For starters, I’m not sure changing scapegoats addresses the underlying problem.  There really is very little difference between abdicating responsibility to trainers for recruiting excellence — or whatever standard we used to aspire to — to  expecting “recruiters” to stop buckling under the weight of a hiring manager’s passed buck.

In the final analysis, managers and their direct reports need to pick up the mantle of developing their “human resource.” That’s what I say. Recruiting is no less a management task than planning, budgeting, organizing stuff, and troubleshooting.

If the decision to hire and fire is a managers’ prerogative shouldn’t a manager be capable of taking care of the attraction and screening bits too? One might expect to see improved results across the board if they did.

Imagine, no need for template intake calls or getting chewed-out for presenting literal and proverbial misfits; no more waiting for overdue feedback on interest, availability and offers;  no more having to explain that a credit score of less than 590 doesn’t automatically mean salespeople can’t sell, nurses can’t nurse, programmers can’t code, and engineers can’t build missile-defense systems.

Needless to say, there are exceptions to the “looks like managing” model.

In those instances where the need calls for high-volume hiring the issue is not the caliber of the recruiting personnel per se but the process and underlying technologies that are deployed in the name of cost and time efficiencies. If the economies of scale aren’t there then maybe the path of least resistance is to outsource the problem. Even then, the consumer-manager needs to be intimately involved in every aspect of the process, not just selection. The manager should be held accountable for results post-RPO too, why not?

I was told once by a VP of Legacy Thinking that that it makes no sense to ask a $150-an-hour manager to do $75-an-hour “grunt work.” Therein lies part of the problem, viewing recruiting as piecemeal work instead of quantifying its  intrinsic value to the organization, assigning responsibility for its proper execution to a capable manager.  As a result, despite lauding quality-of-hire metrics — however fuzzy — stakeholders continue to demand time-to-fill, cost-per-hire and money-in-the-bank metrics not knowing how else to measure recruiting value.

That said, “grunt work” like sourcing should be passed off to a $75-an-hour bod, and perhaps other elements of the process could be unbundled too. But, when all is said and done, these things need to be delivered in support of the manager, not a recruiting cohort or talent management overlord.

Faced with the possibility of being held accountable for recruiting outcomes, management surrogates like John Sullivan go on the attack.  For the purposes of throwing recruiting under the bus, “failure metrics” will do. Googling those “facts and numbers” keep us from considering the possibility that, instead of getting the bus from point A to point B, when it comes to taking the talent management lead, most  hiring managers are asleep at the wheel.

In defense of the recruiting professionals who are among the most gifted, and in reply to those whiny people John Sullivan’s quotes as saying, “Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip,” I say, “Then render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Newsflash! Recruiters don’t make selection decisions, “hiring managers” do.

So, what could a trainer do but compound the problem?

It’s trendy to talk about talent management in the context of strategy and  “best practice.” Invariably we default to transactional recruiting because we are forever driven by short-term imperatives. Maybe a decade of “talent shortages” combined with an institutionalization of JIT and “the arrogance of supply” has deepened the inherent flaws that have doomed modern-day corporate recruiting to the sorry state reported on ERE, not just in John Sullivan’s piece, but repeatedly over the years.

I’m not aware of any new training methods that enable recruiting-centric management thinking over process-driven behaviors, are you? That’s not to suggest training couldn’t enable managers more capable of strategic recruiting. But how do you justify the expense of that when the ROI may be harder to quantify than the number of candidates that over the years never even got an automated reply, let alone a recruiters’ call.

Last, how badly do we want to train our manager-gazumping competition? After all, if we could increase the value of our managers’ contribution by having them grow and develop their people from beginning to end, would we be prepared to pay them what they would then be worth? Probably not.

Consider: If we paid managers a percentage of the their new hires’ first years compensation, and an annual bonus for each one still engaged, managers might spend too much time on end-to-end “talent management.”  Granted, while recruiting may now be at the level John Sullivan imagines is good enough, who will then sign-off on department expenses or decide who gets the cubby-with-a-view when our longest serving team member finally kicks the bucket?

We don’t need better recruiters. Actually, I don’t think we need recruiters at all. We need better support for managers, managers who can grow and develop their teams free from the money- and time-wasting recruiters represent. Those managers who are good at getting the job done, in its entirety, should be rewarded accordingly.

To John Sullivan’s attention-grabbing intent, and  John Sumser’s suggestion that we should “line new employees up with the right people,” I hope my contribution here adds some weight to the scales of wishful thinking.

1. Token blacks, Hispanic women and cross-dressing vicars hardly make the case for diversity in the workplace, not in the Supreme Court of the United States anyway. I think the appointment of a an every-man or two would suffice, provided they are Calvinists of course.
2. I always wondered who the real Kris Dunn was.  Will the real Kris Dunn please stand up? Thank you!
   
3. Laurie Ruettimann thinks about power and influence on a “regular basis”  seemingly unaware of the nasty side affects of over-exposure to testosterone. [For the uninitiated, power is to the right, influence is to the left. Yeah, I'm an elitist jerk too]

If you’re lucky enough you might still pick up a copy on Amazon.com. If you’re really, really lucky you won’t need to.

The chapter I wrote is entitled Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.

Mr. Perry rather liked the idea of giving comparable Google-powers to job seekers as the ones I have been imagining recruiters might like to have.  If nothing else, something to read while putting their feet up after a long day slogging it out with buxom recruiter-infidels. Gunpowder for the natives, if you will.

Unfortunately, my piece was savagely cut, “For brevity’s sake,” I was told, “nothing to get your knickers in a twist over.” Hmmm, really? I’ll be the judge of that!

For those who want to read the unabridged version of  my chapter I have posted it here: Guerrilla Googling and the Job Hunters’ Dashboard.

For those who prefer a few “choice cuts:”

On “The War for Talent…”

“The things that we do that involve the justifiable and systematic destruction of life and property, the wholesale creation of widows and orphans, and which showcase the ghastly aspects of human ingenuity, make great metaphors for recruiting.”

On recruiter types…

“Whether the mercenary top-guns who have a silver bullet for every tough assignment or the enlisted rank-and-file who are best when shooting at point-blank range, the job seeker is likely to encounter a recruiter who has left many more dead and wounded in their wake than decorated heroes to their credit.”

On sourcing…

“A well-practiced hacker can find a handful of good resumes for Utah-based, bi-lingual, left-handed brain surgeons who specialize in anesthesia-free, pediatric trepanation as easily as a ho-hum hack can  find an endless supply of photocopier salesmen with profiles on LinkedIn, and who have long since been forgotten about.”

On being prepared…

“Remember, the corridors of power are littered with the bodies of well-intentioned job seekers who blew themselves up even before greeting the gatekeeper.  Asymmetrical warfare is not for the fainthearted or weak-willed. And it’s certainly not for the ill-prepared either.”

On calling recruiters at home…

“While you might think it’s reasonable to telephone a recruiter at home…imagine a mother of three trying to separate one of the twins from a choke hold while extricating the third from the jaws of an over playful Chihuahua and it is easy to understand why your unsolicited call may result in your permanent excommunication.”

Mr. Perry has invited me to contribute again for his next book. I can hardly wait. In the meantime, he has a blog, don’t you know: Guerrilla Job Hunting.

Not that there are that many to choose from, Zoho People impressed me the most, not because it was any good — actually, I thought is was a piece of crap — but because their customer service  was absolutely amazing.

During our hours [and hours] trying to fix bugs and get things working one of the support-wallahs told me a new module for recruiters was being released in a “few weeks.”  That was almost a year ago.

I don’t know if “better late than never” applies here as I think the last thing humanity needs at this point in our evolution is another applicant tracking system but the nice people at Zoho have just  announced Zoho Recruit and, if nothing else, I want to acknowledge the quality of personal service Chandru gave me.

As to Zoho’s unremarkable launch, Mr. Ted could teach them a thing or two about clever marketing I think. I do believe they’ll need it…

1. U.K. blogger Katharine Robinson [aka The Sourceress] posts Performing Sourcery at The Recruiting Unconference. Hmmm…Nothwithstanding timezones, recruiting unconferences are so yesterday, don’t you know: Jeff Hunter’s Talent Unconference [2007]; John Sumser’s Recruiting Roadshow [2008]; Jason Davis’s RecruitFest [2008/09]; Susan Burns’ Talent Camp [2009] and some I’ve missed, I’m sure. Now, Bill Boorman’s The Recruitment Unconference taking place in London on 19th November…a sign of the times, no doubt.




2. In Feel Sorry for the Recruiter… Lisa Kaye laments that recruiters “worry if they will wind up on the other side of the desk, interviewing for jobs that well frankly are no longer in high demand.” Look on the bright side: if they ever make it back into recruiting they’ll have a better grasp of what “candidate experience” really means. That should make them better recruiters, don’t you think? [Counterpoint: My Future in Recruiting]




3. In his post It’s all about the message Michael Specht rightly notes: “…that clearly communicating the employment deal up front is a critical first step in having an engaged employee,” going on to say, “Employees who blog openly and honestly will allow prospective employees to see what it is really like in your workplace.”I guess shooting the messenger is out of the question then, eh, Michael?

To save you from my miserable experience farting around with incompatible plugins, suffice it to say that I disabled every one of them in order to get this site back up. In so doing I came to a remarkable realization…

Until it ruptures with life-threatening and gut-wrenching pain a benign appendix goes quite unnoticed. As one of many useless parts of the human anatomy which have atrophied with evolution I realized that most of the plugins I had installed were, or had become, similarly vestigial.

With surgical precision I started whipping out the offending plugins to find that not only did my blog now work but that I rather liked the idea that stripping the blog down was “inline” with how I my want “online” experience to be…minimalist, intensely personal, um, useful even.

I never had much of a readership here. The one or two occasional visitors were more likely perverts looking for filipino hot babes or wannabe sperm donors than the industry blogebrities whose attention I once craved.

That said, I was alarmed — I don’t know why, what else did I expect? — to find that the faint signs of life that affirmed my blog’s existence for the last however-long had completely disappeared. Instead, Google Analytics showed a flat line. My blog is dead. I mean, like, no signs of life. Flat-line dead. Even three days after reactivating the analytics plugin, nothing. I mean, three days, for the love of God!

But hold on a sec…is that brain activity I detect or is this an out-of-blog experience?  There’s got to be more to this experiment than Recruitomatic’s gone bye-bye. Surely, there must be more.

Hello?

Well, I guess “today is a good day to die” after all.

Clear!

I see John Sumser strikes a similar tone to Raghav’s in his post 091018 Recruiting.com. John’s analysis leads me to affirm that while Recruiting.com might make a great case study for a start-up starting over, cool recruiting tools alone rarely, if ever, compensate for lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function.

While technology continues to envision a promising future I wonder how many employers can translate any of it beyond the reordered acronyms of a fancy, near historic sales pitch.

After all, who will the marketers and salespeople target for the progressive solutions like Recruiting.com’s new whiz-bang offering? Why, companies with lousy internal processes, weak management and a decimated recruiting function of course. At best, it’s Methadone for an industry long stupefied by vendors’ peddling the things dreams are made of.

On the bright side, Raghav had no idea that Recruiting.com was a reinvention of  “i-love-me-some-disruptor” Jason Goldberg’s Jobster. The disassociation is a  branding coup for CEO Jeff Seely and his team I think. For those of us who have been around long enough to remember Goldberg’s shenanigans and/or Recruiting.com’s humble beginnings as a trend-setting blog — that is remarkable indeed.

Perhaps Recruiting.com is, as my buddies-in-the-know suggest, deserving of a second look. You decide.

1. One would hope that tutoring in the Stanislavski method could improve the chances of every job seeker…fake it ’til you make it, buddy!
2. The firing will continue until morale improves…makes perfect sense to me.
3. “Some are born to be waiters on Broadway and others have waiting in the wings thrust upon them…” Chad Sowash waxes lyrical, seeks drama award…what can I tell you?

1. Is it distracted driving, one too many potholes, or both? Putting it bluntly…your manager is a dope.
2. You take the high road, I’ll take the low road but remember…You Can’t Have it Both Ways
3. Tut-tut. Mr. Hunter throws poor Jim under the bus. Well, better than “threw the windscreen,” no?

1. Who said: “A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart” - John Sullivan, John Sumser or Jonathan Swift? Such studious fellows all…Rub-a-Dub-Dub
2. Erecting the new recruiting edifyce…Bob the Builder meets Smiling Bob
3. “When we win, we all win.” So, what happens when we’re counting the rations?…Man overboard!