Your Corporate Strategy: It Just Doesn’t Matter? Part
16
In late 2013 I
asked the recruiting manager of a mega-retailer, during a lengthy advertised
search for a higher level HR position, “If
there is lack of feedback within your own HR Department…..how do you know how
you’re doing?... How can you improve the candidate hire to candidate referral
to the hiring manager success rate (metric)?....How do the candidates, probably
your customers, feel about the process….?”
The reply was,”…It can be extremely frustrating to network with potential
high caliber employees and have nothing to share with them. Of course, metrics go out the window.”
To this I
would refer to number 4 on Lou Adler’s previous list, “Define Quality of Hire
before the person’s hired.” Get direct
feedback on how you doing because, “It’s surprising that
HR still relies on the dogma of hiring practices 100 years old, and still
believes that a 62% interviewing accuracy rate is acceptable.”
This
reinforces the fact the link between Recruiting and the Doing (the hiring
manager) is broken. This is just another
part of the many disconnected organizational processes. It points to another of many examples of how
far we have to go after losing our way for so long. How frustrating must it be to try and do your
very best and not have a process in place to get simple required feedback
(grade)?
No matter how
high in the company the hiring person might be, no feedback means no
improvement. Worse, this manager didn’t feel empowered to solicit feedback
within their own HR Department!!!!
Imagine how it must work outside their own department! Whether
internally or externally recruiting, feedback is essential to good hiring
practices.
Not long ago I talked to a recruiter who volunteered they were talking to every
candidate who had applied for a higher level executive position - 120
candidates! What???!!!! Per Lou Adler, “Never interview more than
four people for any job. If you need to see more than four people, something’s
wrong. So figure out what's wrong before interviewing more candidates.” The magic number is 4-5 candidates, and has
been for a very long time within a well-defined and fully company integrated
recruiting/acquisition program. If you
want to improve Talent Acquisition/Recruiting performance do the upfront work
first then get feedback to reduce the interview to hire ratios by purposely
interviewing fewer people.
In a recent
New York times article by Catherine Rampell - Jobs to Fill, Employers Wait for
Perfection,
“… for a
large majority of positions where candidates are plentiful, the bigger problem
seems to be a sort of hiring paralysis.”
For one candidate, “After about six weeks of interviews for an
entry-level administrative position at a talent agency, he got some good news:
in mid-December, he was finally offered the job. There’s just one catch. More than two
months later… They still haven’t given me my start date.” !!!!!!!!!
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/jobs-fill-employers-wait-perfection-190422709.html
Additionally, in INC.’s “Hiring Only the Best? Big Mistake”
, David Wexler’s article, Freshbooks' Vice President of Human Relations, should
completely drain the enthusiasm from any misguided company or HR philosophy of
“recruiting only the best” - a major contributor to the 3 Rs (Ridiculous
Recruiting Results).
If you are
interested in other reasons why this process is broken you can check out some
of my People Thoughts blog points I call the Black Hole at:
Next: Can we fix the broken external links - The
Black hole your customers see
No comments:
Post a Comment