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 Right People Designing Recruiting and Staffing Processes

Running a successful business depends on having the right peo-ple in the right roles to effectively execute its strategies. The most important decision a company makes about its employees is to hire them. Every other action made about employees is a direct result of that initial decision to bring them into the organization.

Despite the strategic importance of hiring, many companies have treated recruiting as a largely administrative process.1 Rather than focusing on the busi- ness value associated with hiring, recruiters often focus on increasing the num- ber of job requisitions processed, with little emphasis on how the newly hired people perform after they join the company. As one person put it, “HR depart- ments that focus on number of hires instead of quality of hires might as well measure effectiveness by the kilos of people they’ve employed.” Fortunately, the growing influence of strategic HR is steadily changing the focus from quantity to quality of hiring. This is the result of several factors:

• Scarcity of skilled talent. Experienced recruiters know there is always a lim- ited supply of qualified high performers available to fill skilled jobs at the sal- ary companies want to pay them. This skill shortage is growing due to the increasing complexity of jobs, decreasing birth rates in many countries, and more intensive competition for talent around the globe.2 Do not be fooled by overall unemployment statistics. There may be more people available in the

F O U R c h a p t e r

Hunt, Steven T.. Common Sense Talent Management : Using Strategic Human Resources to Improve Company Performance, Center for Creative Leadership, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ashford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=827115. Created from ashford-ebooks on 2020-04-07 03:26:09.

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Commonsense Talent Management60

job market in general, but that does not mean they are people who have the skills and competencies needed to support your company’s strategies.

• Cost of labor. As the supply of skilled labor decreases, its cost increases. Companies cannot afford to make hiring mistakes given how much it costs to bring people into the organization. There is also the insidious problem of hir- ing marginal performers and having them stay. In many countries, it is both difficult and costly to fire someone for underperformance.

• Importance of human capital. The past thirty years have seen a steady shift from a resource-based to a knowledge- and service-based economy. In today’s market, competitive advantage depends less on what companies own and more on whom they employ. Your company’s ability to hire skilled, high-performing employees simultaneously supports the goals of your business while depriving your competitors of the talent they may need to compete against you.

Recruiting was once seen as a back-office function that was often outsourced as a commodity service. It is now becoming a key differentiator in the emerging war for talent. Winning this war requires rethinking key questions around what makes a good recruiting process.

This chapter is organized into three sections. Section 4.1 discusses fundamen- tal changes in how companies are thinking about recruiting and the growing emphasis on creating more collaborative, quality-focused recruiting processes that balance hiring quality with hiring efficiency. Section 4.2 discusses nine key questions to ask when designing a recruiting process. There is no one best way to do recruiting, but the best recruiting processes all address these questions thor- oughly. Section 4.3 discusses different levels of recruiting process maturity that can be used to guide the creation of a long-term road map for achieving recruit- ing excellence.

4.1 RECRUITING TO SUPPORT BUSINESS EXECUTION From a strategic perspective, the goal of recruiting is not simply to hire people into the organization. Rather, it is to efficiently place and retain the right people in the right roles to effectively support the company’s business strategies. This is a significant change from how some recruiting departments traditionally viewed their role (see the discussion: “From Processing Candidates to Hiring Performers: The Changing Role of Recruiting”). Organizations that approach

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Right People 61

recruiting with a strategic mindset are distinguished by the emphasis they place on five key topics: quality of hire, quality of sourcing, networking and relation- ships, hiring manager involvement, and integrated talent management.

F R O M P R O C E S S I N G C A N D I D A T E S T O H I R I N G P E R F O R M E R S : T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F R E C R U I T I N G

The past thirty years have seen significant changes in the field of

recruiting. Prior to the advent of the Internet, much of what recruit-

ers did was associated with the basic identification and processing of

candidates. Recruiting tended to be an administrative function focused

on placing want ads, processing and sorting job applications, and set-

ting up candidate interviews. Some companies also tasked recruiters

with handling the paperwork for new employees. The Internet freed

recruiting departments from much of this administrative burden and

allowed them to streamline the recruiting function significantly. But

recruiting still tended to be judged on process metrics such as time to

fill and number of people hired. Staffing departments were rarely held

accountable for the performance of new employees. Nor were they

expected to challenge managers on whether it made more sense to fill

positions internally or externally.

The growing importance of strategic HR is shifting recruiting from a

focus on hiring efficiency to a focus on staffing effectiveness. Recruiting

departments are still held accountable for efficiently processing and

rapidly placing candidates. But the difference between administra-

tive recruiting departments and strategic ones lies in the ability to fill

positions with the best-performing candidates at the lowest cost. This

requires recruiters to collaborate with hiring managers to ensure they

accurately define job requirements, tapping into the social networks of

hiring managers and other employees to find the best candidates, using

rigorous candidate selection methods that validly predict future job

performance, and extending recruiting beyond the hiring decision to

accelerate and track job performance after employees have been hired.

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4.1.1 Quality of Hiring Decisions Even slight improvements in the quality of hiring can have a massive finan- cial impact on organizational performance.3 For example, by changing its hir- ing methods, a call center company was able to increase retention of call center agents by about one week. This may not seem like a lot, but given the costs of hiring and the fact that the company hired more than one thousand agents every year, this small increase in retention added up to millions of dollars in savings. Quality of hiring can also make or break companies when it comes to staffing critical leadership and technical positions. For example, consider the financial benefits associated with hiring the right merchandise buyers in a retail company or the costs associated with putting the wrong person in charge of quality con- trol in a manufacturing plant.

Strategic HR organizations know the value of the quality of hiring and con- stantly emphasize it to line-of-business leaders (see “Getting Hiring Managers to Take Recruiting Seriously”). They review every step in the recruiting process based on how it will affect the company’s ability to attract and select the best per- formers. Recruiters are evaluated not just on time to fill positions but on the performance and retention of employees they help bring into the company. A quick way to assess whether an organization has a mind-set based on quality of hiring is to ask recruiters, “How do you know if you effectively filled a position?” A quality-oriented recruiter will focus on measuring how candidates perform after they are hired and will not simply review metrics related to sourcing and screening candidates.

G E T T I N G H I R I N G M A N A G E R S T O T A K E R E C R U I T I N G S E R I O U S L Y

You might think that hiring managers would be obsessive about hiring

the best employees possible. After all, they are the ones who directly

benefit or suffer from a good- or bad-quality hiring decision. However,

this is not always true. Many managers only think about recruiting

when they have open positions on their teams. And when this happens,

they often think about filling the position as fast as possible without

thinking too much about whether the person they are hiring is truly the

best candidate available. In essence, they view recruiting more as an

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Right People 63

operational inconvenience than as a valuable opportunity to improve

the quality of the people on their teams. These managers often resist

investing more time than is absolutely necessary to define job require-

ments, source and select candidates, and onboard new employees.

The best way to shift hiring managers’ mind-sets toward recruiting is

to make sure they are fully aware of the costs and benefits associated

with hiring decisions. Before beginning the recruiting process, ask man-

agers these questions:

• What is the minimum financial impact this position will have on

your department and the company overall? The typical assumption

is that employees will contribute revenue to the company that is at

least equal to twice their cost in salary and benefits. In other words,

we pay people with the assumption that the value they provide to

the company is greater than what we pay them. So how much is this

position worth? Remember to take into account that we probably

expect this person to stay in this position for at least a few years so

his or her annual financial contributions will be multiplied by his or

her expected tenure.

• What is the maximum financial impact of this position if we hire a

top performer? Studies show that top-performing employees often

generate three or more times the revenue of average performers.

How much financial value would come from hiring the absolutely

best candidate into this role?

• What is the cost of poor performance? People sometimes say

employees are our most valuable assets, but employees who perform

poorly can be an expensive liability. How much damage could realis-

tically be caused by making a poor hiring decision?

• Taking all this into account, how much financial value is associated

with this hiring decision? What is the difference in the value of

a good decision versus the cost of a poor one? To put this in per-

spective, think about the last time you invested this much money

to purchase equipment, acquire materials, or enter into a service

contract agreement with a vendor. How much time did you spend

defining the specifications for this investment, reviewing proposals,

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4.1.2 Quality of Sourcing The quality of the people you hire for a job is constrained by the quality of who applies. The field of candidate sourcing has been radically changed by the Internet. Companies can now easily and quickly source candidates from hun- dreds of online job sites and social networking systems. Companies with inte- grated strategic HR technology systems can also source internal candidates by scanning databases of current employees. This ready access to so many candi- dates is a mixed blessing, however. On the positive side, companies can find qualified candidates for jobs regardless of where they are located around the globe. On the negative side, companies can be inundated with thousands of applications from unqualified candidates.

Sourcing is much less about the number of candidates and much more about their quality. Sourcing has become so important that there is now a specialized field of recruiting marketing that uses sophisticated web tools to attract candidates and rapidly sort through applicants and workforce data to find sources that yield the best candidates with the least cost. The specialized technology and workforce ana- lytics applications associated with recruiting marketing enable companies to find, attract, and engage high-quality candidates with the minimal investment possible.

4.1.3 Relationships and Networking Recruiters use a variety of methods for finding job candidates, but often they find the best-quality candidates through networking. Networking is particularly

and making the purchasing decision? Doesn’t it make sense to spend

an equal amount of time on the recruiting process to ensure you

hire the best employee possible?

I have had this sort of discussion with many line-of-business leaders.

Almost every conversation ended with leaders expressing a sense of sur-

prise and appreciation about the importance of hiring the best people

possible. The exceptions were leaders who already understood that one

of the most important business decisions they ever made was deciding

who to bring onto their teams. In either case, the result is greater will-

ingness to collaborate with HR departments to build and deploy more

effective recruiting processes.

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Right People 65

valuable when hiring for positions that require specialized experience. These positions tend to be filled by people who have extensive networks of professional colleagues. As one recruiter explained, “When hiring for a skilled position, the ideal candidate is probably a person whom either the hiring manager or one of the manager’s colleagues already knows. Hiring managers are rarely more than two degrees of separation from the best candidate.”

Networking is effective for several reasons. First, managers and employees are likely to recommend better-quality candidates since they don’t want to work with people whom they view as incompetent or unmotivated. Second, the best candidates tend to be currently employed elsewhere. These so-called passive candidates already have jobs and may not take notice of job postings, but they may respond to an inquiry about a job opportunity from someone they know. A third benefit of networking is that it does not cost a lot of money, unlike job postings, which can be associated with hefty fees.

Strategic HR organizations embrace networking for finding and attracting the best candidates. They invest in tools to help recruiters build and maintain pools of qualified candidates they can leverage for future hiring. They instruct recruiters on how to leverage the networks of line-of-business managers and employees. They also provide employees with tools and rewards that encourage everyone in the organization to play a part in finding high-quality talent. This includes making use of internal and external social networking technology and sites—for example, providing employees with tools that allow them to share job openings with people they may know through public social networking sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

4.1.4 Hiring Manager Involvement A common problem in recruiting is a tendency for hiring managers to distance themselves from the actual recruiting process. Rather than collaborating with recruiters, some hiring managers assume they can give the recruiter a job requi- sition and that two weeks later they will be presented with the perfect candidate. Strategic HR organizations stress the need to keep hiring managers and other line employees actively engaged throughout the recruiting process. They use col- laboration tools that give managers visibility into the types of candidates being sourced and selected. For example, online databases make it easy for recruiters to share potential candidates with hiring managers and allow hiring managers to make comments and suggestions to the recruiters about candidate qualifications.

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These tools help managers compare candidates, get a sense of the quality in the available talent pool, and exchange thoughts and opinions with other members of the recruiting team. This allows managers and recruiters to jointly deter- mine if they should expand, reduce, or otherwise redefine the scope of the job or candidate search based on the talent available. Emphasis is also placed on using interview processes that allow multiple stakeholders to evaluate candidates (e.g., allowing coworkers to participate in the interview process).

Actively involving hiring managers and other employees in the sourcing and selection process improves the quality of applicants and ensures that line leader- ship feels a sense of ownership around the final hiring decision. Involving multi- ple employees in the hiring process also helps with bringing new employees into the organization because they have already met and established a connection with many of their future coworkers. Of course, there is an efficiency trade-off in terms of the time required for more people to participate in the hiring process. But in general, few hiring decisions should be made by a single person acting without involvement from their colleagues.

4.1.5 Integrated Talent Management Recruiting is something people often think about only when there is a job vacancy in their group. Hiring is thus treated as an isolated event that lives outside the ongoing talent management process. The most effective strategic HR organizations campaign against this limited view of recruiting. They view recruiting not just about filling positions but as a key part of a broader set of strategic HR processes. It is about creating talent flows within the organization through integrating staffing, employee development, succession management, and career planning. Recruiting may not be something that’s done every day, but it is something that needs to be kept constantly in mind, especially during times of large-scale company growth or change.

Two concepts are particularly important to consider when viewing recruiting as part of an integrated strategic HR framework:

• Balancing internal versus external hiring. Recruiting activities that are inte- grated into a broader strategic HR framework actively balance the relative merits of internal versus external hiring. Staffing is used to support inter- nal employee career development and succession management and to bring new talent into the company. Managers and recruiters discuss whether open

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positions should be used to build the capabilities of existing employees or to bring in new skills from outside.

• Workforce planning and job design. The best time to source talent is before you need it. Recruiters should not passively wait for line managers to come to them with open requisitions and then go out looking for candidates. Strategic HR organizations create ongoing discussions between recruiters and line managers about the company’s business strategies and future hiring needs necessary to support them. This includes anticipating the need to fill potential vacancies for existing jobs and forecasting the need to staff new types of jobs to support ongoing business growth.

The five themes of hiring quality, sourcing quality, relationship recruiting, manager involvement, and integrated talent management should be reinforced throughout the design of recruiting processes. Keeping these themes in mind will decrease the risk of creating recruiting processes that may be efficient but provide questionable value when it comes to supporting business execution.

4.2 CRITICAL RECRUITING DESIGN QUESTIONS There is no one best way to do recruiting. What works extremely well for a regional health care organization may be disastrous for a multinational software company. The processes that are appropriate for hiring new college graduates are much different from those used to hire senior executives. But companies that have the most successful recruiting processes typically have one thing in common: they have carefully thought through the following recruitment design questions:

1. What types of jobs are we hiring for?

2. How many people will we need to hire, and when will we need them?

3. What sort of people do we need to hire? What attributes do candidates need to possess to become effective employees?

4. What roles will hiring managers, recruiters, coworkers, and candidates play in the hiring process?

5. How will we source candidates?



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Commonsense Talent Management68

6. How will we select candidates?

7. How will we get newly hired employees up to full productivity?

8. How will we retain employees after they are hired?

9. How will we measure recruiting success and improve our processes over time?

The answers to these questions will vary from organization to organization. But failure to adequately address any of them will almost always result in a flawed recruiting process.

4.2.1 What Types of Jobs Are We Hiring For? When it comes to recruiting, not all jobs are created equal. The methods needed to effectively fill jobs vary widely depending on the job type. Table 4.1 provides a description of four broad categories of jobs and discusses how each one influ- ences recruiting process design:

• Pivotal jobs are positions where differences in performance have huge impacts on business performance. Recruiting for these jobs places a strong emphasis on hiring the best candidates possible.

• Critical jobs are crucial for business operations and require specialized skills and capabilities. Recruiting for these jobs depends heavily on having effective sourcing strategies.

• High-volume jobs are positions where companies hire hundreds or even thousands of employees a year. These positions require automated recruiting processes that can efficiently source and screen large numbers of candidates without overwhelming recruiters or hiring managers.

• Operational jobs are positions that are necessary to keep the organization running, but that are not particularly pivotal or critical. These tend to be filled intermittently and require recruiting processes that can be quickly scaled up or down based on current hiring needs.

Some jobs cut across several of these categories, and most large organiza- tions have jobs falling into all four categories. What is important is to recognize that the ideal recruiting process will change depending on the type of job. Many companies need several distinct recruiting processes to support the variety of jobs they must fill.

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Type of Job Examples Typical Emphases of Recruiting Processes for These Types of Jobs

Pivotal jobs, where differences in per- formance have a significant impact on company profitability

Strategic leadership roles such as CEO or other senior executive

Key operational roles such as manufactur- ing plant managers or technical experts in software companies

Aggressive strategies for sourcing talent

In-depth processes for screening and selecting the best candidates

Leveraging internal tal- ent through succession management

Critical jobs, which are necessary for maintain- ing company opera- tions and where there is a significant shortage of talent

Jobs requiring special- ized skills such as nurses in health care or main- tenance specialists in utility companies

Identifying and building relationships with poten- tial candidates early in their educational career, often years before they are qualified to be hired

Creating strong employee value propositions to attract qualified candi- dates (i.e., showing why the company is a highly desirable place to work)

Using career develop- ment and training to build internal talent pools

High-volume jobs, where the company hires large numbers of employees each year

Hourly frontline retail jobs

Entry-level college graduate jobs such as engineers in a large aerospace company

Creating broad sourcing strategies to attract large numbers of candidates

Automated methods for screening employees

Sophisticated selection tools to increase the qual- ity of those hired

Automated onboarding processes

(Continued )

Table 4.1 Job Categories and Related Recruiting Processes

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4.2.2 How Many People Will We Need to Hire, and When Will We Need Them? Recruiting organizations can often be characterized by how they engage with line leaders. Reactive recruiting organizations can be thought of as support departments that respond to staffing requests from hiring managers as quickly as possible. Proactive recruiting organizations actively reach out and engage with hiring managers to forecast future job needs and ensure talent is available when needed. Proactive recruiting is about building and sourcing talent pools before they are needed. It is usually more effective to adopt a proactive than a reactive stance, particularly if the company is trying to staff hard-to-fill jobs with high- performing talent (see the discussion: “The Differences among Time-to-Hire, Time-to-Fill, and Time-to-Start, and Why This Matters”).

T H E D I F F E R E N C E S A M O N G T I M E - T O - H I R E , T I M E - T O - F I L L , A N D T I M E - T O - S T A R T , A N D W H Y T H I S M A T T E R S

Time-to-hire is one of the most frequently used metrics for evaluating

recruiting performance. Usually measured in days, time-to-hire refers

to the total elapsed time required to staff an open position. Despite its

Type of Job Examples Typical Emphases of Recruiting Processes for These Types of Jobs

Operational jobs, which are necessary for maintaining company operations but are not a key source of com- petitive differentiation for the organization

Shared services jobs such as administration, security, or facilities management

Recruiting processes that can be quickly scaled up or down since the com- pany hires these positions only intermittently

Workforce planning to forecast shortages so recruiting processes can be ramped up in advance

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Right People 71

wide use, time-to-hire is among the most poorly understood metrics in

the field of staffing.

The first thing to realize about time-to-hire is that it is primarily a

measure of process speed. It is not necessarily associated with candidate

quality. Because there is little value in making bad hiring decisions quickly,

the emphasis that time-to-hire places on time over quality significantly

limits its value as a measure of staffing performance. The second issue

with time-to-hire is it suffers from poor definition. Some organizations

measure time-to-hire starting with the initial approval of a requisition,

and others do not start measuring it until a requisition has been assigned

to a recruiter or posted to a career site. Another critical difference in time-

to-hire definitions is whether to stop measuring when an offer is secured

from an approved candidate or to include time that elapses after a candi-

date accepts an offer but before actually starting the job.

Because time-to-hire is poorly defined, it is better to replace it with

two other metrics, time-to-fill and time-to-start, that have more precise

definitions.

Time-to-fill: the elapsed time between the initial approval or posting of

a requisition and the final acceptance of a job offer from an approved

candidate

Time-to-start: the elapsed time between the initial approval or posting

of a requisition and the actual day when the new employee begins

working in the position

Time-to-start is usually longer than time-to-fill since candidates

must accept a job offer before they start that job. But many factors

that affect time-to-start do not affect time-to-fill. For example, com-

pany policies restricting employees from moving into a new internal

position until a replacement is found for their current role may radi-

cally lengthen time-to-start but could have little effect on time-to-fill.

There are also situations where a company may intentionally increase

time-to-fill while simultaneously taking steps to decrease time-to-start.

Although such staffing strategies may seem contradictory, they make

sense when time-to-fill and time-to-start are analyzed independently

instead of being lumped into a single time-to-hire metric.

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We first look at increasing time-to-fill to increase the chances of a

better candidate applying. A few years ago, I worked with a company

that analyzed the impact that hiring strategies had on its ability to

hire star candidates with certain rare qualifications.a These star candi-

dates generated extraordinary levels of revenue for the company, but

there were rarely enough available at any given time to meet the com-

pany’s operational staffing needs. This company determined that in

some situations, it was advantageous to purposefully increase average

time-to-fill to increase the likelihood of hiring more star candidates. To

understand this finding, remember that star candidates are by defini-

tion rare, so receiving applications from star candidates is a relatively

infrequent event. If the company focused on minimizing time-to-fill, it

was likely to hire fewer nonstar candidates because it did not wait long

enough for a star candidate to apply.

So how long should companies wait for star candidates to apply

before they decide to close a requisition? The answer depends on the

job and the labor market. In this study, the organization leaders deter-

mined that if they intentionally waited five days before filling positions,

they would receive an additional $300,000 per year by hiring better-

quality candidates. Of course, these gains had to be offset against

costs associated with leaving positions unfilled for five days. Whether

this trade-off is worth it depends on other factors. But the potential to

make $300,000 simply by waiting a few days before making a hiring

decision certainly seems worth exploring.

Now we look at decreasing time-to-start to zero without affecting

time-to-fill. Companies that recognize the difference between time-to-

fill and time-to-start can develop staffing strategies to ensure that time-

to-start remains near zero. These strategies allow the company to avoid

disruptions in company operations caused by vacancies while avoiding

the risk of lowering hiring standards just to fill a position. For example, the

staffing department in one retail organization made a commitment to

keep store manager jobs 100 percent staffed at all times. This meant

having no open management positions by reducing time-to-start to less

than a day.

To achieve this goal, the company decoupled the process used for hiring

new store managers from the process used to place newly hired managers

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Shifting from a reactive to proactive recruiting stance requires making a commitment to workforce planning, which involves HR and business managers working together to anticipate the company’s future staffing needs. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully discuss what is involved in effective workforce planning. But at a minimum it requires creating structured processes and col- lecting data to accomplish the following:

• Agreeing on likely business growth scenarios extending at least three years into the future. Looking more than three years out is important because the labor market trends that are felt in recruiting unfold over years, not quarters.

• Determining what sort of talent will be required to support different business growth scenarios. This involves analyzing the kinds of jobs required to support

into specific store positions. It then intentionally overhired so that within

a given region, there were always slightly more store managers than store

manager positions. After their initial training, newly hired store managers

were provided with additional in-store training until a vacancy occurred in

their region. They were then immediately transferred into the vacant posi-

tion to minimize any discontinuity in store operations.

In addition to increasing operational continuity, these changes

led to improvements in the process used to hire new store managers.

Although recruiters feel constant pressure to keep the pipeline filled

with good candidates, they are no longer under the gun to staff a spe-

cific position in a specific store as fast as possible. They can hire in a

more systematic and measured fashion, focusing on candidate quality

instead of responding to the hiring crisis of the moment. They are not

pressured to lower their hiring standards just to get someone in the

door and can scrutinize candidates without worrying about the added

pressure to staff an existing vacancy.

Decoupling the concept of time-to-fill from time-to-start represents

an innovative approach toward staffing. These examples illustrate what

can happen when staffing leaders take the time to critically analyze

staffing metrics and processes. What gets measured is what gets man-

aged, so it makes sense to understand exactly what you are measuring.

aHunt, S. (2004). Understanding time to hire metrics. Electronic Recruiting Exchange.

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various business strategies and growth expectations and then determining the skills and experience that candidates will need to perform these jobs.

• Analyzing the skills and experience of the current workforce and forecasting the likelihood of losing employees with particular skill sets due to turnover, retire- ment, or movement within the organization. It can be particularly insightful to talk about predicted employee turnover in terms of “years of experience lost” instead of “number of employees leaving.” For example, imagine that a com- pany expects to lose ten engineers in the next three years due to retirement. Assume the average tenure of these engineers is thirty years. There is a big difference between “we expect to lose ten engineers over the next three years” and “we expect to lose three hundred years of experience in the next three years.” It may also be worthwhile to examine the value of experience. For example, in many manufacturing, health care, and computer programming jobs, there is a strong, positive relationship of years of experience, employee productivity, and work quality.

• Calculating gaps between the employees currently in the organization and the ones likely to be needed over the next several years, and then designing staff- ing strategies to ensure the company will have the talent it needs when it needs it. The staffing strategies should integrate external hiring, internal employee development, succession planning, the use of contingent workers, or a mix- ture of all of these. The possibility of addressing workforce shortages by increasing the productivity of current employees should also be considered.

Moving to proactive recruiting shifts recruiters from an administrative orien- tation focused on responding to hiring managers’ requests to a strategic orienta- tion of actively working with business leaders to figure out what sort of people the company should be hiring and how to get them.

4.2.3 What Sort of Employees Do We Need to Hire? What Attributes Do Candidates Need to Possess to Become Effective Employees? The main objective of strategic recruiting is to hire employees who will deliver effective levels of job performance. To achieve this objective, it is critical to clearly define job performance and understand how it relates to different can- didate attributes. What specific business outcomes does the company want to achieve by recruiting new employees? Is the goal to improve employee retention,

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increase productivity, provide better customer service, achieve higher sales rev- enue, or have an impact on some other outcome? Is this a pivotal position where it is crucial to spend the time and resources necessary to find and hire the best possible candidate? Or is this more of an operational role where hiring solid but not necessarily outstanding employees will suffice?

There is a cost to hiring the best talent available. Not all roles need to be filled with the most qualified candidates, who also tend to be the most expensive and hardest to find. The importance of hiring the “absolutely best” candidates avail- able varies depending on the job. Some jobs in a company are more pivotal than others in terms of their impact on overall business performance.4 Pivotal jobs are ones where differences in performance have major impacts on business outcomes. This includes senior leadership roles such as the CEO, but can also include critical operational and technical roles (e.g., frontline customer service staff in a luxury hotel or software architects in a technology company). These are the jobs where you want to hire the best-quality talent available. Yet there are also jobs where having solid, reliable performance may be as valuable as hav- ing the best performance possible, and maybe even more valuable. For exam- ple, many service support functions and long-term operational roles do not need to be staffed by the most experienced people available. For these roles, hir- ing people who are good, efficient, and consistent may be more valuable than hiring people who are outstanding but often also more costly and demanding.

Every staffing process should start by asking hiring managers to clarify the business goals they want to support through hiring new employees. This neces- sitates making decisions that emphasize certain outcomes over others because employee attributes that have a positive impact on some outcomes often have a negative impact on others (see “No One Is Good at Everything”). For example, a common trade-off when evaluating candidates is whether to focus on produc- tivity versus stability. The most highly productive employees are often the first to leave to pursue new opportunities.5 These employees are usually driven by a desire to move to increasingly challenging positions, are more likely to have job opportunities elsewhere, and may quickly tire of jobs after they master them. While there is value in having highly productive employees, there is also value in having a stable workforce. The financial value of maximizing productivity versus maximizing retention varies depending on a company’s business model. Discussing the relative value of different business outcomes such as these is an important part of designing a recruiting strategy that will deliver the best results.

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Developing a clear understanding of what drives job performance in a certain role can be difficult. When managers are asked, “What makes a great employee?” they tend to answer in vague generalities about passion, dedication, and a “can- do” attitude. These characteristics sound good, but they reveal next to nothing about what makes high-performing employees noticeably different from average or poor ones. This is why it is important to use job analysis techniques to define the employee behaviors and characteristics that drive job performance.

Job analysis is not an overly complex discipline to master, and there are many books available that cover different job analysis methods.6 Any worthwhile job analysis method will require the involvement of hiring managers, current employees, and other subject matter experts familiar with the job being staffed. Most methods require subject matter experts to clarify specific tasks performed on the job and provide examples of things current or former employees have

N O O N E I S G O O D A T E V E R Y T H I N G

Effective recruiting requires making choices on the relative importance of

different candidate attributes. It is hard to envision a candidate attribute

that is always desirable regardless of the job. Attributes that are strengths

in some jobs are weaknesses in others. For example, being highly agree-

able may be a desirable trait when applied to things like fostering team-

work and getting along with others but can be a weakness for jobs that

require taking a firm stance on an issue or holding others accountable

for their behavior. Candidates with the strongest levels of experience and

technical capability typically cost the most to employ. Extremely detail-

oriented individuals may struggle with high levels of change.

Hiring requires balancing relative strengths and weaknesses to find

candidates who are the optimal fit given the job demands. When talking

about candidate qualifications, keep in mind there is probably no candi-

date that will be a perfect fit with every demand of the job. Candidates

who excel at some aspects of a job will invariably be less effective in oth-

ers. It is important to work with hiring managers to determine which

attributes are the most important for job success and agree on areas

where it may be necessary to make certain trade-offs. Hiring managers

and recruiters who insist on finding candidates who excel at everything

are likely to end up looking for candidates who don’t exist.

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done on the job that illustrate effective or ineffective behavior (for an example of one job analysis method, see the discussion: “A Simple Job Analysis Technique”).

A S I M P L E J O B A N A L Y S I S T E C H N I Q U E

It is not possible to hire the best candidates unless you know what they

are expected to do in the job after they are hired. However, hiring man-

agers frequently struggle when asked to describe what candidates will

need to do to be successful in a job. Rather than defining what behav-

iors are critical for job success, they rattle off generic platitudes about

good performance, such as “being a service-oriented team player.”

These things sound good but reveal little about what people actually

need to do to be successful on the job.

The following steps outline a simple job analysis method that walks hir-

ing managers through defining what skills and competencies candidates

need to be successful in a job. These steps are not intended to replace

more rigorous and specific job analysis techniques, but they can be effec-

tive for quickly clarifying what criteria to use when assessing candidates:

Step 1: Define the job goals. Ask the hiring manager to list the five to ten

things employees must accomplish in this job to be successful. These

should be tangible accomplishments, results, or outcomes that employ-

ees must achieve. As I sometimes put it, “If we built a machine to do this

job instead of hiring people, what would this machine have to create?”

Or I might say, “If we hired someone and you never actually saw her

work after she was hired, what things would she have to accomplish

in order to provide evidence that she performed the job successfully?”

Step 2: Define the work environment in terms of challenges and enablers.

Start by asking the hiring manager to list three to six challenges about

the work environment that employees must overcome, manage, or

simply learn to accept in order to be successful in the job. These are

typically related to things like resource constraints, the culture of the

company, the nature of the competition, or the nature of the job tasks

themselves. What about the environment might make this job hard

for some people? Next, ask the manager to list three to six enablers

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found in the work environment. What technology, tools, support, or

other resources will employees have to use to be successful in this job?

What about the culture of the company, the nature of the job oppor-

tunity, or the job tasks themselves make this a desirable position?

Step 3: Identify key job competencies. Define five to ten types of behavior

that employees need to display to be successful in this job, taking into

account the job goals and environmental challenges and enablers.

What do high-performing employees do differently from average

employees? What do employees struggle with? Encourage the hiring

manager to provide examples of what previous employees did that

illustrate the difference between effective and ineffective perfor-

mance in this job. It may be useful to ask hiring managers to review

a competency library like the one contained in appendix A and select

the five to ten competencies that best describe the characteristics that

differentiate great employees from good ones and average employ-

ees from unsuccessful performers. Emphasize that what is important is

not to identify every behavior people need to display to be successful,

but to highlight the competencies that will have the greatest impact

on distinguishing effective from ineffective candidates.

Step 4: Identify critical candidate attributes. Look at the information iden-

tified in steps 1, 2, and 3. Do any of these require employees to pos-

sess specific skills, certifications, or experiences? Stress the difference

between necessary skills and qualification employees must possess in

order to be eligible to hold the job (e.g., formal licensing requirements)

and the skills and experiences that are desirable but not necessary (e.g.,

having three years of job-relevant experience instead of two). Remind

the manager that increasing the number of skill requirements placed on

jobs can significantly increase the difficulty and cost of staffing them.

These four steps can be completed in as little as forty-five minutes

when working with individual hiring managers, although it is often

more effective to conduct them with multiple hiring managers and sub-

ject matter experts in a longer workshop setting. These steps can be

used as the foundation of a highly rigorous job analysis process. They

can also be used as an efficient way to help hiring managers articulate

the job requirements for a position they may be filling only once.

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A well-conducted job analysis provides a clear picture of the functions ful- filled on the job and the employee attributes required to perform the job suc- cessfully. This includes having clear definitions of the job components:

• Job title. If possible, use job titles that external candidates will understand so they can tell whether they are interested in and potentially qualified for the job.

• Job tasks, responsibilities, and objectives. These describe the kinds of goals people in the job are expected to accomplish or the tasks they will need to perform (e.g., maintaining customer service levels, building new products, achieving sales quotas).

• Job requirements. Credentials or licenses candidates must possess to be eligi- ble to hold the job regardless of their other qualifications (e.g., US citizenship, licensed degrees).

• Relevant qualifications. Skills and experience that candidates are expected to possess to be considered qualified for the position (e.g., years of experience, job-relevant training, and course work).

• Job competencies. Behaviors people are expected to display on the job (e.g., supporting team members, planning and organizing, thinking analytically).

• Conditions of employment. Things people must accept in order to perform the job (e.g., work hours, job location, physical job requirements or Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, travel schedule, pay).

Clearly defining these categories will provide clarity and focus for subsequent decisions concerning what sort of candidates to source, how to select among different job applicants, and what actions will be required to bring newly hired employees up to speed. This information can also be used to create performance management and career development processes to maximize the productivity of employees after they are hired.

4.2.4 What Roles Will Hiring Managers, Recruiters, Coworkers, and Candidates Play in the Hiring Process? Finding, selecting, hiring, and onboarding employees is a cooperative effort. It goes beyond the role of any one individual or department. In the design of recruiting processes, attention should be placed on determining the

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involvement of four particularly key stakeholder groups at different stages of the recruiting cycle:

1. Recruiters or human resources (or both). Individuals who are formally tasked with managing processes to support sourcing, selecting, and onboarding new employees

2. Hiring managers. The person or people responsible for overseeing the budget and salary associated with the new person—the ultimate decision maker on whether to hire a candidate

3. Coworkers. People other than the hiring manager who will have input into the hiring decision—typically coworkers or managers from other depart- ments who will work with the candidate if hired

4. Candidates. Individuals being considered for the job—external applicants or internal employees seeking a position

Table 4.2 provides an example of how these four stakeholder groups might be involved in different steps of the recruiting process. The table calls out spe- cific responsibilities that recruiters, hiring managers, coworkers, and candidates have related to defining job requirements, sourcing and hiring candidates, and onboarding candidates after they are hired. Note that almost every role has some level of involvement in each step. It is particularly important to emphasize the role that hiring managers play in each of the steps.

The responsibility for hiring high-performing talent into a company ulti- mately lies with hiring managers, not recruiters. Recruiters are there to guide and support hiring managers. Staffing processes that allow hiring managers to shift responsibility for making good hiring decisions from themselves to the recruiting function are doomed to disappointment and failure. Most experi- enced recruiters can tell stories about being blamed for not being able to fill a position when the real problem was that the hiring manager never fully defined what constituted a top candidate or was unresponsive when asked to review and meet with candidates whom the recruiter recommended. To maximize the effectiveness of recruiting processes and minimize risks of finger pointing over recruiting problems, it is sometimes useful to document the role the hiring man- ager plays during the hiring process through a service-level agreement or similar formal statement of responsibilities.

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Stage Recruiter Role Hiring Manager Role

Coworker Role

Candidate Role

Defining job require- ments and candidate qualifications

Provide tools to define job competen- cies, skills, and qualifications.

Work with recruiter to define job demands, requirements, and candidate qualifications.

Input into job demands, require- ments, and qualifications.

Typically none unless the job is created to fit the capabilities of a specific person.

Sourcing candidates

Provide tools and guidance to hiring managers and employees on using social rela- tionships to find candidates.

Maintain talent pools with poten - tial candidates.

Use job postings, search tools, and other methods to find candidates.

Leverage personal social net- works to find candidates.

Recommend potential tal- ent sources to recruiters.

Leverage personal social net- works to find candidates.

Recommend potential tal- ent sources to recruiters.

Respond to job oppor- tunities.

Screening candidates

Screen out clearly unqualified candidates.

Recommend quali- fied candidates to hiring manager for review.

Review quali- fied candidates for suitability.

Provide feedback to recruiter on why certain candidates were or were not selected.

May have input into the screening process.

Provide necessary information required to evaluate qualifica- tions.

(Continued )

Table 4.2 Recruiting Roles

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Stage Recruiter Role Hiring Manager Role

Coworker Role

Candidate Role

Selecting candidates

Provide interview guides to hiring managers and employees.

If relevant, admin- ister and interpret advanced selec- tion tools.

Communicate to candidates why and how selection tools are used; answer candidate questions.

Conduct interviews and other assess- ments to evaluate candidates.

Provide infor- mation on the quality of candidates.

Conduct interviews and other assessments to evaluate candidates.

Provide information on quality of candidates.

Complete necessary assess- ments and interviews.

“Selling” candidates on the job

Engage qualified candidates to keep them inter- ested in the job.

Sell candidates on the benefits of the company as an employer.

Communicate the opportuni- ties provided by the job to candidates.

Treat candi- dates with appropriate respect and courtesy.

Communicate the oppor- tunities provided by the job to candidates.

Treat candi- dates with appropriate respect and courtesy.

Ask ques- tions about the job and express career preferences.

Make the hiring decision

Provide advice on strengths and weaknesses of candidates.

Take owner- ship for the final hiring decision.

Explain to recruiters why candi- dates were or were not considered acceptable.

Provide advice on strengths and weaknesses of candidates.

Accept or decline the offer.

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4.2.5 How Will We Source Candidates? Sourcing candidates is one of the key differentiators of a highly effective recruit- ing process. You cannot hire the best candidates for a job if they never apply in the first place. Companies that excel at finding and attracting the best candidate not only improve the productivity of their own workforce, they also deprive their competition from hiring top-quality talent.

There are a variety of approaches for sourcing candidates. Table 4.3 lists sev- eral of these approaches and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Stage Recruiter Role Hiring Manager Role

Coworker Role

Candidate Role

Onboard ing newly hired employees

Provide guidance to candidates and hiring managers on steps required to bring a new employee on-board.

Optional: Manage certain adminis- trative tasks for recently hired employees.

Ensure steps are taken so new employ - ees can quickly get up to speed.

Engage new employees; make them feel welcome.

Participate in onboard- ing process.

Tracking performance after hiring

Collect data on performance and retention of can- didates after they have been hired.

Evaluate the effectiveness of recruiting methods based on performance and retention of newly hired employees.

Provide data on the per- formance of newly hired employees.

May provide input into the perfor- mance of new employees.

Provide feedback on the qual- ity of the hiring and onboarding process.

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Sourcing Method

Strengths Weaknesses When It Tends to Be Most Effective

Employer branding

Has impacts on large numbers of candidates.

Attracts candi- dates the company might not other- wise reach.

Can integrate with and support other company branding efforts.

Takes a long time.

Marketing costs can be significant.

Impact is hard to track; does not tie to hiring specific individuals.

May attract large numbers of poorly qualified candidates.

Hiring large numbers of candidates over many years.

Seeking to create awareness among certain candidate pools.

Building talent pools

Critical for creating talent pipelines and shortening time to hire.

Builds strong relationships with key groups of can- didates (internal or external).

Expensive to main- tain relationships over time.

May be difficult to prequalify candi- dates for inclusion in talent pools.

Can be a challenge to maintain the quality of talent pools.

A tendency or prefer- ence for hiring candi- dates from the same sources exists.

There is a strategic focus on hiring can- didates with certain common character- istics (e.g., demo- graphics, educational credentials).

Job posting Quick and easy way to reach a large number of candidates.

Jobs can be posted on sites visited by specific types of candidates.

Often some of the best candidates are already employed and do not look at job postings.

Can be expensive depending on the site.

May attract large numbers of poorly qualified candidates.

Hiring for jobs with very clearly defined qualifications and hiring criteria.

Hiring for jobs in a certain specialized area where there are career-specific, tech- nical job sites.

Table 4.3 Sourcing Methods

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Employer branding uses marketing techniques to build a company’s reputa- tion as a good place to work among segments of potential candidates. For exam- ple, companies interested in hiring engineers might sponsor events at university engineering schools or place ads in engineering trade journals that reinforce the benefits of working for the organization. There are many techniques for building

Sourcing Method

Strengths Weaknesses When It Tends to Be Most Effective

Professio nal recruiting

Leverages seasoned profes- sionals who may have extensive networks of candi- dates and strong recruiting skills.

Expensive.

Outside recruit- ers may be more focused on filling positions than hir- ing high-quality employees.

Hiring for specialized technical and leader- ship positions where candidates tend to be scarce or already employed elsewhere.

Social net - working

Taps into profes- sional networks maintained by cur- rent employees.

Attractive because best applicants often come from employee referrals.

Relatively inexpensive.

Works only if existing employees have contact with the kinds of candidates desired.

Can be time-consuming.

Hiring for technical or industry-specific positions where the best candidates are probably one or two degrees of separa- tion from existing employees.

Career pathing

Creates a talent flow within the organization.

Usually less expen- sive and more suc- cessful than hiring externally.

Increases reten- tion within the company.

Best candidates may not necessarily be current employees.

Creates vacancies within the organiza- tion due to moving talent.

Requires investing time and resources into developing internal talent.

Hiring for positions where there are clear career paths within the company.

Hiring for positions where familiarity with the company is critical to job success.

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an employer brand, but the most successful employer branding campaigns tend to have two things in common:

• The company has clearly defined the brand message it wants to convey based on the kinds of candidates it wants to attract. A good employer brand uniquely differentiates why it is better to work for the company compared to other organizations that hire for the same types of jobs.

• Careful thought has gone into which candidates to target with the brand- ing message. The goal is not to encourage all job candidates to apply. It is to encourage qualified candidates with certain characteristics to apply, while perhaps even actively discouraging candidates who are not likely to be a good fit with the company.

I once worked with a company in the environmental science industry that developed an employment brand that effectively met both of these criteria. This company lacked the funds to pay geosciences engineers as much as other com- panies hiring candidates with similar degrees. To address this issue, the company built an employment brand emphasizing it as a place where engineers can work on solving major environmental problems. This company could not pay as much as other organizations, but it could entice engineers who were willing to sacrifice their earnings potential in order to work on what the company called “save the planet” projects.

Building talent pools involves maintaining relationships with groups of potential candidates for future jobs. Talent pools may consist of students, job seekers, and current employees who possess certain skills or experience desired by the company. These pools serve as a source of candidates when there is an opening. One of the major factors to consider when building tal- ent pools is how much focus to place on internal versus external candidates. Many companies overlook their existing employee population when sourc- ing talent, although internal employees are often the best source of qualified candidates.

Job postings are advertisements that communicate job opportunities using online job boards, websites, or newspapers. There is usually a fee for posting jobs on specific sites. Traditionally job posting was probably the most common method used to advertise job openings. However, social net- working sites are increasingly displacing job postings as the main way to market job openings.

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Professional recruiting refers to using professional recruiters to seek out potential candidates. Professional recruiting may be supported by in-house recruiters or external, contingency-based recruiting organizations. Professional recruiters can be very effective for staffing hard-to-fill positions, but tend to be far more expensive compared to other sourcing methods.

Social networking means finding candidates by leveraging people’s personal rela- tionships. It increasingly uses technology such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other sites to communicate job opportunities to potential candidates. This tech- nology is becoming a dominant method for sourcing candidates. There are several advantages to social networking. First, many people in professional or specialized roles are hired based on personal referrals. Second, networking results in the hiring of individuals who are already known by people in the company. This helps create a stronger social bond within the company and tends to decrease turnover, since peo- ple like to work with people whom they also consider to be friends. Many compa- nies are also using social networking technology to create and maintain employee “alumni” groups that encourage past employees to recommend candidates for jobs within the company and encourage former employees to rejoin the organization.

Career pathing refers to methods that help existing employees move into new jobs within the company. It thus integrates training, succession management, mentoring, and other career development methods that help employees iden- tify future roles in the company and acquire the skills and experiences needed to qualify for them. The goal of career pathing is to get employees to look beyond their current role and take a longer-term perspective toward pursuing future job opportunities within the organization. This is critical for moving staffing from a process for filling open positions to a process used to maintain a steady supply of high-performing talent for critical roles across the company.

The sourcing strategies that make the most sense vary depending on the jobs being filled, the size and location of the hiring organization, and the depth of available recruiting resources. The most effective recruiting processes leverage a mixture of sourcing methods to maximize the probability that the right candi- date will apply for the right job at the right time. It is also important to consider the preferred communication medium of the candidates who are being tar- geted, which may differ significantly based on candidate demographics (see the discussion: “Generational Differences and Recruiting: Saying the Same Things Differently”). Also consider how much emphasis to place on filling positions with internal versus external candidates.

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It can be very beneficial to use recruiting marketing methods to monitor the value of different sourcing strategies. Recruiting marketing uses data analyt- ics to determine which sources generate the most successful candidates at the least cost. Effective collection and analysis of sourcing data is important because the value of sources changes based on job type and over time. For example, employee referrals may be an excellent source of candidates for certain jobs but yield poor results for others. And Internet job sites that yielded successful candi- dates in the past may quickly become outdated given how rapidly Internet pref- erences and habits shift from one year to the next.

G E N E R A T I O N A L D I F F E R E N C E S A N D R E C R U I T I N G : S A Y I N G T H E S A M E T H I N G S D I F F E R E N T L Y

As long as there have been adults and children, one group has been

emphasizing how different they are from the other. But there are signif-

icant research challenges to figuring out whether generations really are

different. This is particularly true when trying to determine if different

generations have different career expectations. Apparent generational

differences may simply be due to differences in the lifestyles people

have at different ages. What people want from work when they are

twenty and single tends to be different from what they want when they

are forty and married with two kids. Apparent generational differences

can also be due to changing economic conditions. Employees currently

in their twenties may act differently from how older workers acted

when they were in their twenties because when older workers were in

their twenties, the labor market and the economy were much different.

Some of the more rigorous research on generational differences and

employee attitudes suggests that what people fundamentally want from

a job has not changed much over the years.a Regardless of generation,

most workers are looking for jobs that provide some sense of challenge

and career growth, fair compensation, a reasonable level of work-life

balance, and some degree of stability. What does appear to change

across generations is how people communicate. In particular, there are

big differences in candidates’ preferences and expectations for using

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the telephone, e-mail, social media, and other methods to interact with

employers. In sum, when it comes to recruiting across different genera-

tions, the issue is not so much what you say but the methods you use to

say it. A company’s recruiting message should probably remain relatively

constant across candidates from different generations to avoid accusa-

tions of age discrimination. But the way that message is communicated

may change depending on what generation you are targeting.

aDeal, J. (2006). Retiring the generation gap: How employees young and old can find common ground. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Meister, J. C., & Willyerd, K. (2010). The 2020 workplace: How innovative companies attract, develop, and keep tomorrow's employees today. New York: HarperCollins.

4.2.6 How Will We Select Candidates? After you have identified and contacted candidates and they have applied, you have to decide which candidate to extend an offer to. Effective staffing assess- ment methods are critical to increasing the quality of hiring. Even small investments spent to improve the accuracy of selection decisions can often sig- nificantly increase the productivity and retention of employees.

Table 4.4 lists a variety of tools used for candidate selection. It can be difficult to determine which selection methods to use given the number available. The best methods vary depending on the nature of the job and the depth of the company’s resources. However, there is one selection method used in virtually every recruit- ing process: candidate interviews. Given the prevalence of interviewing, compa- nies can reap significant benefits by maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the interview process. There are many ways to do this, ranging from designing preset interview questions to providing manager training on how to conduct an effective interview. Two of the simplest ways to significantly improve interviewing are structured interview guides and coordinating multiple interviews:

• Structured interview guides. Considerable research has shown that interview results do not accurately predict job performance unless the interviewer fol- lows a structured process of asking every candidate the same set of interview questions tied to specific job requirements.7 It is extremely important to cre- ate structured interview tools that ensure interviewers are asking the right questions about the right topics. There are many forms of structured inter- views, but one of the easiest and most effective is behavioral-based inter- viewing. Appendix A contains an example of common job competencies and

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associated behavioral interview questions, as well as a simple guide for con- ducting structured interviews. Consider using this or similar content to build structured interview guides to support your company’s hiring needs.

• Coordinating multiple interviews. Candidates for most jobs will be inter- viewed by several people within the organization during the hiring process. It is important to ensure that these interviews are coordinated so that can- didates are not asked the same questions multiple times by multiple people. There should also be an efficient way to collect and collate interview results to ensure a fully informed final hiring decision. The easiest way to do this in a large organization is to use technology systems that provide tools for coordi- nating, conducting, and collating results from interviews.

The last area to be addressed when designing selection methods is determin- ing what data will be used to evaluate the accuracy of selection tools over time. Many recruiters act as though the hiring process ends shortly after an employee accepts a job. A better practice is to extend the hiring process to include track- ing employee performance and retention for a year or more after hiring. If an employee is fired or quits within the first year, it is probably the result of hiring someone who never should have been given the job in the first place. The only way to truly fix this sort of problem is to evaluate and improve prehire selection methods based on posthire performance data gathered after hiring. It can be par- ticularly useful to examine why certain new employees did not meet expectations. For example, if employees quit in the first year on the job, try to determine why they left and use these findings to inform future sourcing and selection strategies.

Physical exams

Drug screens Use medical screening procedures to detect whether can- didates have used illegal or controlled substances (e.g., urinalysis, analysis of hair samples).

Physical ability tests

Require candidates to perform physical tasks such as lifting weights, completing cardiovascular exercises, or demonstrating flexibility.

Table 4.4 Types of Staffing Assessment Tools

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(Continued )

Background investigations

Criminal record checks

Search public records and private databases to determine if applicants have any prior criminal convictions.

Social security verification

Search online databases to ensure that a candidate’s social security number is valid.

Reference checks Collect information from former employers or aca- demic institutions to verify previous employment status (and possibly job performance) as well as educational credentials.

Credit reports Contact credit reporting agencies to obtain information about a candidate’s financial history.

Résumé screens

Electronic recruit- ing agents

Search the web for qualified candidates based on key- words found in résumés posted on internal or external career boards.

Résumé capture and reviews

Evaluate candidates based on the content of résumés they submit directly to the company or résumés posted to web-based job boards.

Interviews

Unstructured interviews

Evaluate candidates by having a discussion with them about topics that seem relevant to the job.

Structured interviews: Motivational questions

Evaluate candidates by asking predefined questions about interests, career goals, and plans.

Structured inter- views: Situational questions

Evaluate candidates by asking how they would respond to hypothetical situations similar to those they may encounter on the job.

Structured inter- views: Behavioral questions

Evaluate candidates by asking them to describe experiences and accomplishments that relate to things they will have to do on the job.

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Self-report measures

Prescreening questionnaires, weighted applica- tion blanks

Ask very direct questions to candidates to determine if they possess specific skills, experiences, or credentials needed to perform a job (e.g., “Are you willing to work weekends?” or “Have you ever used MS Excel?”).

Personality questionnaires

Ask candidates a series of self-descriptive questions about their likes, preferences, behaviors, and experi- ences that reflect personality traits associated with job performance.

Integrity and reli- ability tests

Ask candidates about beliefs, preferences, and experi- ences that reflect a propensity for counterproductive behavior.

Biodata inventories

Ask questions about previous life experiences and accomplishments that show statistical relationships to job performance.

Culture and work environment fit inventories

Ask questions about job preferences, values, beliefs, and desired work environment to predict organizational commitment and job satisfaction with a specific job or company.

Knowledge; skill and ability tests bad simulations

Ability tests and measures of problem-solving aptitude

Predict ability to solve problems and interpret informa- tion by asking applicants to solve questions that require processing information to arrive at logically based conclusions.

Knowledge and skills tests and measures of past learning achievement

Assess familiarity of and mastery with regard to spe- cific types of information or tasks (e.g., knowledge of accounting rules, ability to use certain software pro- grams, typing skills).

Job simulations, assessment cen- ters, and work samples

Use audio, video, computer simulations, or human actors to recreate actual job situations and then assess how candidates react to these scenarios.

Source: Hunt, S. T. (2007). Hiring success: The art and science of staffing assessment and employee selec- tion. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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4.2.7 How Will We Get Newly Hired Employees Up to Full Productivity? Companies lose money on newly hired employees until these employees reach a basic level of on-the-job competence. It can take several months before newly hired employees know the ropes well enough to make a real contribution. They are not adding value when they are spending most of their time figuring out where to sit, who their team members are, or how to fill out their health care benefit plan forms. High-performing employees tend to find this onboarding phase frustrating. They want to get up to speed and contribute to the company as fast as possible. They may even quit if they feel it is taking too long to become productive. This is why it is important to make employee onboarding as quick and efficient as possible.

There are three basic categories of onboarding for new employees:8

• Administrative onboarding focuses on the tactical details associated with establishing new employees in a company’s payroll structure, benefit plans, office environment, and computer systems. Although these actions are purely administrative, they can be a source of considerable frustration and inef- ficiency if they are not done well. Linking staffing systems to the systems used to manage and track employee payroll, benefits, performance, and logistics can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on administrative onboarding.

• Technical onboarding focuses on ensuring employees have the train- ing, knowledge, and tools needed to perform their job. Depending on the job, technical onboarding may take less than a day or more than a year. Companies that have extensive technical onboarding requirements may want to link their recruiting technology to career development and learning man- agement system technology.

• Social onboarding focuses on welcoming employees into the corporate commu- nity so they feel part of the broader corporate culture. It helps new employees get to know the people they work with in terms of their interests, experiences, and history. This aspect of onboarding is often overlooked, but it is very impor- tant for several reasons.9 Strong social ties with work colleagues play a role in driving employee engagement and retention. Social networks also form a foun- dation for enabling effective teamwork. Fortunately, technology tools now exist to help companies support social onboarding in a consistent, scalable fashion.

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Best-in-class staffing organizations recognize that the hiring process is not fin- ished until the new employee is fully up to speed as a contributing member of the organization. Technology plays a major role in this step as it allow companies to automatically transfer data collected during the staffing process into the systems and processes used to manage and support employees after they are hired.

4.2.8 How Will We Retain Employees after They Are Hired? It is extremely expensive for organizations to go through the process of hiring candidates only to have the new employees quit early into their tenure. Candidate turnover within the first year should be considered a failure in the staffing process for most jobs, since something about the job and candidate clearly did not match. Retention after the first year is more a function of how employees are managed and the career opportunities they see within the organization. Nevertheless, staff- ing organizations might also want to pay attention to reasons that employees leave later in their careers and see if there are ways to help longer-term retention levels through changes in the hiring process. High-performing employees are of special importance in this regard. Among the main reasons they quit are these:

• Perceived lack of career growth opportunities within the company

• A sense of inequity around pay, promotion, and staffing decisions

• A general sense of misfit between their personal interests or work preferences and the characteristics of their manager, job, or company culture

Staffing organizations should actively work with the leaders of other strategic HR processes such as compensation, employee development, performance man- agement, and leadership development to ensure that the employer brand being promised to candidates during the recruiting process is fulfilled in the treatment of candidates after they are hired. Tracking data across the employee life cycle is central to this effort. This requires having workforce analytical systems that sup- port the collection and integration of data on recruiting, performance, compen- sation, succession and development, and internal job transfers.

4.2.9 How Will We Measure Recruiting Success and Improve Our Processes over Time? It is impossible to know if a hiring process is truly effective unless the crite- ria that will be used to measure staffing success have been defined. How do we know if we made a good hiring decision? How can we tell if our hiring process is

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efficient over the long term? Answering these questions lies at the heart of creat- ing a staffing process that is truly focused on business execution.

Table 4.5 lists several metrics to measure staffing effectiveness. (The metrics that are most important from a business execution standpoint are shown in ital- ics.) All of these reflect how staffing programs affect workforce productivity. Time-to-fill, although it has its limitations, is a critical metric for ensuring that staffing processes are minimizing disruptions to business operations caused by vacancies in key roles. Measures of productive and counterproductive perfor- mance and employee retention are central to evaluating whether the company is hiring high-quality candidates whose capabilities and interests match the demands of the job. Time-to-competence is critical to ensuring the effective- ness of onboarding methods. Examining data on internal promotions and job

Table 4.5 Staffing Metrics

Prehiring Metrics Posthiring Metrics

Number of hires Productive performance

Applicant volume Counterproductive performance

Applicant source Tenure

Time to hire Time and attendance

Time-to-fill Hiring manager attitudes

Cost per hire Employee attitudes

Applicant quality Rating performance/time to competence

Applicant-to-hire ratio Turnover costs

Offer-to-acceptance ratio Employee demographics and EEO statistics

Applicant Demographics and Equal Employment Opportunity statistics

Internal promotions and transfers

Applicant reactions Turnover reasons

Note: The entries in italics are the most important metrics from a business execution standpoint.

Source: Hunt, S. T. (2006). Using metrics to guide staffing strategies across dispersed workforces. Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, 2, 3–17.

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transfers is key to shifting the focus of staffing from a process that concentrates on filling near-term vacancies to one used to create long-term talent pipelines. The metrics in table 4.5 should be reviewed with stakeholders associated with the staffing process to decide which are most important, how the data will be collected, and what actions will be taken based on the results.

4.3 RECRUITING PROCESS MATURITY Developing a high-performing recruiting process is not a short-term under- taking. Creating effective employer brands and developing large talent pools of qualified candidates can take months or even years. It is important to approach the creation of a recruiting process as a continuous improvement journey rather than a one-time event. This means adopting a deliberate, systematic long-term approach toward process design.

Figure 4.1 illustrates the maturity phases organizations go through as they develop their recruiting processes. These phases reflect a shift from a reactive “filling-of-positions” approach to a more proactive approach of maintaining a steady supply of high-performing talent.

Figure 4.1 Recruiting Process Maturity Levels

1. Filling open positions: Processes are established to efficiently fill open positions when they occur

2. Selecting high-performing candidates: Systematic assessment methods are used to guide hiring decisions based on key job criteria

3. Building talent pools: Employee brands and candidate relationships are used to maintain pools of available, qualified talent for key positions

4. Forecasting future talent needs: Data are used to predict and plan for vacancies before they occur

5. Maintain talent pipelines: Processes to create steady supply for key positions; staffing is done with development in mind; data are collected to predict future workforce needs and track talent flow

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The first level of maturity is to establish efficient methods for filling open positions. This involves establishing methods to create and track job requisi- tions and efficiently process candidates as they move through the hiring process. Achieving level 1 provides a stable platform to support the next levels.

Level 2 focuses on implementing tools to improve the accuracy of hiring decisions. This may include integrating more sophisticated selection tools into the hiring process. At a minimum, it should emphasize more effective interview processes. Level 2 forces companies to define what kinds of candidates they wish to hire, a requirement for getting to level 3, building talent pools.

Level 3 focuses on creating internal and external pools of candidates that can be used to fill future positions. A key part of achieving level 3 is creating tools to provide the staffing organization with visibility into internal talent along with external talent pools. While level 3 provides a general sense of the amount of talent available to fill different types of jobs, level 4 focuses on defining the gap between the talent that exists within the company and the talent that will be needed in the future. This is where workforce planning becomes critical. Level 5 represents a fundamental shift from staffing to fill positions to staffing as a means to create and maintain ongoing talent pipelines. At this level, companies are able to consistently and quickly fill positions with high-performing employees by proactively fore- casting talent needs and preidentifying qualified candidates. This is where staffing becomes a major competitive differentiator for driving strategic success.

Higher levels of process maturity provide greater levels of business value. At the same time, there is a cost to achieving higher maturity levels, and it may not make sense to be at the highest level possible for all jobs. This is particularly true for many operational positions where the focus of hiring may be more tactical than strategic. What is important is to consider what level of maturity makes sense for your organization given your current business execution drivers and long-term strategic needs.

4.4 CONCLUSION Companies get to make an initial hiring decision only once for every employee. Ensuring managers are hiring the right people into the organization is probably the single most important outcome of effective strategic HR methods. All other strategic HR methods are going to be either enhanced or constrained by the quality of this initial decision. For this reason, it is vital to do everything you can to make sure this decision is the right one.

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There is no one best way to hire employees. Different jobs require different recruiting processes. What is important is to build out processes that make the most sense for the jobs you are filling. This means actively involving managers in defining job requirements, working with managers and employees to source and select talent, developing and rigorously applying effective selection methods, and extending the hiring process beyond the hiring decision to include onboard- ing and posthiring performance. No matter how much time and work you put into designing your organization’s recruiting process, there will always be another next step for driving further improvement. No company ever achieves the perfect recruiting process. But with a little effort and consideration given to some of the issues presented in this chapter, every company can create recruiting and staffing processes that are far better than the ones they are currently using.

NOTES 1. The terms staffing and recruiting are used interchangeably. One could

make a distinction that recruiting is more about finding talent and staff- ing is more about hiring people into jobs. But these two functions have become so intertwined that most companies tend to view them as the same general process. For consistency, I tend to use the term recruiting more often than staffing because it connotes both sourcing and hiring talent.

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3. Hunt, S. T. (2007). Hiring success: The art and science of staffing assessment and employee selection. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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5. Hom, P. W., & Salamin, A. (2005). In search of the elusive U-shaped per- formance-tenure relationship: Are high performing Swiss bankers more liable to quit? Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, 1204–1216.

6. Brannick, M. T., & Levine, E. L. (2002). Job analysis: Methods, research, and applications for human resource management in the new millennium.

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Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gael, S. (1988). Handbook of job analysis for business, industry, and government. New York: Wiley.

7. Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.

8. Bauer, T. N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D. M., & Tucker, J. S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-ana- lytic review of antecedents, outcomes and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 707–721.

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