The process of persuading person(s) to work for a

company or become a new member of an organisation. Process is defined as Sourcing, Screening & Selection

and Onboarding. To engage person(s) for service

Wikipedia

Going For Gold A Gold Level of Service and Process

In what seams a simple concept, why is it so hard for many organisations to achieve?

Most executives would not dream of approaching their function or business without a strategy, a plan, defined rules and following some type of standard operating procedures.

So why do so many take a shoot-from-the-hip approach to recruitment, unprepared and happy to make decisions based on emotions and gut feeling.

Or are still adopting a traditional passive recruitment model when no other part of business is passive, it is at most re-active, preferable pro-active.

Or they do simply do not see that a first class recruitment model is essential to an organisation achieving its business goals.

Recruitment Is Strategic

Being strategic means that something is important or essential to a plan of action.

From this it should be apparent that recruitment is very much a strategic function.

We need to create a recruitment strategy based on what makes the most sense and produces the highest “Return On Investment” for the effort.

That strategy has to be simple, pro-active, ever changing, scalable, repeatable and needs to be metric and measured to identify areas of continuous improvement and success.

Strategic recruitment needs to be an integrated part of the organisations business processes, widening its scope and footprint.

It’s A Team Effort In a July 2008 Australia Business Council poll, 59% of managers said that

finding enough good people to fill current and future requirements was their most pressing problem.

But it is interesting in the same survey most managers did not list recruitment in the top 5 activities that they undertake as part of their role.

In the 2008 Seek survey of why people leave an organisation and also why they join a new organisation “the quality of line/hiring managers” was one of the top 2 reasons.

In today’s corporate environment we have, to some degree, lead manager to believe that recruiting talent is a function of HR.

IT IS NOT, it need to be a team effort: Recruiter, Hiring Manager, HR Business Partner and the organisational team.

Engaging Our Hiring Managers

Without question, hiring managers are key to success and as business partners to our managers we need do 4 things to

Go for Gold.

1. Counsel and educate our hiring managers on the importance of their commitment in recruitment.

2. Let them know that recruitment is a systematic business process and educate them on their role within that process.

3. Make them understand that they have shared accountability, with us, to recruit and retain talent.

4. Champion with them, that hiring top talent is always the goal of the organisation and accepting 2nd grade, what ever the circumstance, is always going to be losing.

Planning For Success Often in our urgency to implement recruitment we forget to take a breath, contemplate the request and plan, this often leads to poor outcomes.

We need to take a moment to consider: Who is our organisation and what is our brand? What is the hiring priorities of the organisation? What is our general Employee Value Proposition? What do candidates want in the current market? What is our standard recruitment process, is it right for this occasion?

Does it need evaluated? What do we want to achieve? Are we all aligned, on the same page, with

the same expectations.

The Steps To Gold- Defining Real Job Needs

The key to minimising hiring mistakes and opening the pool to more top candidates is clarifying expectations by defining real job needs.

This is more than just getting the corporate job description with minimal education and years of experience required.

It is working with the hiring team to define the skills, attitude and motivation they need to hire and creating a prioritises position and performance profile.

Prioritised Position & Performance Profile

A PPPP describes the 4-6 agreed performance objectives that a person taking the job will have to do in the first year(6mths) to be successful, and defines what verified competencies, skills and personal characteristics the person need to have to accomplish this, critical and non critical .

Questions that need to be agreed to create this may be:

What are the problems that need to be immediately addressed What is the single major accomplishment this person will have to achieve in the first year What would a top candidate have to do in the first 30 days to achieve this objective What skills would a top candidate need to engage to achieve this What would be the other KPI’s in order of importance priority What needs to improve or change in role What do top people in this job do differently from just OK people What is the environment like (Pace, resources, culture, sophistication, management style,

decision making) What will a person learn in this job, Short / long term How does this job tie into bigger company initiatives What are the critical technical skills and how will this person use these Why would a top person want this job

Steps to Gold- Developing a position marketing description We hope that most positions have a current corporate job description.

Unfortunately these are usually in a standard template and can be more about what you can and cannot do within a role or an organisation and are not very compelling to a potential top candidate.

Boring Job Descriptions is one of the top 5 reasons why top candidates did not apply for a job and one of the top 10 reasons why someone turned down a job while in the recruitment process.

You need to create a separate recruitment job description with more of a marketing feel. This may be a simple as taking the current job description and reordering it so the exciting items appear first, or editing out the standard policies and procedures, or substituting buzzwords highlighting exciting equipment, projects, best practice etc. This is especially important as we move more and more to utilising new technology to find and advertise positions and brand opportunities.

Or you may have to or want to start from scratch, perhaps holding focus groups to identify what

excites top candidates or you top performers or ask new hires what factors, words, elements were the most or least compelling to them or investigate tools like Q12 where they reflect the criteria individuals use to select their next job.

This can also be developed into a template tool for recruiters to work with hiring managers to clarify position requirements.

Steps to Gold- Sourcing/Attracting Candidates

Getting access to top candidates is critical to success. You need to get the word out through as many suitable

channels as possible attracting active and passive candidates.

Just having an active candidates sourcing strategy will not in a candidate tight market get you the top talent you want, you also need to have an passive candidate strategy and the most effective strategy is if you can have an available pipeline

You also need to understand where your top candidates will come from and how they look for a job and target those mediums.

Talent By Major Sourcing Channels

Referrals & Targeted Passive Recruitment

Talent Pool Databases / Pipelines

Online & Print Advertising

3rd Party Recruiters

Internal Transfers

Temp/contract Conversions & Past Employees

Reference: Taleo Sept 08

An Advert is Not Enough To attract and ultimately hire these great people you need to consider the following:

The quality of the ad- If you follow marketing principals you only have 30 seconds to capture attention. What’s in it for the top candidate?

The number of people who see the ad- If top people can’t find the ad, it really doesn't matter how good it is. Type the title, keyword, location and the word Jobs into Google and see if it comes up. NO! Figure out what it takes to get to the top of a search engine.

Use some type of analytical tool to track your ad response- How many people see it, how many read it, how many apply. If you are not getting a good number of applicants there is something wrong with the ad, or it is too difficult to apply or it is discriminating potential candidates, you need to identify were the problem lies. Apply for one of your jobs and decide was it an easy, positive experience.

The quality of the applications- We need to start tracking the source of our best candidates. Your career website- At some point in the process good active and in particular passive

candidates will look at your organisations career website. What message is it conveying? Are the ads listed boring or worst out of date. Do you have positive stories about what it is like to work at your organisation? Is it to hard or demeaning to apply from your website.

Employment Branding- Very few companies have actively went out to build a strong employment brand. This is a long term investment, building your brand in a competitive market as an exceptional place to work, innovative and leading, proactively making it easy for applicants to read, hear or see the factors that make you different, but you can dramatically improve the quality and quantity of applicants over a long period by focusing on this.

Referral Programs- Work with the powers that be to create a visible, creative, easy to understand referral program that is not just tied to actual hires. We need to work towards the whole company being our sourcing team, they usually know the best people in their field either direct or indirect or by reputation.

Networking Sourcing passive candidates is more about networking than advertising.

The growth of social/business networking sites, Facebook, My Space, Linked In has made it easier for us all to expand our network or contacts but we need to know how to work them to our advantage or you can spend hours on line data mining with limited results.

If you are going to use these mediums as sourcing tools you need to understand the real job, the skills you are seeking and why a top person may be interested in this position. You need a strong message to sell and be able to do this well on first contact as you will not get a second chance.

Networking is more about getting to know talent, getting them to talk about what they want, finding out their motivation and getting further referrals it does not always produce short term results but can be great long-term branding if done properly.

Another under utilised networking opportunity is professional events and contests, if at every sales conference you asked the sales team to come back with the business cards of 3 top performer they meet, would you potentially have your next top talent.

Building a recruitment networking culture within the organisation, the best companies do this very well where every employee is a recruiter, identify talent within their day to day contacts and spreading the employment brand. A friend @ cisco program.

Steps to Gold- Candidate Care Their has been lots of surveys done about what candidates want during an interaction with an organisation as part of a recruitment process.

99% want an acknowledgement of their application 80% expect some salary and benefits information early in the interaction 66% want to have a clear understanding on what the main tasks of the job are and how they

will be measured. 58% want to know and understand the organisations culture 59% prefer to know they are not short-listed rather than hear nothing 23% want to be assured of anonymity 77% if interviewed want verbal feedback on how they performed at interview and what they

could do better next time to get the job. It is a learning experience. 90% want to have a sense that they are respected as an individual during the recruitment

process.

The fact is even with improvements in applicant tracking and management systems over the last 5 years these statistics have not changed much and a lot of negative feedback still come back about candidate care.

This is an easy low cost initiative for a great employment branding experience that can long-term dramatically improve the quality and quantity of candidates.

Also remember a candidate must feel welcomed, engaged and excited to accept an offer of employment.

Steps to Gold- The Interview The interview is a tool that allows you to conduct an in-depth work history review,

gather proof and understanding of candidates major accomplishments and their motivations.

But it is also a selling opportunity, about the organisation and the role and to shows top candidate how this job can offers both an immediate stretch and increased long-term growth, the 2 main reasons why people accept a job and not have the decision being made on compensation.

Top recruiters will always conduct a performance based interview as it has been proven that previous performance/accomplishments are the best indicator of future performance coupled with what is a candidates personal growth rate this is a great establisher of self motivation and potential.

We also need to ensure that all involved interviewing managers are prepared, understand the real job needs, are on time, focused on the task ahead and a fair legal interview is conducted with respect for the candidate. Top candidates will usually be interviewing with more than one company or are not yet convinced that leaving their current employer is what they want to do and if it is a poor interview top candidate will pull out of the process.

Steps to Gold- Assessment One of the reasons for poor hiring decisions is the informal and unsophisticated way in

which a consensus is reached about a candidate. Decisions based on first impressions, initial reactions and emotions rather than science.

Implementing an evidence based assessment approach will ensure that we are going for gold.

First it is important to have a formal debrief session defined as part of the process with all involved in the interviewing process reviewing all information pertaining to each client, this may be just based on the interview but could include other assessment tools: testing, references etc.

Going back to the initial position and performance profile create a candidate assessment sheet and rank each candidate on at min the following 5 criteria, but can be more. 1. Competency to do the job 2. Motivation to do the job3. Team skills working with comparable teams4. Achievement of comparable results 5. Cultural and environmental fit

Steps to Gold- Offer & Onboarding

There is a lot of debate on where this sits and who’s responsibility it is. I am going to say it has to be part of an high performing recruitment process.

The offer should always be more than just increased compensation, top candidates will not move only for this.

To minimise the amount of candidates that say no it should always be the recruiter who does the initial offer as they are trained to handle and overcome objections or deal with counter offers but this should always be followed up by the hiring manager calling them or creating an event around the offer, meet the team/lunch/coffee etc.

Assist them through the resignation process, be their as a friend to deal with the emotional roller coaster they will encounter in the next few weeks. Rehearse with them what they are going to say especially if they are likely to be counter offered, if the recruitment process has been a strong positive experience top talent will not change their minds.

In the time between offer and starting it is important that they have lots of communication with the company as this is were employee engagement starts. Some task undertaken may include: Creating friendship opportunities with a colleague/buddy Invite them to informal meetings/ get togethers etc Get them involved in the job before starting, send over reading material, ask for their comment on a

proposal Get a senior executive to call and welcome them, this is a great way to show the company has great

communication, is accessible and implies a strong trust

The last step is to ensure that you have worked with HR business partners and hiring managers to have a strong on-boarding program in place that reflects the efforts that you have put into recruiting top talent and creating an Excellence in Recruitment

Results When you have developed your strategy, done your

planning and executed the process it is important to understand what is working and where is the opportunities are for continuous improvement. The right mix of measures will help to validate the success of the model and allow you to share information with the hiring managers and organisation.

Because recruitment is continuously changing, driven by

technology and market conditions it is important that processes are refreshed and regularly updated.

The Future is Now - Web 2.0 “If you don’t invest in finding tomorrows candidates today you’ll become history.”

This was the headline in a recent article in the front on the business section of the New York Times it went on to say if you are still posting boring job descriptions on the major job boards you’d be considered a Web 1.0 stone-ager/ Neanderthal.

What is Web 2.0- It consists of a range of broad reaching tools including : Webinars, discussion walls, twitters, surveys, videos, 3 life games + more as they grow an d invent new ones every day.

Web 2.0 key trends and tools are: Integrated social media engines- Facebook pages, Linked in networks, pushing teaser ads to

appropriate blogs or sites most appropriate to your target audience. Use of Talent Hubs- A portal or micro-site for a group of jobs that are marketed using

consumer marketing principals ( Recommendation/ information style) Developing a prospect database with automated CRM- Build a personal prospect pool that

is constantly nurtured using automated CRM tools Apply advanced consumer marketing tools to recruitment advertising- Don’t use you

advert to sell a job use it to make a connection, create interest and ultimately demand.

Recruitment has went through increasing faster rates of change over the last 10 years and it will only get faster The key factors are going to be Automation, Optimisation and Integration

Excellence in Recruitment

By Morag Malloy Mar 2009

ANY QUESTIONS?