Over the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to participate in numerous industry events allowing me to talk “shop” with many talented staffing professionals.
As always, these events allow me to learn from others and provide me time to incubate thoughts/ideas that often turn into future strategies.
Some interesting thoughts/ideas from my travels:
- Ideally, I think most would agree that hiring people based on competencies (versus skills) will drive better hiring decisions. Unfortunately, because it is not easy to assess someone’s competencies, we most often hire based on skills. With internal candidates, we should have a more accurate understanding of past performance, candidate competencies, etc. allowing us truly to focus the hiring decision based more on competencies versus skills.
- Probably only 5 to 20% of all hires need some type of direct sourcing activity. Do you understand the positions that will NOT be filled by active/internal candidates before you dedicate time, money, and resources on active/internal strategies that take precious time away from direct sourcing activities?
- Shally Steckerl challenged the thought that one’s internal website is a “source of hire” – rather, it is a destination. Think about it. Most often candidates search for jobs via ‘google searches’, job boards, sites like www.simplyhired.com or www.indeed.com, SEO/SEM, social networking, advertising, etc. If one source of hires is your website, you probably do not truly understand how your candidates ‘found’ your opportunities.
- For those of you that have multiple license agreements with large job boards, how many of your recruiters actually use them on a regular basis? Many companies have saved money by cutting back on licenses!
- David Lord had some interesting statistics on retained executive search firms.
- The submitted candidate to hire ratio for retained search firms was 6.5 to 1 in 07 and 5.2 to 1 in 08. Is this more efficient than your internal team?
- 4 out of 10 retained executive searches fail! WOW!
- While most executives see recruiting as “essential”, do they really perceive it to be strategic to their organization? One way to shift their thoughts is to answer the question, “How does recruiting solve corporate problems?”
- Here’s an idea – Create an annual report for your 2009 recruitment activity/ performance. Present the report to CXX level.
- To truly create an effective Talent Relationship Program, you need to get hiring managers involved with the ‘relationship management’ activity.
- If your sourcing team does an effective job of identifying/sourcing quality talent for key job families over time, your sourcing team will spend less time “identifying” talent and more time developing relationships with the talent found!
- Create questions to ask your hiring managers:
- What positions are most critical for changing the market value of our company?
- What positions are less critical and really only need good people?