This is the third and final installment of Common Perceptions in Talent Acquisition That Must Change. In case you’re just tuning in, Part I dispels the myth that talent acquisition (TA) is a cost center for businesses. Part II touches on the importance of sharing decision-making power with multiple stakeholders in the hiring process. Below is the third and final misperception in need correction:

Digital Transformation Is a Lipstick on a Pig Exercise

Okay, that might be the most bizarre sentence I have ever written. If the first thing that came to your mind was, “Where the heck is this guy going?” or “This dude is weird.” Then that’s fine by me as long as I have your attention.

To get us started on this topic, I should clarify a bit. Putting lipstick on a pig, with concern to digital transformation in HR and TA, means that you are avoiding the core technology or process issue and trying to fix it with a point solution. Here are a few examples that I love:

• Using chatbots for your careers page, but still requiring a login and password for your applications.
• Having amazing website architecture, beautiful content, and deep videos on your careers page, but applications that do not render on mobile devices or aren’t responsive enough to allow someone to apply while on an airplane. (Yes, this one drives candidates crazy, and ultimately drives most to abandon the process. Imagine if you were shopping on Amazon and then when you went to check out, they asked you to get out our checkbook and mail in your payment.)
• Selecting any modern solution that doesn’t have a mobile app. I know this may sound ridiculous in 2019, but you would be surprised at how many HR tech vendors exist without any sort of mobile application. If we can do banking on our phones (which is clearly sensitive data), should we not be able to do HR/TA related tasks, too?

There are several reasons that companies make decisions like this:

Budget

Point solutions are typically less expensive than platforms, or other frontend or backend systems that support multiple integrations. So, if you have limited funds available to support a project, then it feels good to tackle something in order to drive some level of progress.

Be careful about how often you take this approach, as it’s common for companies to amass a good number of disparate systems over time. Most of which will not integrate well with one another, i.e., you could easily end up with a rat’s nest on your hands.

Time

Similar to budget, most point solutions, in theory, are faster to deploy than core technologies to your overall process. When a company has fully optimized their talent attraction and engagement workflows, and it has narrowed them down to one area of performance-related concern, then a quick fix point solution is perfect.

However, when a company has multiple known issues, it’s best to slow down and outline the desired process steps and outcomes as opposed to implementing something that you only think–or hope–will work. 

Procurement Process

This one is interesting. Many companies have simpler processes for procuring something that is considered tactical (cost, time to deploy, low IT requirements, etc.), so if a team is pressed for time, wants to avoid doing an RFP, or simply doesn’t want to deal with internal politics, then taking on something fast and easy feels like the right path. 

I struggle with this one as it can be very difficult for HR/TA leaders to get budgets approved. In fact, they rarely get what they are asking for.  Yet, they are no different than any other department in that they are under a tremendous amount of pressure to innovate.

Market Influence

Whether it’s because of peer pressure, or broader market influence, many people end up making a purchase simply because others are doing the same. That feeling of being left out or behind drives the majority of buying behaviors.

Now that we’ve discussed why some companies make decisions like this, what should companies do? While the following tips are not going to work for every scenario, they are the best pieces of advice I can give you based on my 20+ years of building businesses and working with organizations of all sizes.

1) Have a Plan

All companies need great execution to survive. In order to accomplish any goal in life, it’s best to lay out a framework and timeline for what you are after. Most people know what is broken and standing in their way, yet very few have a clear strategy on how they plan to fix it.

2) Be Prepared to Pitch and Defend Your Plan

Having a plan is a start, but in order to properly execute the plan, you will need alignment, funding and resources. A thoughtful business case that articulates challenges, solutions, and clear outcomes. Also: supporting data goes a long way with executive teams. Finally, don’t flinch when opposition arises. If you believe in your plan and have properly articulated its value, then your peers and executive audiences will respect you even more when you fight for your projects.

3) Solve for the 90%—Not the 10%

It’s impossible to make all departments and users happy, so focus on the greater good within projects versus worrying about a few detractors here and there.

4) Stop Thinking About Your Old Processes and Think About New Ones

While we do have a certain level of compliance driving our various hiring processes, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t constantly bethinking about new ways of doing things. 

Thank you for your time! Sarah and I look forward to your feedback and continuing the conversation! 

Good Hiring,
Bob

This is the second installment of Common Perceptions in Talent Acquisition That Must Change. Part I addresses the false notion that Talent Acquisition (TA) is an unnecessary source of overhead costs for businesses. The following is another commonly held, but inaccurate belief in the industry.

Hiring (Well) Means “Letting Go”

Relinquishing control and trusting that those around you will do the right thing is not always easy. There are tons of HR executives and TA professionals out there who think that the only people who can execute a TA strategy are recruiters and recruitment leaders.  As business needs are constantly changing and evolving, the concept of forecasting accurate hiring numbers (forget layering in the complexity of attrition) is as nebulous as the flying purple squirrel candidates.

Targets, priorities, and profiles change, and both inbound and outbound sourcing methods take time and energy – which leads to inevitable resource constraints. While it would be nice to say that all of this can be solved with a good CRM strategy, the reality is: there will always be certain roles that we are filling ‘”just in time.”

This means that a completely centralized recruiting function needs to be built for worst case scenario hiring numbers – they need to be prepared for the inevitable “urgent hiring push” that in some businesses is cyclical and in others seems to be completely random. The most amazing thing that TA leaders need to realize is that they have an entire workforce of recruiters – inside their own companies. 

As an industry, we’ve spent too much time making the recruiting process complex and bringing all control and ownership into the department, that we are missing out on using our best asset to our advantage: our people. TA leaders who decentralize their hiring processes (i.e., give both power AND responsibility back to the hiring team – managers, brand ambassadors, executives, department coordinators) have access to a huge pool of resources who are both experienced in interviewing and invested in making a great hire.

Giving access to these resources does come at a price: your ability to control every tiny part of the hiring process. If you want these people to be REALLY invested in hiring, they need to have some semblance of control.  This may mean letting them post their own jobs (gasp!) moving their candidates through the recruitment process, or even making a hiring decision without input from a recruiter.

There are of course certain parts of the process that need controls (you still need a sound approval chain for postings and for offers) and most hiring managers will still want the opinion of someone from your TA team before going to offer on a candidate.

BUT, instead of them having to have your approval or wait for your team to push a button, you become an advisor that they look to for advice, assistance, and support (or sometimes a differing opinion). Ultimately, the hire is theirs to onboard and manage, so why not let them feel that the hiring process is theirs to own too?

Next week we will dive into the last topic of our three part series, which is how delivering true digital transformation within TA is not a lipstick on a pig exercise.

I’ve been known to upset the apple cart in meetings from time to time. In fact, one prospective customer of mine recently asked the room “who brought this guy?”

The reason for that reaction is that a core component of my career in customer engagement has been playing the role of devil’s advocate. A challenger, if you will, an idea generator, listener, and collaborator. This mindset and approach commonly creates friction and, to be transparent, has not come without my share of mishaps over the past 20-plus years.

I believe that when something in business, or in life for that matter, does not align with your core values, is fundamentally wrong, or impacts people negatively, then why not challenge the status quo? I am pretty sure that we would all agree that most are comfortable doing this in their private lives with respect to their political views or sports for example, but what about the workplace? 

In my experience, many people in their professional lives will join conversations, listen, and even participate in some way, but not ask why when they hear something that sounds a bit off or maybe is against what they believe. Instinctively, my sense is that they don’t want to put themselves in an awkward position with their peers or leaders. They stay quiet. I speak up.

My recommendation is to always challenge, but be prepared to offer ideas and a solution to your position. Without a solution or recommendation, you truly are just disrupting the flow of a meeting, and that is not productive. When done properly, the worst case scenario is that people or the business go on doing things the way they have done it before. Best case – they move forward, try something new, and get out of their comfort zones. This may be as a result of your ideas, or maybe not, but as long as a positive outcome follows, it doesn’t matter.

So, now that you know a bit more about me and my communication style, here are a few positions on commonly held ideas in my industry that I believe must change, as well as some ideas on how to get there.

1)  Talent Acquisition (TA) Is a Cost Center

It wouldn’t be groundbreaking to argue against this; many thought leaders think this is a misconception. The problem is that not enough people in TA are actually doing something to counteract the perception that the HR/TA function is a cost center.

For example, if you and your company are still running the business through core metrics like Time to Fill and Cost per Hire, you are only perpetuating this problem. These are legacy data points that only speak to the length of time it takes to do your job as a recruiter and how much you’re costing the business to get a new butt in a seat. I hate that term by the way, but to companies running their operations in this manner, that’s the only way of looking at it.

Nothing about either of those outcomes speak to value or revenue. Why is it that we never talk about value or ROI per hire? People create and drive business, not products or services. Never forget that. 

As a sales leader, I know that the average ramp time for an enterprise level account executive in a SaaS sales environment is anywhere from nine to twelve months to achieve full productivity. A typical non ramping quota for someone in this role is 1.2M annually, so 100k per month of bookings capacity.

Here’s where things get interesting. In my experience amazingly talented sales reps ramp faster than those that do not (we can discuss why another day. ) So, if we can agree upon that, our equation suggests we are losing 100k a month of bookings capacity for every month in which a role goes unfilled.

Even if your average productivity rate for sales attainment is 65%, that means we are still missing out on $65k each and every month that role goes unfilled. Even worse, imagine if you fill the role with the wrong person. That hiring decision could set you back for at least a year, which drives further negative consequences for productivity, training costs, replacement time, hiring costs, etc.

Why do people care how much the cost per hire was for the role? Yes, I realize there are budgets and people are seeking efficiency, and I respect that at some level, but isn’t the point to drive revenue, release a new product, or maintain your high level of customer service outcomes?

Regardless of the role you are filling, we should be talking about business outcomes, not just the cost. At my company, we spent that last few years thinking about this issue. As a result, we came up with all sorts of ideas for measuring TA outcomes differently. The real challenge was how to come up with a concept so simple that businesses could embrace it readily at every level.

As with all good methodologies, they require a great name. Hiring Success, we believe, fits the bill as it is focused on outcomes that will propel businesses forward within critical areas most executives and TA leaders care about. Internally at SmartRecruiters, the methodology I am about to share is an integral part of our DNA and how we operate.

The Hiring Success Framework provides a framework for TA teams to deliver successful hires on time and on budget, to be the strategic function that every business needs and relies on. I could write a whole essay on that topic alone. If you want to dive in further, just click here for more reference material. But for today, I will focus on three metrics that we recommend using as part of this framework. Metrics that move the conversation away from cheaper and faster to BETTER.

CEOs and their executive teams inherently understand the importance of great hiring, but they struggle to quantify the specific financial return of incremental spend on recruiting. Fortunately, the metrics & math related to out-hiring the competition are simple to explain and understand. They lie along the familiar frame of cost (Hiring Budget), speed (Hiring Velocity) and quality (Net Hiring Score) to capture the impact of each on the hiring process.

Hiring Budget

An organization’s Hiring Budget includes all recruiting costs such as all Talent Acquisition (TA) employees, program spend, outside recruiters, travel costs of candidates and technology infrastructure, but does not include time spent by interviewers and the hiring team as they engage in the process.

While most organizations measure the cost of recruiting, forward-looking organizations consider their Hiring Budget an investment just like a marketing budget to attract and grow ideal candidates and express the budget relative to the salary of people hired. Therefore, the Hiring Budget is a percentage of the total salary of new employees or New Hire Payroll (NHP).

Hiring Velocity

Hiring Velocity measures one simple thing: the percentage of jobs filled on time. Why is this important? Well, it answers one simple question: Are we able to hire the people we need when we need them? It’s critical for CEOs and their executive teams to know that their decisions and plans can be implemented because they have a TA organization that can mobilize quickly and deliver results. If they can’t, taking too long to hire the right candidates hinders the organization’s ability to grow and meet goals. Hiring Velocity is highly correlated to Business Velocity. 

Net Hiring Score

How do you develop a reliable measure that accounts for the numerous elements that inform your hiring success? We envisioned something like the Net Promoter Score that evaluates consumer loyalty: simple, solid, and straightforward. We created the Net Hiring Score (NHS), which evaluates the quality of each hire based on the following:

• 90 days in, we ask hiring managers one question: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this person the right fit for the job?
• 90 days in, we ask new hires one question: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this job the right fit for you?
• We then average the scores across managers and new hires, subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of advocates.

A score of zero, for example, indicates a company is hiring as many bad organizational fits as good ones, resulting in a net neutral impact on the company. Above zero, a company is coming out in the black with more good hires than bad ones. Below zero, and the company is in the red with bad fits outweighing the good ones.

More food for thought on that here in this LinkedIn article.

For more information on Hiring Success and how to win in the Talent Economy, check out the following resource.