Stop playing around and turn separated operational recruitment into an integrated and strategic practice.

“Often the best solution to a management problem is the right person."

Edwin Booz

So what is HR really about? What are HR people doing? What is the purpose? That is in need of a bit of thinking. Let’s look at what is generally seen as the four core activities in HR and what is really happening there. Those four core activities are Recruitment, Development, Performance (management) and Retention. Today, I want to have a look at recruitment

Recruitment is arguably the most easy one to define. It’s visible, it can be measured, it can be clearly described. HR people populate large departments in large companies doing nothing else then recruitment and selection. Even smaller organizations tend to have some people dedicated to this discipline. If we want to have a closer look at what they’re doing there, it can be useful to start with separating the two main activities, namely recruitment and selection.

            Companies recruit in a lot of different ways, but most organizations recruit in a reactive way. In most cases it even means that there is a complete stand still and not much of activities can be registered. These organizations are most of the time big corporations and their recruitment activities were formed historically, being diverted from the golden years when these corporations used to receive hundreds of applications a week. The market doesn’t work that way anymore. Most people don’t have a favorite company that they’re following all the time. Recruiters that sit around and wait until a good CV drops by do have issues getting their recruitment targets, even when they’re having fancy websites and a lot of employer branding events going on. Candidates these days want to be and have to be approached. Good future workers have jobs all the time anyway. Furthermore: all the big corps do have events and cool websites, so having those is just basic, there’s certainly not a differentiator to be found anymore. What is a better way of working then? The secret lies in being pro-active and to work on a more personalized basis. Use of social media here is an absolute must. You need recruiters, or even an AI device (they’re there!) that can track the right people for you. You will have to talk to these people, as said in a personalized way. That’s already a start.

            But then you’re still not there. State-of-the-art recruitment is only possible if you look at it from a holistic point of view. Recruitment is not just an activity or a process but a part of a much bigger cluster. You can have a fantastic recruitment process, but if you’re paying less than the market does, you will have not a lot of people signing. You can pay them well but maybe you have corporate values that just don’t sell well (the bigger story). It can even be as basic as having the wrong job descriptions on your website and thus not be able to find the right people. If you think this last statement is a bit over the top, then I can tell you that a lot of big corporations have completely wrong descriptions on their websites. Usually for that one job they’re already looking for months for the right candidates. KPI’s are also important. Does a recruitment department have KPI’s? And if yes, are they using them to monitor themselves? Or another even more compelling question: are their KPI’s defined in a “right” way: are they relevant and do they measure what one wants them to measure?

            This is how activities should be organized. But most of the time recruitment activities consist of going to job fairs, “screening” incoming CV’s and calling people when something is not clear on their CV’s. And most recruiters these work with LinkedIn. That’s about it. It’s by all means a very operational job and is generally considered as some kind of starting point of an HR career. Start at the bottom, as they say. It gets more interesting if we look at the strategic positions and decisions that have to be taken in the field of recruitment. We can again ask the question: for whom are we recruiting and what’s the purpose. If we’re lucky the recruitment targets are the result of some kind of thinking and a workforce plan. It’s still strange to me to observe that even the biggest companies are just starting with a thing that we call Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). But one thing is certain: recruitment targets are always top-down driven. In lots of cases, top management will ask their middle management to give them an idea on the amount of people they need. If that’s done properly then the manager will send in a plan in accordance with the business strategy, but that’s not always the case. Even if middle management has an input and even if their plans are in line with overall business strategy, it will be the excom or whatever top management body that will make the final decision. And that doesn’t mean that they’re just going to validate what comes from middle management. They will always change the plan. Because they have to be lean, remember? Or just because they want to… CEO and certainly the COO will give their departments a list of how many FTE’s they can have. Does HR has a say in this? Well, no! The CEO will give the list to his top HR person and will demand that X amount of will have to be hired in a certain span of time. The HR (wo)man then goes to the recruitment manager and will just hand over the number. Sometimes the top HR or the recruitment manager wants to have a good feeling about him or herself and will ask for an extra FTE if the recruitment target is very high. And if they succeed in doing so, they will be praised by all of their direct reports as a good or even visionary HR leader. It would be much more interesting if HR departments start to use available data (and there’s a lot of that) to start recruiting pro-actively. Where are the talents that my company is interested in situated?- A quick LinkedIn search can answer that question, though it will be a rough estimate, pretty quick. Are there enough people in the region that we can hire? It can very well be that business strategy requires 500 SAP consultants, but are there so many SAP consultants in the vicinity? It’s clear that this procedure doesn’t have any strategic value whatsoever. Although everybody will agree that recruitment itself and the decisions that go with have a very high strategic value.

            Selection then. Now that we know who and how many people we will have to hire and if we succeed in getting some CV’s to our play table, we’re going to select between all of these CV’s to find the most ideal candidate. Again, this will have to be part of a more holistic system that will define in a very SMART way how this perfect person looks like. Not only in capabilities but also in terms of motivation and cultural fit. We will also have to see to it that every possible recruiter of a certain organization selects using the same (assessment) methodology. We will have to have a standard procedure and again will have to use KPI’s to monitor how where doing on process indicators (how long does it take to go from first interview to contract, for instance) and have these preferably down per selector. We will even have to have a standardized set on how and when we communicate with candidates. Most companies don’t implement all of the above. Most of the time the only really exciting thing that’s going on in selection is the discussion about if HR has to see the candidates first or “the business”. And if we know that, who is going to take the “hire” or “no hire” decision?

            Most of selection departments these days use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Reaction) methodology. Of all selection consultants I know –and I do know a lot of them- all of them will tell you that they use or know this interview framework. I also know that 90% of them use this methodology in a rather individual style. Meaning that they will actually not use it in the ways as it has been invented for. Not rarely, there are no key competencies defined per role, which means that nobody of the selectors knew exactly what they have to look for. That’s why most of the selectors will reply in all honesty that they still do most selection on “gut feeling”.

            And what are they selecting? Which competencies –if already defined- does the HR selection function takes a look at? Of course at the “soft skills”: The behavioral competencies and sometimes the cultural fit. I have to admit that I still don’t see a lot added value here and now I’m not only talking strategic. Why can’t a “business” or line manager conduct these interviews? He or she will be the one that has to work with this new colleague as a part of his or her team. These managers know better than HR what the needed competencies are… if a company start to draw up job profiles, it will not be HR that defines the competencies but it will be line management. Of course, in line with what a told earlier, HR has told management that they can’t be good at interviewing. Because they know STAR and line management does not. The only sensible reason I can see to have HR conduct selection interviews is to act as a kind of buffer to management and filter out the good from the bad candidates. Even on that point, there is a fierce debate going on. What the line manager has been looking for this really special, really hard to find employee and HR says no after an interview because the person in question has been just a bit too arrogant. Or in a case I have observed during one of my missions was too friendly…

Another thing that companies these days are just not ready for is the appearance of a candidate that is great but the corporation has no opening for them at that specific time. Having an HR reply to that would actually mean fulfilling a more strategic role.

Most of the HR organizations never have a quality control. By that I mean that there’s no measurement in place to see in how many cases the recruitment team was actually right by hiring somebody. Checking all the people that they didn’t hire is much tougher but the people that are there could easily be followed up. How are they performing? And if we combine that information with demographics (prior employer, studies,… ), we can actually set up a more “scientific” way of recruitment and selection. If we find out that there’s a high predictability of having a top performer if he has worked in company X before or has studied for a certain grade, we could target these groups. These days recruitment stays a “killing a fly in a dark room with a bazooka” activity. If we could start having “precision bombings”, then again we would move into a more strategic role.