A New Role for Recruiters
Last week I explained some of the reasons why many of the recent layoffs were directed at recruiters. This week I will try to provide some ideas for becoming more influential and effective.
Past recruiting initiatives have generally focused on improving efficiency, managing workflows, and controlling costs. New initiatives are required in this era where there is massive talent confusion about which people, skills, and attributes are most important and where managers and recruiters often hold divergent ideas about the labor market.
Recruiting has the opportunity to shine or be replaced unless it can ensure the availability of and quality of talent. Recruiters are central to that effort, and many changes are underfoot. Recruiting as a profession is challenged to embrace a broader work scope and take responsibility for more sophisticated and complex talent analysis and development.
There are several approaches to developing a sustainable talent management process and philosophy. Some of these mirror the methods used by manufacturing, finance, and other corporate functions that have transformed over the past decades. We can all learn from each other and draw inferences where they are appropriate.
Ask yourself and your managers a new question.
What people policies will lead to a sustainable workforce model over economic cycles and skill changes? This is the central issue that must be solved. Binging and purging people is a zero-sum game; neither you, the employees, the candidates, or the organization gain anything. What each gets are anger, frustration, and fear.
Shift Your Thinking
Instead of thinking about your job as filling requisitions, sourcing candidates, or screening people, think of it as providing talent guidance to management.
Having the right frame of mind is the most critical aspect of change. It will not be easy to think like a solutions provider rather than a “slot filler.” Still, as long as that is your goal and you periodically assess whether you are moving in the right direction, you will succeed.
Recruiters can help managers by influencing what combination of skills and experience will make it easier to achieve their business goals. Recruiters with credibility can push back on hiring managers who seem to be asking for talent that is not right for the organization’s direction. But to do this, the recruiters will need knowledge of the talent market and be able to intelligently speak about the availability of certain kinds of talent with numbers and facts.
Focus on the real skills you and the hiring managers determine are critical.
To quantitatively improve candidate quality and overall performance, a solutions provider needs to be able to define every position in terms of critical competencies and skills that have been verified as necessary to accomplish the tasks of that position.
You need to ask hiring managers to define the skills they need to hire, not the degrees and experience levels they think are appropriate. While degrees and experience may add depth to the final decision, skills and abilities, ultimately make the most difference.
Another way to improve the sophistication and effectiveness of talent planning is to add more thoughtful analysis to the process.
Finance has developed models to help guide investment decisions, and over the next few years, Recruitment needs to develop similar models for talent planning. For example, use modeling techniques to determine whether hiring a replacement for a position or training someone internally is more efficient. The decision is made on data, not on the opinions of HR or managers.
Some possible areas for investigation and research include:
Calculate the impact of one person or a team of people on profits based on a skills profile versus another person or team with a different profile.
Look at the attributes of successful performers and tie your findings back into the recruitment assessment and the development processes.
Use search techniques to scan emails for employees’ thoughts about the organization and find clues why people might be looking for new positions.
This simple graphic is one way to show the value of various skills and what category of person should provide those skills. This is not a definitive model – it is an example designed to engage a hiring manager in a discussion.
Use Four Strategic Levers Wisely
Each recruitment function has four levers that have an effect on talent and define the talent strategy. These are the levers of attraction, competence, commitment, and performance.
We have overused the attraction lever for a decade or more as organizations convinced themselves that they needed more people with narrower skills. Recruiting became the darling of HR and has now suffered a significant blow as the other levers rise in importance.
The competence lever focuses on the development of people and on increasing the capabilities of the current workforce. The lever is being pulled the hardest right now, although the performance lever is also critical.
The performance lever defines success and focuses teams and individuals on accomplishing business results. As desired outcomes are better defined, performance can be more finely measured and improved. We need much better ways to quantify performance and isolate elements of it from other influences.
The final lever or commitment contains engagement and retention. People stay with an organization because it does two things: (1) it provides them with interesting, exciting, and meaningful work, and (2) it removes barriers to development, cross-training, and internal transfers. In other words, engagement is not about pay, the boss’s mood, the furniture, or the work/life balance. It is much simpler – it is about treating people as if they mattered, as if their opinions are essential, and as if they could make their own decisions about what they can do.
The next few years will be marked by the increasing use of quantitative tools and methods in HR and recruiting. Many of these will be “imported” from other disciplines already shaken to the core, such as manufacturing and finance. We are entering an era when we begin to quantitatively define how many people are needed to meet business needs, what skills are proprietary, which can be outsourced or given to consultants, and what needs to be done internally for well-defined reasons. We will be moving to a disciplined and much deeper understanding of work and who does it to build a more sustainable workforce.
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