Amy: The Shrewd Recruiter's Story
This is a brief story of how a shrewd Talent Acquisition Pro discovered a flaw in their hiring process while competing in a talent scarcity market, found a solution, convinced her Talent Acquisition Director, VP HR and critical Hiring Managers she had the answer. All done on a modest budget.
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What is my definition of shrewdness? To be shrewd means you’re smart, strategic, and resourceful. You see a problem clearly, you know what needs to be done, and then you figure out how to do it. That’s Amy.
Amy’s Story
I really hadn’t spoken to Amy before she contacted me, but we were connected on LinkedIn. Here are the cliff notes of our conversation.
Amy is the Lead Talent Acquisition Professional for a fast-growth technology company competing in a hyper-competitive candidate market. She had recalled reading something about my LinkedIn profile that led her to contact me.
She began by providing a short bio of her current role, company and her recruiting challenges. Then she said, “I’ve looked at our recruiting process and we seem to be losing quality candidates at the offer stage. Could we talk about our hiring process and see if you think I’m correct in my conclusion?”
I replied, “Of course, I have a standing 15-minute invite to my calendar on my website just for this purpose. After we talk for a few minutes, if you think I can help, we’ll schedule a longer call to see if it makes sense for me to help you. Neither call costs anything, just exploratory in nature.”
Then Amy proceeded to walk me through her process, from opening the requisition to 30 days post hire. She said, “We seem to get candidates to the offer stage, then lose them. Compensation seems to be a large part of this. Our online reputation is pretty good, I think it’s mostly the money. Do you have any ideas on how we might improve our offer to hire ratio?”
Listening to Formulate a Hiring Process Solution
My initial reply to Amy wasn’t what she expected to hear, but remember she is shrewd. She was searching for a solution, and not 100% committed to her personal conclusion. In other words, she was open-minded.
I began by suggesting that her “recruiting process” had more than one flaw that perhaps she hadn’t yet realized. These flaws were manifesting themselves deep into the process, i.e. the offer stage.
A good recruiting process consists of well-constructed end-to-end stages, each tying to and building on the other. Her process seemed to be a cobbled together stages that failed to meet this critical test.
Her recruiting process had over time been assembled from ideas from around the web, in combination with various experiences from her hiring managers. That left critical gaps and nothing to adequately bridge these stages. Not only did they not connect well, there were exposures to diversity challenges that also existed.
The six items below are a few things I suggested that Amy consider.
Solution
Here Are The Steps of My Recommendation for Amy
- 1Job Description. Your job description is too heavy skilled based and doesn’t tie to the post-hire quality of hire evaluation. (See number six below).
- 2Sourcing Mix. Your sourcing mix is not as good as it could be. In a talent scarcity market, it should be more like a 40-40-20 mix.
- 3Employee Value Proposition. You Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is too foucsed on overall company brand, and not enough on the specific job brand.
- 4Compensation. You need to create up to a 30% non-compensation element and incorporate that into your recruiting. This helps mitigate compensation pressures at the offer stage. There are key strategies to do that.
- 5Interview Process. Your interview process has several flaws which need addressing. This a topic for a separate blog post in the future.
- 6Making the Job Offer. When you are successful in closing your offers, your post-hire quality of hire evaluation at the 30, 60, 90 and 180-day intervals do not tie with the real job. (See number one above).
I have a lot more detailed stories like this one. Amy was shrewd enough to follow through and make an even bigger impact on the success of her employer. She chose the “combo” approach. If you’d like to learn more contact me using the orange button below..
Why behavioral interviews fail...use Performance-based Hiring instead #hiring #interviews #behavioralinterview
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