Recruiting

As your passionate recruiting manager, I give everything I’ve got to find and keep the people we hire and grow your company in a way that makes people proud to do work here.  You respond by telling me I am not hiring fast enough, yet I work overtime…I work weekends…I am typically the first person in the office to smile at candidates and I’m the last person to leave after our interviews are over for the day.  I’m your candidate experience cheerleader and I manage the haystack of relationships circling your revolving door of rejected candidates.

“Make sure they all have the same candidate experience!”

You continue to bark at me, excusing your behavior with excuses like “our investors and board of directors are pressuring our executive team to meet head count objectives!”   You ask me in a passive-aggressive manner:

“Why are we behind schedule with hiring? Why aren’t we hiring fast enough! You ARE the expert, aren’t YOU?”

I get it.  You need to build your product.  You need to deliver happiness in the form of features to your growing user base.  We need to hit hiring goals and build toward revenue targets to maximize shareholder value.  We need to keep everyone happy and employed.  Well, maybe not happy.

You may think I am failing you as a recruiting manager but what do you know about recruiting?  I am the expert….remember? Oh, you’ve interviewed a bunch of candidates in this skill-set, so that makes you an expert in supply chain, candidate marketing, candidate engagement, sourcing, recruiting, and human relationship management?  Riiiiiiiiight.  Well, Mr and Mrs. C-Level…

Recruiting has become more than, “Can they do the job, will they do the job, are they a culture fit?”

Please allow me to educate you in the world of demanding people, messed up processes, and silly recruiting tools…We call it recruiting…….and if you pay attention….there might even be an actionable insight you can take away.

11 reasons why corporate recruiting managers fail…

1. Root Cause Identification: There isn’t a data-driven method to pinpoint the root cause of a recruiting problem on internal / external recruiting teams.

2. Best Practices: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are focused on workflow and tracking, capturing data related to hiring a candidate but not nearly focused enough on “how best to hire a candidate” or “how best to recruit.”

If you need help in these areas, go here.

3. Planning: Your recruiting team responsible for sourcing, recruiting, and hiring is impacted daily with necessary updates that influence a job opening that they never get or get too late. Here is an idea – develop a plan and build out your KPI’s before you open the new job, so you know what and why you are hiring.  Recruiters need visibility and transparency behind the motives of “why are we hiring for a new role” because it directly impacts the hiring success or failure.  Otherwise recruiters look stupid when candidates and coworkers ask “why?”  Talk about credibility problems. Involve your recruiters, please.

4. Communication:  When you do pass on information to your recruiting leader, you tell him/her recruiting manager but he/she is inundated with meetings and hiring manager counsel sessions.  By the time information is passed onto the people actually doing the recruiting, it is no longer important information because a new update supersedes the importance of the old one.  Good luck with that.

5. Engagement not tied to Incentives:  We might spend between 1M – 200M on our talent acquisition program annually, yet we don’t have access to a streamlined program that tracks and manages recruiting performance in a programmatic fashion.  There is no method, whether it is customizable or predefined, to help evaluate and manage performance of internal and external recruiting teams.  We can’t inspire change, increase engagement, or collaborate with recruiting teams/recruiters in realtime.  

6. Key Performance Indicators (KPI): It’s a major problem that we only measure recruiting team performance on a case by “hire” case and it isn’t predictable, cost effective, or strategic.  This reactive approach neglects benchmarking and it prevents optimization in cost, speed, quality, forecasting and of course, performance.  Performance based hiring is legit.

7. Inaccurate Data: When neglecting performance data, we don’t have a real-time strategy with pivoting power to understand who our top performing recruiting teams/recruiters are in the areas that we find most valuable at any given time.  Whether we want speed, cost, quality, specialities, or referrals.  We don’t know what we want or need.  We can’t predict.  We can’t recognize performance over fluke. We can’t anticipate problems. We don’t know which agencies we should enlist help from because we have zero-quality data and we are too busy reacting to fire drills.   Emotional hiring managers are running behind schedule pressuring us while we continue to recruit in the dark.

8. Bureaucracy and Politics: Recruiting managers can’t communicate changes to everyone involved in the change in a timely, centralized fashion, and this impacts internal and external recruiting teams’ efforts.  As your recruiting manager, we don’t have a fast method to reach everyone impacted.  There is no way to broadcast conversation related to feedback, candidate updates, interview notes, req updates, or other program details impacting the internal and external recruiting team success.  There is no forum to provide feedback or clarify without causing email bottlenecks, confusion, and constant chasing.  Recruiting leaders forget or give up on providing essential updates impacting hiring decisions.

9. (Lack of) Information Sharing:  Changes happen hourly and it impacts recruiting teams ability to match and qualify talent.  Some of these changes aren’t restricted from recruiting teams.  Sourcing, recruiting, and candidates are dependent on the dissemination of the information contained within these changes.  Share more information with the reason behind the change.

10. Process or Technology: Recruiting processes built around existing software fail as a conduit system between hiring managers and candidates communication.  It takes way too long for updates, notifications, and alerts to reach their destination.  This causes hiring teams to miss offer and decision deadlines, impacting candidate experience, partner relationships, loyalty, and hiring success.

11. Burnout, Lack of Recognition: Burnout is a huge problem in the recruiting industry.  After dealing with constant pressure from executive leaders and hiring managers who want to hire faster and don’t care how….recruiting leaders quickly run out of positive ways to inspire recruitment performance in recruiting teams.   Positive reinforcement quickly turns into subdued threats.  Fear-based methods lead to escalations, increased turnover, and reduced morale.  Recruiting managers end up micromanaging or neglecting “un-coachable” recruiters with counterproductive effects on performance.  What is earned on Friday isn’t praised and forgotten on Monday.  Recruiting departments can be miserable places to manage recruiters and an even worse place for those subordinates trapped under yours truly, your clueless, underperforming, not-hiring-fast-enough recruiting manager.  Bless your heart.

The good news is there are efforts to correct these massive problems.

Connect with us and learn more: https://angel.co/recruiting-scorecard 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Chmielinski is a second generation recruiting veteran, former athlete, and founder of Veruca.io, the first ever recruiting innovations lab.  His company is built from two generations of sales and recruiting experience resting on the backbone of post-millennial technology.  An industry-leading, hub-spot for consulting, technology, and recruiting process design.  Veruca.io aims to make life easier for professional sourcing and recruiting teams.  Mr. Chmielinski’s inaugural software attracted 178 active users in 114 cities from 17 countries.

Talent Acquisition Evolves

Employers rely heavily on staffing agencies to find, qualify, and hire talent, and the extreme cost inhibits us from innovation. The emerging talent acquisition market is estimated to be valued at $85 billion dollars. Organization leaders are fed up with traditional recruiting dogma coming from self-proclaimed recruiting leaders, and several popular companies who have unlimited resources have been working on creating the new sourcing and recruiting paradigm that will replace the way you do it now. Let me take it one step further. I’m not talking about an improvement to the existing paradigm because a cool, new tool hits the market like connectifier comes along to creatively automate a secondary recruiting function like research. I’m talking about the radical reinvention of the entire marketplace for talent acquisition. In fact, we no longer will call it talent acquisition. Talent delivery is a more appropriate description for the future. On demand.

Tech leaders wiped out historically-stable industries in 2013 and 2014 with marketplace/crowdsourcing technologies and the struggle to hire talent has brought the recruiting industry front and center in 2015 and beyond. The technology to do it better has arrived. The exciting 2015 economic forecast in the USA and the realization of recruiting underperformance in prior years jeopardizes the bold acceleration in technology our society is capable of producing. An internet of things conundrum.

The spotlight in recruiting is ours. A focus on progressing recruiting and talent-delivery technology. I’m not talking about recruiting leaders who capitalize on the broken system. The ones who schmooze C-Levels trying to pose as software gurus at expensive dinners with software-like company names who progress their own markets by developing a new process to aggregate recruiting help but still use traditional fee structures. Those are smoke and mirror jobs and don’t innovate our recruiting industry. They might generate tons of revenue for being different but they stall progress. You companies know who you are. What I am saying is that the genius minds that created companies like google or uber or airbnb or zappos or facebook, have been studying and focusing on your so-called, craft. Those minds. That is the brain power focused on wiping out the primary function of talent acquisition with an entirely new approach. We earned it with greed and the kicker is that it will intuitively and seamlessly include the incremental secondary technology we get excited about at venues like SourceCon. Contact me if you would like a couple links to see the research. I don’t have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of discussions I have had with CEOs and CTOs that are planning on aggressively scaling in 2015 with a mindset to acquire talent differently. Before you argue, yes, I agree that you can never sunset something 100%. The recruiting minority will have a vehicle to operate the old way, for example, even casino and hotel industries in Las Vegas still run AS/400 midrange and there is a small market for RPG programmers. I doubt the vehicle for that talent delivery will adopt a new paradigm for obvious reasons.

We’ve driven technology execs to be passionate enough to reinvent our industry and we can’t change that but as recruiting leaders, we can recognize the shift and evolve our practice. Let the tools do the heavy lifting and lets focus on the relationships. Let’s make investments toward supporting the shift rather than fear it, because a new wave of recruiting and sourcing is upon us and we as talent acquisition professionals are best equipped to lead the charge. However, in order to restore trust to our profession we have to make a sacrifice and show leaders that we do our work for the right reasons. It is time we set aside the ridiculously large agency fees. We have to reduce our huge margins on direct hire and contract staffing services. Only then will we receive authority and the figurative keys to the 85 billion dollar castle.

I was raised in a recruiting family and supported my parents nationwide, successful recruiting company and I can’t honestly justify how we assign value in the majority of these huge staffing fees. Let’s be real and take ownership. I joked in a forum recently saying we are in recruiters anonymous and the first step is to acknowledge the dysfunction. Let’s reinvent what our value is to the organization rather than justify our value to each other. Tech leaders don’t value the skill-set. The only thing the extra margin in our fees really do is fuel our lifestyle until we put in the work to make the next match. Not very progressive. Please acknowledge that I say match because placements don’t accurately define the actual thing we are trying to do. We are consultants that identify a match. The minute we start placing people, we become interested in generating revenue, not focused on aligning to the objectives that people have within an organization.
After supporting a few 100M managed service contract staffing programs (MSP) at a couple well-known enterprises, I was amazed at the corruption and reallocation of spending going to the wrong people for the wrong reasons. It is obvious to me why most professionals do not like and do not trust recruiting professionals. With recent advances in technology, we have the capability and opportunity to let go of the past. We can provide relationship-building results and replace the stigma of greed and mistrust if we use the tools as our ally and develop new creative approaches to monetization, just like every other industry is working toward.

Greed will be replaced with Goodwill. Let’s take out the trash within our profession and begin by boycotting huge staffing agency placement fees. In case you missed it, that’s our call to action. Let’s evolve our relationship with hiring leaders and walk away from the thing that many think is the only thing we care about. Let’s prove that there is a stronger approach motivated by relationship values. Let’s support the development of better talent acquisition systems and trust me, we will unlock the door the 85 Billion in monetization that will flow through all of us.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO NEXT?

1) Join a marketplace recruiting technology platform

2) Reduce your dependency on the recruiting establishment by saying no to huge fees.

Work only with progressive tech recruiting tools and organizations that define value away from double digit fees.

3) Get creative and demonstrate your true value. Don’t gauge your clients.  Start doing pro-bono recruiting for colleagues and build credibility with your hiring leaders.

4) Come up with a new idea for monetizing recruiter services alongside tools.  Pitch the idea.  Get creative.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Chmielinski is a second generation recruiting veteran, former athlete, and founder of Veruca.io, the first ever recruiting innovations lab.  His company is built from two generations of sales and recruiting experience resting on the backbone of post-millennial technology.  An industry-leading, hub-spot for consulting, technology, and recruiting process design.  Veruca.io aims to make like easier for professional sourcing and recruiting teams.  Mr. Chmielinski’s inaugural software attracted 178 active users in 114 cities from 17 countries.