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The World of Hiring - Changing Faster Than Most Companies Can Respond

By Bryan Johanson, March 1, 2007

Last week we kicked off our live Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 with the first event in Washington, D.C. to a sold out crowd. On Wednesday evening, Lou Adler hosted 21 recruiting leaders in an intimate roundtable discussion about state-of-the-art recruiting in corporate America. Since it was an invitation only event - all participants were directors and vice presidents of recruiting, or Vice Presidents of HR, with direct responsibility for recruiting.

For those of you who couldn't make it, or would rather be a fly-on-the-wall, I thought I'd share a few of the issues discussed by this high powered group. These may be some of the very issues you'll want to address in your own hiring strategy for 2007.

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For those of you who couldn't make it, or would rather be a fly-on-the-wall, I thought I'd share a few of the issues discussed by this high powered group. These may be some of the very issues you'll want to address in your own hiring strategy for 2007.

1. Recruiting and closing good candidates is getting harder. Nearly the entire group agreed that it was getting harder to recruit great candidates. There was some disagreement on the ease of finding talent (identifying names of good people), but there was universal agreement on the difficulty of convincing candidates to move forward in the process. This is partly driven by the nature of the competitive market. With many places in the U.S. experiencing 2% or less unemployment, top talent can afford to be choosy. Couple that with a marketplace where individuals can easily find new opportunities and where counter offers are the norm; now, you've got a very hot labor market. Employee loyalty seems to be at an all time low -- even among those who have accepted a position. Almost all candidates try to ensure they are making the right decision by actively exploring other options. (They would rather avoid "buyer's remorse".)
   
   One Vice President of HR described a nine month search for a Director of IT, only to receive an email from the candidate the night before his start date informing her that he was not coming. He didn't even have the decency to pick up the phone. They decided to outsource that position because they couldn't afford to be without the help for another nine months. To combat these trends, companies will have to teach their recruiting staff how to deal with candidates who have multiple opportunities. Hiring managers will have to become more involved in the closing and recruiting process. Even after candidates start, you have to keep recruiting them. Lou calls this process continuous rehiring. As you know, retaining your talent is much cheaper than going back out to the market.
2. Bureaucracy is enemy # 1: Great recruiters in the corporate world are being buried by mounds of red tape - documentation and busy work surrounding the recruiting process. Whether it's compliance with the OFCCP rulings or Sarbanes Oxley or any number of other internal and external time wasters, great recruiters hate this part of the job. The best ones won't do it! Part of the recruiting leader's job is to streamline the processes, upgrade technology and minimize the busy work we strap onto the back of our core recruiting team.
   
   I was on the phone with the President of a small recruiting firm in Pennsylvania. She has completely relieved her recruiting staff of all paperwork by creating a separate team to handle the generation of names, as well as the application and data entry processes. Why? She knows that time spent doing these tasks means less time talking to candidates, building networks and qualifying candidates. Her goal is maximize her recruiters' time with quality candidates. Some of the best sales people don't like filling out the paperwork, don't submit great reports and won't waste time on activities that don't produce sales. This is also true of the best recruiters. They won't waste time on activities that don't produce results. They avoid the pitfalls of the corporate ATS system like the plague. They prefer to work the phones and consider most time away from the phones as counter productive. These types of recruiters require a different incentive structure and role definition to survive in most corporate recruiting departments. Using recruiters with third-party experience requires an organization to rethink everything - incentive structures, bonus payments and role definitions.
3. Marketing the company and the position is critical: For many companies this means a complete overhaul for the career section of the corporate website. Some companies have made major strides in this area, but many have missed the boat completely. Most candidates - even passive candidates that your best recruiters dig up themselves - will visit the corporate website. The messages they read about the company, the mission, the vision, the people who work there and the career opportunities have a huge impact. Here's a case-in-point. We just spoke with Francine Meza, VP of HR for Advanced Medical Optics. She has two sons who recently entered the job market. One son is 24 with an engineering degree. These are the four criteria he used to pick his new position:
   1. The quality of the company's whole web site - companies with poor quality sites were quickly eliminated from consideration.
   2. The career message and career opportunities and how these were presented on the career page - if the emphasis wasn't on long term growth he wasn't interested.
   
   
   3. Only if the above two criteria were met would he even begin to look for a job. In some cases, he just sent his resume to the recruiting department and let them look for the right job.
   
   
   4. He accepted the job based on the hiring manager, the career path opportunities and some of the projects he'd be working on - as long as the compensation was fair.
   
   
   
   

The theme: Understand your buyer and design sourcing around their needs. Do not design your sourcing around your favorite job board, the ATS, or company bureaucracy. The world of hiring is changing faster than most companies can respond. These are some of the important and popular topics we discussed at the executive roundtable. If these issues aren't already on your recruiting agenda for 2007, maybe you should take a second look.

Happy Recruiting