LEAN, Just-in-Time Recruiting!

We are excited that we had over 50 participants in our inaugural Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study .  We had the pleasure of presenting our initial findings at the National Association of Healthcare Recruiters Annual Image Conference in Las Vegas last week.  The conference, as always, was Five Star!  And we were overwhelmed (and humbled) with the interest in our Lean, JIT recruitment principles and our actual study.

One metrics that surprised us (especially in our flat economy) was the percentage of positions that had been open over 60 days. 

While the overall average Time to Fill (TTF) was trending around 46 days (which is good compared to years past and benchmark data from sources like Saratoga.org), 38% of the participants current open positions were trending over 60 days.

Further analysis provided some conclusions:

1. Recruitment teams are pretty good at filling what we call Business as Usual Req’s (BAUs) with internal or active candidates that apply to postings, especially since most are rewarded (and measured) on how many positions they fill.  While we didn’t track this particular data element/segment in the study, our qualitative analysis indicates that the average TTF for these positions is 20-30 days.  
2. Most organizations continue to struggle with filling difficult/critical to fill positions (CTF).  These positions are still trending at 60, 90 days + TTF.

So while on the surface, most organizations feel pretty good about their overall TTF metric, under the surface managers are still concerned about their recruitment teams’ ability to fill CTF positions. Even more important, the inability to fill these positions JIT is often costing organizations millions of dollars (Cost of Vacancy).   

We believe the three primary reasons that 38% of the positions are trending over 60 days are as follows:

1. Not managing/monitoring your over sixty days report:  It is very easy for a recruiter carrying 25, 30, 50 req’s to forget what their top priorities are, which positions have been open over 60 days, etc.  It you do not stay on top of your openings (and if managers aren’t pounding down your door, positions can creep past this milestone very fast.
2. Recruiters either don’t have the time to source for quality candidates or . . . are NOT carving out time.
3. Recruiters don’t have the skills/competencies (or both) to find high quality talent for their CTF positions.

Some solutions to reducing the percentage of positions trending over 60 days old:

1. On a weekly basis, have a team meeting to specifically discuss positions trending over 60 days.  Position on hold? Close it.  Candidates to disposition and get over to manager? Do it. One of our clients has recently implemented a Monday morning “huddle” to specifically discuss positions trending over 60 days.  By making it a priority, they have cut these down from 25% to 13%!  
2. The “time” issue is a little more problematic.  It takes relatively no time to “source/pre-qualify” an active, internal or referral candidate.  Literally, this process is a few minutes. On the other hand, it might take hours to source and pre-qualify one passive/top talent candidate.  Most organizations do not factor this when developing recruitment resource plans!  They don’t dissect which positions are BAU’s, which are CTF and . . . how much sourcing time needs to be dedicated to filling these positions.  With our staffing optimization model, we take that into consideration when identifying the number of resources needed to manage the corresponding hiring needs.  You should investigate this when developing your resource plans.  
3. The 3^rd reason is probably the easiest to fix.  Assuming the recruiter has the competencies of an ‘Elite’ recruiter , they probably can be taught the skills to source top talent.  At the very least, you could assign sourcing activities to those in your organization that enjoy and are good at sourcing or outsource part of the sourcing activities, such as name generation to allow your recruiters more time to cultivate relationships (and ultimately recruit) passive candidates.

If your organization measures you on TTF, I would ensure that you are deploying best practices to manage it!

Any questions, please contact me!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 7:56 am and is filed under David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Boot Camp, Recruiter Sales, Recruiter Top Gun, Recruiter Training, Relationship Recruiter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.