Right People
Designing Recruiting and Staffing Processes
Running a successful business depends on having the right people 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.
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 recruiting with a strategic mindset are distinguished by the emphasis they place on five key topics: quality of hire, quality of sourcing, networking and relationships, hiring manager involvement, and integrated talent management. FROM PROCESSING CANDIDATES
Quality of Hiring:
1- 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 hundreds of online job sites and social networking systems. Companies with integrated strategic HR technology systems can also source internal candidates by scanning databases of current employees. This ready access to so many candidates 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 high-quality candidates with the minimal investment possible.
2- 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 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.
3- 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 requisition 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 collaboration 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. 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 determine 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).
4- 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.
CRITICAL RECRUITING DESIGN QUESTIONS:
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. provides a description of four broad categories of jobs and discusses how each one influences 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.
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 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”).
3- What Sort of Employees Do We Need to Hire? What Attributes Do Candidates Need to Possess 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 candidate attributes.
4- How Will We Source Candidates?
Sourcing candidates is one of the key differentiators of a highly effective recruiting process. You cannot hire the best candidates for a job if they never apply in the first place.
5- 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.
6- 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.
7- 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.
8- 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 criteria that will be used to measure staffing success have been defined.
RECRUITING PROCESS MATURITY:
Developing a high-performing recruiting process is not a short-term undertaking. 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.
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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