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Hiring the Best is a Team Sport
Selecting Your Recruiting Team to Win the Hiring Game

By Lou Adler, September 27, 2006

In my opinion, most hiring processes and corporate recruiting departments have been built using a Lone Ranger model. Hiring third-party recruiters and allowing them to play using their own rules is a losing proposition. Not only is this inefficient, results are unpredictable and doing this leaves your recruiting efforts at risk if one of your starters leave. If you want to scale "best practices and best processes" you have to start with a well-organized team of specialists doing the right things every time.

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With this in mind, here's how I'd field a team for a corporate recruiting department. Of course, if you're a big company you might have more than one person in each position and if you're smaller you might have one person doing everything. I'm drafting my fantasy team right now (you'll see some of my selections below), but go ahead and email me your nominations and we'll make them public at a future event.

The Basic Positions on a Corporate Recruiting Team

1. Workforce Planner. There is no way a company can hire top people on a consistent basis unless it can forecast its hiring needs using some type of rolling 12 month planning process. To fill this role I'd select someone from the operations side of retail, hospitality or distribution. Top people in these industries understand the importance of accurately forecasting resources (people, capital, facilities) to meet changing business needs.
2. Web analytics and metrics expert. The recruiting department must have sophisticated analytical information to measure every aspect of its sourcing and recruiting efforts. Select someone for this position outside of recruiting/HR - probably in consumer products marketing - and have the person optimize each page in your website process to maximize visits, retention rates and candidate quality. On the metrics side, hire someone from manufacturing or distribution who knows how to implement process control metrics, not historical metrics.
3. Active candidate advertising expert. This person needs to maximize the number of top people who respond to your advertising programs. Select someone for this position who has successfully led Internet-based consumer product advertising programs and knows how to reverse engineer your sourcing process.
4. Passive candidate researcher. Getting names of passive candidates requires Internet datamining experts. If you can't hire Shally Steckerl find someone just like him to provide reams of names for every hard-to-fill spot in your company.
5. Passive candidate networker. This person must make 30 or so calls a day to these cold candidates, recruit them and get two to three top quality referrals on each call. This will probably be the most important person on your team.
6. Full-cycle executive recruiter (i.e., account manager). This is the person taking the assignment, writing performance profiles, counseling your candidates, coaching your hiring team and negotiating the close. This person will also lead panel interviews and the formal debriefing session with the hiring team.
7. High volume candidate customer service rep, i.e., recruiting advisors. If you are hiring top performers for entry-level or critical high volume spots you need someone who can advise and counsel them during the process. These recruiting advisors need to provide career advice, answer questions, extend and close the offer. They also follow-up to minimize no-shows.
8. Recruiting process and technology expert. To get more out of your technology you need someone who is both a strong full-cycle high volume recruiter and someone who understands recruiting processes. This person must be seen as a recognized expert and must have a strong backbone; since, the person will be leading all discussions with your IT department and your technology providers. Carl Bradford is the prototype for this type of person.
9. Employee Referral Program Name Solicitor. This is the person who meets with your employees and asks them for the names of the best people they've ever worked with. Instead of hiring one person to do this - why not direct every person on your recruiting team to personally meet with 5-10 employees every week and track their results. Before you know it, you'll have hundreds of names of top performers.
10. College Recruiting Leader. This person must be able to work with the career directors and the top professors at the best schools in the country and get the names of the best students. Select this person wisely.
11. Diversity Recruiter. Hire a diverse person to lead this effort. (Email Eliana Hassen for more on this.) Then start meeting college freshman and high school seniors as part of a four-year diversity hiring initiative to ensure that your company hires the lion's share of these people when they graduate.
12. CRM and resume database mining specialist. Don't wait for your ATS vendor to come up with a solution. Dump all of your resumes and passive candidate information into a large database; then, overlay this with a basic high volume email manager. Done properly, with some creative marketing, you'll fill 5-10% of your jobs this way with some top performers.
13. Assessments leader. Skills based assessments are great tools - if you don't lose top performers in the process. If you don't need a full-time person for this role, get Charles Handler to give you the straight scoop.
14. Coach. If you're a recruiting manager evaluate your team along these lines to see if you have the best people assigned to each role. Your job is to field the best team possible and track their performance. (If you're the person who is hiring a recruiting manager, then judge them on how well they can put the team in place and if they can win the hiring game.)
15. The hiring manager and the hiring team. Too bad you can't select your clients, but a good process in place can help you win the game. In my opinion, to get hiring right everyone on the hiring team must agree to the real job needs and they must all adhere to some type of objective assessment process. I unabashedly recommend Performance-based Hiring. The key is to have some "rules of the game" in place before you begin playing, otherwise you'll never win.

Depending on the size of your team, you might need to combine positions or hire outside experts to set up the initial process. With a workforce plan in place you can "time share" these skills by concentrating on critical hiring needs.

The bottom line, hiring top talent is a team sport. Unfortunately, every recruiter, manager and interviewer uses their own rules. There are no referees or umpires and no instant replay; so, you'd better wear your helmet and protective gear if you want to play.