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.

I have been involved with RPO companies large and small in various capacities over the years. I can say with the confidence of an insider that in the main, they or no less dysfunctional, inept, devoid of imagination and generally wattless than the clients who they purport to transcend.

No two employers are alike. They are all different by virtue of their size, orientation, positioning, culture, experience, leadership, workforce and yada-yada-yada.

So, how can a process that systematizes something as nuanced, complex and involved  as recruiting passive, semi-passive, semi-active, active, and/or hyper-active candidates — who, I might add, could match any number of psychographic constructs, fit any number of demographic profiles and/or be in any number of geographic areas — be farmed out to an industry that is one slice short of a loaf of bread?

Surely the only RPOs worth looking at are the ones that have a process for identifying the underlying problem that is being outsourced and who recognize the problem could be an issue internally as well as within the clients’ operation.

Provided an RPO can be that artful, call a spade a spade on economies of scale and demonstrate how they’ve tackled their own “problems” — God knows there are some marginal recruiters, systems and practices out there — then who are we kidding?

I don’t have any firsthand experience of an RPO that is that open to that degree of self-examination and equally transparent about what they find. Do you? Nah, what are we, nuts?

Top Five Things Recruiters Did Pre-Internet

Do you ever find yourself exclaiming, “How did we ever live without email and the Internet?”

I know I do.  And yet thinking back, not only did we live and work without today’s technology, we prospered. Which got me thinking -  Is there anything innovative that we can learn in recruiting today from how we recruited back before we had today’s tools of the trade?

Here’s my list of the Top 5 things that successful recruiters did pre-Internet. Maybe you can find some pearls of wisdom from the past that will help you with your recruiting today.

1. Disciplined System

When you had to recruit without the luxury of the Internet, there were never enough hours in the day to get everything done. If you wanted to reach your billing goals, you absolutely had to stick to a strict work schedule.

The one that I was trained on looked something like this:

8:30a – 9:30a         Morning Meeting

9:30a – 11:00a       Company Calling and Company Visits

11:00a – 12:00p     Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

12:00p – 1:00p       Lunch

1:00p – 2:00p         Sourcing

2:00p – 4:00p         Recruiting Calls

4:00p – 5:00p         Interviewing, Matching, Presenting, Prepping

5:00p – 5:30p         Daily Planner for Tomorrow

5:30p – 6:30p        (optional) Interviewing, Matching, Prepping

Sticking to this schedule was in many ways the key to our success. You couldn’t help but getting job orders and sendouts and placements when you worked the system every day without fail.

2. Meeting Companies

Before technology, the business world was smaller and more localized. Recruiters worked in territories by industry or discipline and location. After receiving a job order, we always set up company visits. This was critical for improving your chance of filling the position. Why? Three reasons:

a. You got a feel for which applicants would fit in best with the company.

b. You had a chance to build rapport with the hiring authority.

c. You had an opportunity to let the company know exactly how you worked. This might include a lesson on why it is important to make offers quickly so as not to lose the best applicants.

3. Meeting Applicants

I’m still horrified at the thought of recruiters sending out applicants that they have never met.  This was drilled into my head very strongly in my early days of recruiting in the mid-1980s. The story was told by the President of my firm about the one and only time he sent an applicant out without meeting him first. The applicant showed up to the interview in cut-off jean shorts and generally made a bad first impression on the company. The President was mortified in front of his client.

Meeting an applicant in person allows you to judge whether or not the applicant will fit in as an employee in your client’s company. How someone acts in email is often very different from how he or she may act in person. It also gives you a great gauge for how much you will need to prep your applicant prior to his or her interview.

4. Prepping the Applicant

Because communication is so quick with technology today, there are fewer and fewer recruiters who prep their applicants before an interview. This was (and still should be) a critical step toward making a placement. There are many applicants who are great employees but lousy interviewees. You owe it to your client companies to make sure they don’t turn down a great employee because of poor interviewing skills.

My favorite prep story is with applicant Wendy the Accountant. Wendy came into my office and slumped down into the chair with about as much energy as a slug on a hot day. But her skills were great, her work history was stable and she had terrific work references. I can remember that my Manager saw me sit Wendy down in the lobby while I set her up for an interview. My manager said, “Beth, where are you sending that applicant?”  I replied, “Company X” My manager looked at me with horror on her face, “Not Company X. That’s our best client!” I said, “Trust me. She is going to do great. I am going to prep her before she goes.”

I set up the interview and spent the next 1/2 hour prepping Wendy for her interview. I let her know how great she was for the job and that she should walk in their with energy and confidence. By the time she left my building, the whole office watched her out the window walking to her car with great speed and enthusiasm. About an hour and 1/2 later I received a call from Company X. Wendy was still there and they were calling to ask my permission to make her a job offer on the spot. True story. The power of the prep.

5. Sales and Psychology Skills

It’s difficult to be a good salesperson over email. Sales is very much about listening and that is difficult to do with technology. One of the things that makes recruiting so challenging (and interesting!) is that you are not selling widgets. Widets would be easy to sell. Widgets don’t have fears of making changes, widgets don’t have husbands, wives and mothers telling them what to do and widgets don’t have to give two weeks notice to a company that doesn’t want to lose them.

It’s the job of the recruiter to be able to help their applicants get the good things that they want. There’s a lot of hand holding that needs to take place in Recruiting. It’s difficult to hold hands through a keyboard.

© Copyright 2006 Beth N. Carvin.

My experience with outsourced jobs to India – entirely as a U.S. consumer/customer at this point – has been nothing but positive. I am particularly struck by how in Indian society – so exotic, mystical even – people are called Philip and Peter and Patrick. Just like in Wisconsin, in fact.

So, while some U.S. workers can feel less endangered as the wages gap continues to close, others can only hope that India’s apparent failure to learn from U.S. hiring practices will draw India under the spotlight once again, albeit for altogether different reasons, and give employers pause to think – not whether or not we should be exporting jobs – but how to export best practice recruiting too. We’ll see. I’m sure a background check would reveal many Indian customer service reps are going under assumed names. What next?

Namaste, Baba.

To balance this considered opinion, I should present an alternate point of view: “It’s Simple. It’s Affordable. It’s Brilliant.” At least that is what Sue Meisinger, the top SHRMer says.  For anyone not in the know you could be forgiven for thinking the venerated Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is about to diversify into a new line of cosmetic dentistry. The CEO’s sloganeering hardly fits a top-level domain for HR, now does it? Well, I say either way, Ms. Meisinger may be wearing a plastic smile with this one.

Clearly, we should leave the more foundational whys and wherefores to the real experts. You can – and should – read Shannon Seery of EXCELER8ion’s Happy Birthday Dot Jobs .jobs dot-jobs dotjobs… whatever you call it, or study Cheezhead’s comments in google (and msn) smile down on .jobs domain. For an international perspective, a nuts-and-bolts read, see Michael Specht’s posts: dot jobs is available and Fitting .JOBS Into The Marketplace and Movement in Job Search.  I’m sure there are other works we should all be reading, but who knows? Researching this post has led me to conclude that in the final analysis, this is, to be sure, all hype – a wedding with no bride.

For me, the most important thing in this debate is to revisit the original intent behind the dot jobs initiative which was to enhance the candidate experience. But, again, I’m left wondering if this is possible.  I couldn’t find very much online or in the archives about this either. How can this be? This is such a big deal isn’t it?

Bear with me as I take off my dunce’s cap and put my ill-fitting marketing hat on:

1.  Adoption of the dot jobs domain by rank-and-file employers is one thing – if it ever happens. Getting the consumers – job seekers – to use it is another. I remember long before there was an information superhighway, in an effort to improve safety on UK roads, a public service campaign was launched with the tagline: “Clunck Click, Every Trip.”  Like here in the States, thirty-five years later, how far have we come – to the point of mandating seatbelt use by law? The point is that people don’t change their behavior because some know-it-all tells them it’s good for them – even when it is. And, when job seeking is hardly a day-in day-out activity, behavior modification becomes even more unlikely.

2. Accelerated change in consumer behavior is driven by responding to what the consumer wants and asks for or by persuading them to change their behavior in return for a big fat payoff, not by what the marketer thinks they should have shoved down their throat – if we could even get to that point with the dot jobs campaign, which I seriously doubt. Come on – look at who’s marketing the dot jobs domain, and to whom. I don’t find anything in the research that suggests there was an overwhelming demand from the legions of active job seekers for a dot jobs domain or that employers are lobbying to have this thing taken care of as a recruiting imperative. So whose clever idea was this then? Whose agenda? 

3. I’m sure the job boards are absolutely enamored with this brilliant idea. I imagine the top executives at Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs are convening at secret locations right now busily strategizing how to protect their dot com brand equity and business model from an internet revolution, an onslaught lead by SHRM and a few compliant followers with IT departments and willing webmasters. Are the big boards readying themselves for the consequences of another land-grab for dot job domains which, unlike the dot biz domain, they will be totally excluded from?  Or will they end up renting back the office space they once owned just to keep ahead of the pack? Like the yahoos at www.CareerBuilder.jobs perhaps? (Hey, is that “Return to CareerBuilder.com” link in the top right-hand corner legal?)

4. The whole concept of a top-level domain is so five-minutes-ago. The rate at which internet-for-job-search is changing will far outpace the institutional efforts to adopt the domain for any practical application. Just like air bags sold more cars on safety than seat belts ever could, search engine relevancy, tagging and pushing content will drive candidate flow to the right landing page long before my search auto complete is smart enough to know I meant www.microsoft.jobs and not www.microsoft.com.

5. No doubt I am too quick to judge. After all, a year in this business is no time at all.  But you have to admit, when you google “accenture+jobs” it is curious that the sponsored link goes to a careers page which is branded – in my opinion – correctly and with the consumer’s preference and behavior in mind: http://www.careers.accenture.com/.  It’s got to be easier to market that URL than http://www.accenture.jobs/, especially when the original is much clearer in its purpose than the pretender is.

6. So, what is all this optimization fuss about? I mean, what is it really, really about? Why can’t SEO work equally well for www.careers.accenture.com as purportedly it will do for www.accenture.jobs?  There’s 74% of me that just doesn’t get it and I’m sure I’m not alone. Maybe I’ve just shot my online persona in the foot along with any chance of ever landing a job with the Think Partnership or one of their ilk, but I’m sorry – I just don’t get it. Will someone pleeze help me? I’m dyin’ on the vine here!

Anyway, as I said at the outset, and as you now realize for yourself, what do I know? I can’t tell you why this “simple”,  “affordable” or “brilliant” dot jobs domain is key to an enhanced candidate experience any more than I could tell you how any of these top level domains will change the world of job search either:  dot info,  dot us,  dot tv,  dot ws,  dot name,  dot cc,  dot de, dot jp,  dot be,  dot at,  dot uk,  dot nz,  dot cn,  dot tw,  dot am,  dot fm,  dot ms,  dot nu,  dot tc, dot tk, or even dot vg.  If you can’t connect the dots either, don’t worry. I know a man who can – you go daddy!