The Recruitment Revolution

According to a recent CEO Institute survey, the number one issue keeping chief executives awake at night is ‘sourcing and retaining skilled staff’. Yet when PricewaterhouseCoopers asked 1300 global CEOs about their operational priorities, talent strategies didn’t make the top five. So while CEOs might be suffering from insomnia, it seems they’re still doing very little to alleviate the problem.

What most don’t recognise is that 21st century recruitment is stuck at roughly the same stage of development as professional medicine in the 18th century, a time when toxic mercury was used to treat common ailments, and that there’s  a lot they can do to change this.  

Why do I say this? Well, for almost a hundred years, job-seekers have outnumbered vacancies. Consider the Great Depression when up to 20% of the population was out of work; the two world wars when women plugged the gap in the job market; and the population surge caused by the post-war ‘baby-boomers’. For nearly a century then, hiring was as easy as plucking an apple from a tree; people were ‘lucky’ to have jobs, and that was how they were treated.  

With no requirement for innovation, recruitment was never recognised as a key business pillar. The belief that ‘anyone can recruit’ became endemic and because many organisations didn’t measure their hiring outcomes in any objective way, they had little contradictory evidence. This atrophy is evident by looking at conventional corporate leadership structure where there are CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CIOs, but still very few ‘CROs’ or ‘CHROs’. The dumbing down of the discipline led to a proliferation of bureaucratic HR Nazis and a contagion of bad practice spread like a pandemic throughout the industry. 

This wasn’t a problem until the mid-nineteen-nineties when a surge in productivity around the world meant that positions vacant outnumbered good applicants for the first time in nearly a century. This created a ‘war for talent’ and, because most companies had never developed effective hiring practices, they had no mechanisms to deal with the situation.

Even worse, the old supply and demand curve is now distorted because the continuing escalation in technology means that even the most basic roles require more skills. Whereas in the good old days, many jobs could be held by most candidates, employers now compete for a smaller pool of better-skilled recruits.

            This provides a fantastic opportunity for employers. The twenty first century is a time when continuous improvement of recruitment processes is the new paradigm. Poor hiring practices that converted only 10% of the suitable applicants were OK when there were one hundred applying. But it’s no good now that there might only be three.

The first step on the path to revolution then, is to start applying scientific, evidence-based measurement to recruitment, to replace the subjective and often destructive hiring techniques that currently masquerade as standard practice.  For instance, take this example of an interview assessment form that I borrowed from a large global corporation:

Table 1: Example Interview Assessment Form

            This looks like a precise HR system, and it’s commonly used in varying formats, but it doesn’t take much to reveal its subjectivity. A colleague of mine used a derivative of this assessment form when she opened up a business in Los Angeles, and thought she’d landed in recruitment heaven. All of her applicants scored ten out of ten on personality, keenness, and so on. Within six months however, she was embroiled in major performance management issues and her staff turnover was at 65% as her new people left in droves. It was only then that she realised that she’d employed a lot of good-looking, personable wannabe actors and that her ‘objective system’ simply dressed up ‘gut feel’ as if it was fact.  

            This kind of non-scientific approach also applies to psychometric testing which is used by many organisations as a crutch to make their entire hiring decision, often without any objective evidence as to effectiveness. One renowned National provider, whose test was used by a number of large multi-national organisations, admitted to us under cross examination that they had made the questions up. They had no statistical validity at all and in fact ‘sifted out’ both good and bad applicants in equal measure.

            The recruitment revolution then, begins with objective measurement of every existing practice. Career’s websites, recruitment ads, phone interviews, screening techniques, psychometric tests, hiring letters and contracts, recruiters’ incentives, hiring KPIs and so on – all of these need to be placed under the microscope, analysed and improved to create true best practice systems, and put people and their needs at the core of the process. Otherwise the insomniac CEOs will still be up at night wondering ‘Where did all the good people Go?’

As French novelist, Marcel Proust said:

‘The only real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.’

It’s time to look at the whole business of recruitment in a different light.