Candidate quality versus quantity

Recent economic conditions have caused a dramatic resurgence in the discussion of quality of hire versus quantity of hire. One of America’s most respected business leaders—who recognizes the value of quality of hire—put it plainly:

“Hiring good people is hard. Hiring great people is brutally hard. And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the team. All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work.”
-Jack Welch

Although there is great debate over the actual cost of hiring the wrong person, most leaders, understand that quantity hiring can lead to multiple consequences including:

• Increased tangible costs: interviewing time, training, hiring expenses, management and administrative time, severance pay, etc.
• Loss of better candidates: by recruiting the wrong candidate, the recruiting process stops too early, causing the potential loss of a much higher caliber person.
• Loss of existing staff: existing employees could question the company's judgment based on the quality of the new hires, making them more vulnerable to recruiters.
• Customer costs: existing clients view the quality of the employee they deal with as a direct reflection of the organization for whom they work.

As business leaders-if we all agree that candidate quality is the Holy Grail-why do we often find ourselves preaching about quality of hires, while justifying the existence of our talent acquisition function through metrics other than candidate quality and performance?  After more than 15 years of talking with and studying some of the smartest, most accomplished HR and talent acquisition leaders in the country, a number of common themes surface that may help us better understand leaders who seemingly talk out both sides of their mouths.

Ask yourself if you have ever fallen into one of these categories:

• Leaders who promote quality of hire directives to their recruiting organizations, yet primarily talk in terms of "cost" instead of "investment" when reporting results to their management teams.
• Leaders who talk about the need for quality candidates, yet measure their recruiting organizations utilizing transactional measurements.
• Leaders who feel that current economic conditions cause executive management to only focus on cost, further restricting their team's ability to recruit quality candidates.
• Leaders who focus only on the process of talent acquisition, not the business impact.
• Leaders who talk in HR terms, not relating to management in business terms.

Most recruiting leaders have found themselves in situations such as those above, not realizing the effect they have on their staff and their overall relationship with the business executives they support.  In order to effectively lead a talent acquisition function, while addressing management expectations and driving necessary staff behaviors, we must embrace the following key areas.

1.     Begin creating an effective internal brand.

The internal brand of your recruiting organization is critical to any leader's ability to gain the proverbial seat at the table.  This begins by creating the right functional structure and defined metrics that have real meaning to executive management.  

2.     Properly justify costs.

Often executive management focuses on metrics that they have been conditioned to need.  If we begin by building the correct amount of credibility within the organization, we can begin to educate management on the differences between cost and investment as associated with recruiting the rights candidates.  It is no longer just about saving short-term dollars, but about the long-term value the recruitment function brings to the organization.  Properly justifying costs can only occur after a proper credibility and internal brand identity is established.

3.     Drop the "HR" lingo and focus on the business.

Build a story by looking at the big picture of the effects recruiting has to the overall business.   Trade away terms such as ATS, social networking and the like and focus on:

• Increased revenues
• Increased profitability
• Increased efficiencies
• Opening new lines of business
• Delivering better, more innovative products

4.     Develop the right metrics.

Metrics will define the behaviors that we receive from our staff, regardless of what we may otherwise say and do.  If we continually preach about candidate quality to our organizations, yet we measure them on transactional items such as cost per hire and time to fill, the goals attained will be cost per hire and time to fill-otherwise known as quantity.  If we back up our talk about quality with metrics that measure quality of hire, we build consistency and credibility with both our staff and our executive leadership.  

5.     Take ownership.

If the quality of hire is really the focus of your talent acquisition organization, stop talking about it and take responsibility for it!  Tying this to the right metrics, show your staff and executive leadership the performance of the candidates your team has brought to the organization.  Are their sales levels better than those of the past?  Are turnovers in the first 6 months lower than that of the past?  What is the performance rating of the majority of the candidates brought into the organization over the past 6 months? 

Talent acquisition leaders are often quick to discount their function's responsibility in employee turnover and performance. -Although I agree there is a time limit to this responsibility, we cannot discount these facts when reporting our successes (or failures) to our teams and corporate leadership.

Although the argument of quality versus quantity is an easy one to gain agreement on, most talent leaders unintentionally stop short of being able to successful execute on this premise. -We talk about quality and measure quantity. We talk about quality and report about quantity to corporate leadership. We talk about quality but leadership only focuses on quantity.

If we are truly able to focus our organizations on identifying and recruiting quality talent, we must build credibility with our leadership, educate them on the impact of real quality versus quantity, measure our teams on quality of candidate and not quantity of candidate, and take ownership of the entire process.