driving recruitment performance
From good to great
A while back, I received a call from a former HR colleague of mine named Jim. He was a bit distressed, as his leadership team had just challenged him to improve the number of days it took to fill open jobs while still ensuring high-quality hires. Jim had already made several great improvements to the recruitment processes since taking over the HR function three years ago. Because of these changes, the organization saw a ten-day improvement in the time it took to fill jobs, bringing his efficiency metrics in line with external benchmarks. But Jim’s leadership team was hungry for more – they wanted to get ahead of their competition when it came to acquiring high-quality talent. We were going to have to dig deep to figure out how to meet this challenge.
Find your target
So we dove right in and started analyzing recruiting performance metrics. For the most part, the recruiting team was meeting its overall targets (e.g., the time it took to identify and submit qualified candidates to the hiring manager or the time it took to schedule interviews once they received feedback from hiring managers). The rate at which candidates were accepting offers was on target as well.
It was a somewhat different story when we looked at the hiring manager metrics though. There were definitely delays with getting hiring managers to give feedback on resumes, making time for interviews, and/or making decisions on offers. Tightening this up would lead to some improvement, but it would not have the impact that the leadership team wanted.
Jim and I then analyzed the searches that had taken the longest time to fill. It was here that we started to see the real opportunity. Over and over, we started to notice a disturbing trend that hiring managers were not being realistic about their open requisitions. They were slow to adjust their job requirements (skill sets, qualifications, salary level) based on what was available in the market. As a result, searches were getting delayed and costing more money.
Why was this important? I have said this in other blog posts – the recruitment process is no different than buying a home. You start out with a detailed list of requirements that you must have, but as you start looking at what is available in the market and what you can afford to pay, you compromise and figure out the best solution that meets your needs. What we were finding is that many hiring managers were unwilling to adapt their detailed list of requirements and/or what they expected to pay for the role. This was dragging down the recruitment team’s ability to hire high-quality talent efficiently.
We knew we had to change this. Somehow, the recruiter needed to find a way to influence the hiring manager to align his expectations to the market and complete the search in a timely manner.
Find your roots
So we went back to our roots. Earlier in our careers, both Jim and I worked as project managers for different organizations. We spent a good chunk of time considering the triple constraints of project management – cost, scope, and time – to deliver a quality product. These three constraints are interdependent – you cannot change one without impacting one or both of the others. For example, if you move up a deadline, you will need to either reduce the scope or add resources to produce a quality result. We wanted to use this concept to help recruiters control the search scope and drive the hiring managers to hire talent efficiently.
As we continued to discuss this idea, we started to wonder, “What if at the outset, the recruiters provided the hiring manager an estimate of the time and cost to provide a high-quality candidate based on the scope (i.e. job requirements) of the search?" Would the hiring managers be more willing to align to the market if they knew the search they were going to implement would take 90 days and 30% more than the average search budget? In some cases, for highly specialized skills, maybe it does make sense to stick with the original scope. But in most cases, we were willing to bet that the hiring manager would be more open to adjusting his requirements to what was in the market to get the role filled efficiently.
From theory to practice
We wanted to test our theory, so we piloted our approach with a handful of searches. We gave the recruiters formulas to estimate the cost of the search (i.e., estimating the time they would spend on the search based on how long it would take to fill the job). We wanted to keep this as simple as possible. The goal of this was not to add a bunch of reporting and formal processes that would take the recruiter’s eye off the ball of hiring high-quality talent; rather, the aim was to give the recruiters a tool to drive searches efficiently without sacrificing quality.
The recruiter had to exert control right from the search kick-off meeting. During this meeting, the recruiter and hiring manager discussed the job requirements, and the recruiter provided a rough estimate of what it would take to get the job done based on his existing market knowledge. The recruiter then did a quick market scan and shared sample resumes and market intelligence to the hiring manager. From there, the recruiter provided a more formal timeline and cost based on the market availability of the target candidates. This was the first opportunity for the hiring manager to adjust his requirements to align with the market.
And then, once the search got underway, the recruiter included budget and timeline information in the regular status report, which went to both the hiring manager and management. It was easy for the hiring manager and management to see when a search was starting to get off-track. This enabled the recruiter, hiring manager, or management team to take corrective action (e.g., change the job requirements) or escalate as needed to get the search back on track before there was a significant cost and/or schedule overrun.
The pilot was successful, and this new approach is in the process of getting rolled out to a larger group. Look, I am not going to sugarcoat this – we expect this to be a bumpy road. It will take a while for both the recruiters and the hiring managers to adapt to these new roles. Hiring managers are not used to looking at reports that indicate how a search is performing based on timeline and budget targets. They are also not used to being held accountable for driving a search to closure and adjusting their requirements to meet the market need (and potentially reorganizing their teams to make the new resource fit). But, based on the pilot, we strongly believe that over time, this will be a way for the organization to stay ahead of its competition. Also, during the pilot we noticed that once hiring managers saw that they were getting high-quality talent faster, they started to really embrace the model.
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