Strategic recruiting

By clearly articulating your requirements, you can transform human capital acquisition from a reactive game into a proactive offensive strategy. The winners in the recruiting wars will be using this technique.

The problem with the term “human capital” is that it perpetuates the notion that human beings are interchangeable anonymous widgets. People that are treated as if they were capital, start to behave like capital. They move to the source of the highest return as quickly as possible without regard to loyalty. Knowing who you want to recruit enables you to establish a real relationship with them.

Most recruiting happens in response to a variety of “surprises”: Attrition higher than the forecast; the unanticipated departure of a key contributor; unanticipated success in a new market; failure to adjust to changing conditions; the final release of “new” requisitions. Although the precise details of any given hiring requirement can never be perfectly predicted, they can be anticipated with a high degree of accuracy. What is often called “strategic recruiting” is really just a common sense approach to things that can be known about an organization.

Reactive processes are compounded by tools that work against effective recruiting. Applicant Tracking Systems, by and large, create overwhelming pools of data that inhibit clear decision making. They provide solid legal defenses and organizational buffers to cope with large volumes of data. They very specifically do not improve recruiting results.

Strategic

Much is made of the importance of being strategic. In an organization, there are two manifestations: strategic and strategic planning.

The most important part of being strategic is being so well prepared that you are always on the proactive side of problem solving. There is nothing more strategic than a function which sets standards for anticipation. Since strategy is shaped by circumstance, the company depends on constituents that can continue to move the ball forward in changing situations.

Dwight Eisenhower (the greatest planner of the American Century) was known to say: “the plan is everything, the plan is nothing.” By this, he meant that planning is supremely important with one tiny exception. Reality never, ever unfolds the way that you plan it. It is paramount to have a thorough and detailed planning process. It is equally important to understand that things will not unfold the way that you’ve planned them.

Planning helps prepare for a variety of circumstances. In much of the western world, scenario planning, a technique that relies on viewing the future from a variety of perspectives that are designed to discover and challenge core assumptions, is used to build executive team competencies in dealing with the unknown. For most of us, however, participation in strategic planning means filling out a seemingly endless supply of spreadsheets and forms. It takes courage and tenacity to convert strategic planning, as it is experienced by most recruiters, into a useful asset for the organization.

Workforce planning

The goal of workforce planning is to adequately predict the hiring, training and retention requirements of an organization.

Workforce planning can seem so complicated that it never gets done. Visionary systems suggest that a combination of scenario planning and deep skills assessment can lead to a decision-making framework. I favor the back of the envelope school of thinking. That is, some level of planning is far superior to none at all. John Sullivan's article, Why Workforce Planning Fails is an important point of departure (http://tinyurl.com/2omjw7).

When you have a department (or company) focused on the accomplishment of a single, repetitive task (even if it varies in the way that customer support tends to) there are sound, repeatable tools for workforce sizing that can and should be broadly applied. The techniques are so easy and powerful that precision can be measured in fractional percentage points of accuracy. A spreadsheet, attrition rates, forecast growth curves and a few variables will turn out excellent products in these cases. The Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (www.swpp.org) is a good source of tools.

In more sophisticated settings, organizational dynamics and political issues complicate the problem. Ultimately, good workforce planning is an iterative (and ongoing) process. Bottoms-up estimating will always be modified by top-down concerns. Workforce planning is, after all, a planning conversation. Learning to engage the organization in the give and take of planning is at the heart of successful implementation.

Labor market intelligence

Knowing your needs and the issues that affect them is one half of the planning equation. The other, equally important facet, involves understanding your labor market. It is both possible and desirable to know, by name and other contact information, all of the people you could employ within your market. Narrowing it down to those you want to employ comes later.

Although it may seem overwhelming at first (particularly if your organization is in an extremely large city), you should be able to identify the people who are likely to become a part of your workforce, the various sources (schools, competitors, adjacent industries) from which they will emerge. It’s a matter of reviewing the data you already have to determine those sources and the degree to which you rely on them.

This is one of the best uses for an applicant tracking system (ATS). What you are looking for is quantitative data describing the schools, competitors and adjacent industries that supplied you with your current workforce. The very best source of that information is company records. The most likely central repository is the ATS. Data from your existing workforce can show the labor supply patterns.

(Remember the searches you have done in the ATS. They will be useful as you begin to mine for potential employees later on in the process.)

Once you have a solid list of supply points (again, that’s schools, competitors, adjacent industries and other organizations), you can start to ask some pretty interesting questions like:

• What percentage of last decade’s graduates from Community College X did you hire. What percentage of which majors? Are they going to continue to deliver that level of supply over the next five years?
• What percentage of your engineers come from competitors? What percentage come from colleges? Will both sources continue to be viable over the next five years?
• Where do your program managers come from? What’s happening in those institutions?
• Where do your technicians come from? What’s happening in those worlds?

Ultimately, you need a supply point by supply point assessment of value and likelihood of continuation? This is the very same exercise that purchasing departments engage in when they plan for the availability of critical materials or subcontractors.

In fact, you might consider collaborating with them. One person’s labor supply is another person’s subcontractor. Being well versed in the labor supply includes understanding the sources for the entire organization’s supply chain.

State funded economic development councils and boards are great places to find the right data. Each of the members of the employment supply chain, from universities to customers and vendors, from regional government to competitors in transition, members of your chain know the answers to your questions. Building a comprehensive picture of your labor supply, its causes and conditions is a critical step in learning to manage it.

Sourcing

With a clear picture of the marketplace you are trying to work, sourcing becomes a different beast. Rather than searching for magic formulas to discover hidden treasures, the search begins with knowing what to look for and where to find it. While this type of sourcing is somewhat less glamorous than fancy internet hunts, it is much more likely to produce the desired results.

If University X supplies you with 10 percent of your genetic technicians, but only after they’ve worked somewhere else for five years, it would be sensible to try to sponsor their alumni directory. Other outreach avenues could include networking with professors and alumni to cherry pick the best students and follow them through their careers. Scholarships with essay requirements (perhaps for alumni in pursuit of advanced degrees) will also produce solid leads.

The point here is that sourcing, when executed strategically, is not a safari in search of big game. Rather, it is a development process in which the right candidates are shepherded into a system that is designed to provide them with value while you get to know them. Finding the right candidate, when done this way, involves picking from a crop of award winners rather than making do with whatever the market has on hand.

Sourcing involves using and managing sources. At the risk of becoming repetitious, it involves delivering value to the pool of prospective candidates. Each interaction with each potential employee must deliver much more value to the candidate than is taken by the communication. It is important to underline the fact that the definition of value has to be the potential employee’s, not the company’s.

Again, networks are built by giving each network member more value than is required of them. For a network to succeed, each member must be able to take away more than they give. It is the responsibility of the originator of the network to see that these economics are realized. In exchange for investing in value for the members, the originator grows a crop of ready to pick fruit that should, if properly managed, become a sustainable supply for the organization’s hiring needs.

Lean staffing

The principles of lean staffing are borrowed directly from “lean thinking”, a manufacturing approach designed to banish waste. The idea is that eliminating wasteful practices is the source of increased customer satisfaction. Some advanced recruiting organizations have begun to utilize these ideas.

The reason for attacking wasteful processes is simple. The consumption of time and resources inevitably leads to a reactive posture. Typically, the sources of waste include badly developed specifications and poorly measured processes.

When implemented effectively, “lean staffing” focuses on the details of the requisition and the various approval processes involved in the hiring decision. By eliminating redundancies and focusing on clarity in the job description, lean staffing interventions are able to produce huge efficiencies in recruiting organizations.

Rather than tolerating an “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to candidate quality, hiring managers are trained to clearly articulate their requirements. With a solid labor supply and clear requirements, there is no reason that a hiring manager’s needs cannot be satisfied with four candidates for a job. The reduction in candidate requirements (often as many as 100 resumes are reviewed to find a decent candidate in non-Lean Staffing shops), dive costs down quickly and distinctly. The Empower Network (www.theempowernetwork.com), a Dallas based consulting and sourcing firm, has installed Lean Staffing programs throughout the Fortune 500.

Conclusion

Interestingly, well run proactive functions that behave strategically are rarely outsourced. It’s the reactive services with their continually spiraling costs that draw the cost cutting card. Most decisions to move a function off of the company campus are rooted in the inability of management to keep costs in line. The outsourcing initiative is usuall driven by the idea that a contract will solve the problem.

While the approach outlined here won’t eliminate the prospect of outsourcing, it will create a strategic function that is hard to execute offsite. By knowing the requirements in advance, developing sources that meet the forecast needs, using flexible planning and always building networks by giving value, it is possible to build a strategic recruiting function. In it’s absence, outsourcing is a better alternative.