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How Fast Can You Respond to Change?

By Kathy Barton, July 16, 2008

"Even if you're on the right track,
you'll get run over if you just sit there."
– Will Rogers

"If everything is under control,
you are going too slow."
– Mario Andretti

It is a cliché these days to say that the only constant in the business world is change, but that doesn't make it any less true. Here are some great statements about the way conventional wisdom gets turned on its head:

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
– Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Patent Office, 1899

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
– Harry Morris Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, 1927

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
– Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
– Bill Gates, 1981

If these guys can get it so wrong, is it any wonder that the rest of us poor mortals have trouble predicting what's going to happen next? Who could have foreseen the depth and breadth of the current housing slump and its affect on the economy 12 months ago? How often do you see a merger or acquisition coming from down in the trenches? How many of us have seen our companies go from a hiring frenzy to a hiring freeze in just a few months?

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

Newsletter, Recruiting

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The truth is no one can predict the future. What separates really successful recruiters and recruiting organizations from the rest is how well they deal with the unexpected – or the expected but unpredictable. In the Adler Group's Recruiting and Hiring Survey of 2007/2008, we asked 775 recruiters about marketplace changes and the effects of these changes on hiring. 91% of respondents believed that hiring the best is getting harder, and 93% found certain jobs harder to fill than others. This reflects a common theme throughout the survey: companies aren't finding enough top talent, and doing so is getting harder, not easier.

Here we are just six months later, and due to economic conditions, many companies have slowed hiring, or even imposed a hiring freeze. But does this mean finding top talent is suddenly easier? Unless your competition just laid-off a slew of great employees, no. In fact, it can make it even tougher. Semi-passive candidates who are fairly satisfied with their jobs are reluctant to make the jump to a new company where they aren't as well known, don't have a track record, and are vulnerable to layoffs if the new company gets in trouble (the old "last in, first out" theory). And forget about getting candidates to relocate if you don't have a great relocation package – in many markets, it's just too tough to sell an existing house to move to a new one. Unfortunately, some hiring managers assume that the tough market, instead of making good candidates more risk adverse, makes them hungrier, and therefore want to get even more selective about the candidates they will consider. So even if you are hiring less people, finding those people is certainly no easier than it has been in the past. This is a great time, if the number of open positions is down, to start improving your recruiting process and practices. Instead of using the existing job description, work with your hiring manager to create a performance profile. A performance profile is a description of what the person actually has to do in the job to be successful. This profile will help you find candidates who better match the demands of the job, and better equip you to sell the job to those candidates when you find them.

Next, forget about posting that old job description to your website and the major job boards. Yes, I know you can do that with just a push of a button using your ATS, but resist the temptation. Take the time, now that you have it, to come up with a creative and compelling ad that will really attract top candidates. Throw away your boring title (Admin Assist, Entry level Sales, QA Engineer Grade 2) and use something that will get some attention (Win this Job! Break into Sales! Own our Quality Program!). Then describe why a top person would want your job. If you can't do that, you didn't ask your hiring manager the right questions.

Then try some new sourcing tools and techniques. Try Googling for candidates. Reverse engineer your job and find out what the hot job boards are in your area. Talk to the top performers who are currently in the job, and find out where they hang out on the web, and see if you post the job there. Check out LinkedIn, and see if you can get an introduction to a likely candidate. Take the last person you hired out to lunch and find out who they worked with at their last job who was really great. Make sure your job is on SimplyHired and Indeed. See if there are some local networking events or association meetings you can attend. Search your resume database for likely candidates, call them up, and see what they are doing. See what their friends are doing. Get back in touch with some of the really good candidates you haven't had time to call and just have a conversation. Start reaching out to candidates for the positions that you know will be in high demand once things pick up again (and they will!).

The secret of not just surviving, but thriving in a changing economy is to leverage the situation to get better at everything you do. Get some additional training. Attend some on-line webinars. One encouraging note from our 2008 Survey: almost 80% of respondents said that they were modifying their recruiting strategy in response to the increased difficulty in hiring top talent. This is a positive sign that companies understand that hiring top talent is a critical success factor for meeting overall company objectives regardless of short-term economic conditions.