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Managing Your Hiring Managers, Part Three

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

We recently posted the first of three parts in our series about Managing Your Hiring Managers. (Part One, Part Two)   We discussed how to understand what your hiring manager’s want through Voice of the Customer (VOC) and how to build credibility with your hiring managers.

Our final post of the series will focus on how to effectively manage the hiring manager relationship.

Effectively Managing the Hiring Manager relationship   

So, you’ve spent a great deal of time assessing your hiring manager’s needs through Voice of the Customer, and you’ve worked hard to establish credibility.  Now, if you don’t effectively manage the relationship with them then all of your efforts will be wasted!!

One important step in the management of any consultative relationship is the ability to establish a strong foundation to the partnership (yes, you’re the recruiting consultant to your hiring manager!).  This starts when consultants engage with clients in the initial intake session.  

Intake Session = Foundation:  If you have a good intake session then you have a strong foundation to build a relationship! A good intake session is not only about uncovering the basic wants and needs of your hiring manager but it will allow you to explore the position in great detail as well, including: 

  • Why is the position open?
  • What are the top 3-5 key objectives for someone in this position?
  • What are the challenges a person will face in this position?
  • How is performance measured?
  • What is your hiring managers style/personality/culutre
  • Sourcing Strategy questions
    • Who are some of your top performers that I could network with?
    • Who are some of the top performers externally that you’re aware of?
    • Are you aware of any companies that might be struggling that I could tap into?
  • What are the selling points of the position?
  • What “knock out” questions do you suggest I use?
  • What is our Service Level Agreement?

Establishing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a key step in effectively managing the hiring manager relationship.  It sets expectations in advance, for both you and your hiring manager about who is going to do what during the hiring process and how long it’s going to take.

For example, a well crafted SLA will outline how quickly you will be expected to provide qualified and interested candidates as well as how quickly your hiring manager will respond once you have submitted an initial slate of candidates.

If you’d like to see an example of our intake and SLA documents please contact me.

Finally, best in class organizations use detailed analytics, trend tracking, and ongoing voice of the customer sessions/surveys to consistently check on hiring manager satisfaction and correct areas of concern proactively. 

If you’re effectively managing the relationship, you’re not only talking with your hiring managers often about the day to day aspects of candidate flow, but you’re also meeting with them at least quarterly to look at your high level results as a team to mitigate any areas of risk.

Have a fantastic week!

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Managing Your Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Training, Strategic Business Partner, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Managing Your Hiring Managers, Part Two

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Last week we posted the first part in this series on Managing Your Hiring Managers.  We discussed how to understand what your hiring manager’s want (or just as important – need) through voice of the customer (VOC).

A key to building a consultative partnership with your hiring manager is by getting to know them personally and building credibility with strong functional knowledge of their organization, business unit and staff.  

How do you accomplish this? The following questions will help guide you so that you can become recognized as a true staffing partner with your hiring managers.

Knowing Your Hiring Managers & Building Credibility – Self Assessment!

  • Do you have strong, personal relationships with your hiring managers? Do you know where they are from, their hobbies and interests?  You don’t need to be best friends.  But, you should have some basic knowledge of your customer and who they are. 
  • Do you know their administrative assistants or other support staff well? Often the most important contact you’ll have is the Administrative Assistants and other support professionals aligned to your hiring manager.  They can be your best ally to ensure you’re given access to the hiring manager’s schedule and they always have an ear to the inner workings of the hiring manager’s department.
  • Who are their top performers?  Do you have a relationship with them?  If you’re trying to build a business for your hiring manager, you should always look at their leadership team.  From the successor of the department to the top performers, the traits from these team members are what the hiring manager is seeking to build in his/her department and what you should look for when courting talent.  Also building relationships with these leaders will ensure your opinion is vetted throughout the key influencers in your hiring manager’s world.
  • Do you have a strong functional knowledge of what they do?  What does the hiring manager actually do every day?  You should have a basic understanding of how they spend their time.  They should also know how you spend yours. :)
  • Do you keep up with the industry?   Sure, you should be reading Workforce & HR magazines, but you should also be reading up on the latest trends in your industry. Whatever the industry (i.e. healthcare, banking, home building), you should stay abreast of trends there.
  • Have you visited the department or met their staff?  If you have the ability to make a visit in person do so.  One of my clients within the insurance industry conducts site visits once a month to make sure they have a face tied to the name.  
  • Do you understand the career progression for each department?  How do people move up, or transfer out of their department.  This can be a key selling point if this particular manager has a track record of creating star performers for your organization or system.
  • Do you meet with your managers quarterly to quantify your performance/ROI?  As part of a quarterly touch base (or onsite visit), do you present meaningful data to your hiring manager to show what you or your function has done for them in the past 3 months?

We have added this self-assessment tool to our Good to “Elite” competency/skills self assessment library (see below).

Click here to participate.

If would like a copy of your (or your team’s results) results, please email us.

Join us for our final installment next week when we’ll focus on how to effectively manage the hiring manager relationship.

Have a great week!

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Managing Your Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Sales, Recruiter Top Gun, Recruiter Training, Strategic Business Partner, Workforce Planning | No Comments »

Managing Your Hiring Managers, Part One

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

I’d like to share some highlights from my recent presentation at one of our local SHRM chapters, “How to Manage Your Hiring Managers”.

The most important thing to remember is you need to understand what your hiring managers want! You can’t manage a relationship if you don’t know what your customer wants or expects.  Below are some good questions to keep in mind:

  • What are your hiring managers’ business goals?
  • What are their challenges?
  • What are their business drivers? 
  • How does your department help your hiring managers achieve their goals? 
  • Can you show alignment to these goals? 

As we approach the end of the year and start to plan for the New Year the above questions can be used to help guide you and your hiring managers’ planning discussion for 2011.  Be sure to capture and review the “wants/expectations” with your hiring managers on a regular basis to make sure you are on track and nothing has changed. This relates to one of the topics explored during last week’s webinar on planning for 2011.  If you are interested in getting a copy, please email us.

Another great way to assess the needs of your hiring managers is by analyzing the “Voice of the Customer”. This can be achieved by using a variety of tools such as; surveys, polls, and focus groups.  However, it’s always important to consider: 

  • What is your customer’s expectation throughout the process ranked by importance?  (See illustration below)
  • How does your customer rate their experience?

 Blog92910

Once you’ve gathered this data, you’re now armed with the information you need to address your hiring manager’s needs. You’ll be able to add this metric to your talent management dashboard under Quality.  This is commonly referred to as Hiring Manager Satisfaction. 

In the next posting we’ll focus on building credibility with your hiring managers, and close with how to effectively manage those relationships.

If you’d like to see some examples of the tools we use to gather “Voice of the Customer”, please contact me.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Managing Your Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Strategic Business Partner, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Recently Published Study Indicates Hiring to Pick Up to Pre-Recession Levels — Are you ready?

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Just over half of large, recently downsized U.S. companies plan to boost staffing and reach pre-recession levels by 2012, according to Accenture’s recent High Performance Workforce Study.  The survey included 674 senior executives worldwide from companies with revenue of more than $250 million.

Investment in hiring for the U.S. based companies is expected to increase from 24 percent today to 37 percent within the next 12 months.  The study also found that only 13 percent of executives said that they plan to reduce their employee base over the next 12 months. 

Yet as we all know, the planned growth won’t come easily. If a hiring ‘boom’ is imminent, highly skilled workers will come at a premium again as companies seek to grow.

The focus would soon shift from cost reduction to proactive staffing resource planning required to address spikes in hiring needs.   

Questions you might ask to decipher if you are in for a hiring boom:

  • Does your company have a strong balance sheet with cash to invest in a growth strategy?
  • Is your workforce already stretched thin?
  • Are you using contractors to supplement fulltime staff to get the work done today?
  • If there was a hiring “spike”, do you have the resources to get the job done?

If you answered YES to the first three questions and NO to the last, then it probably is time to start to develop a contingency plan in the event it DOES happen!

Be realistic but THINK POSITIVE about the future!  Most important, be prepared.

I hope you enjoy the last few weeks of the summer.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, Employer Brand, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Sales, Recruiter Top Gun, Recruiter Training, Talent Aquisition, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Health System Workforce Planning

Friday, June 25th, 2010

A recent article from McKinsey Quarterly discusses how most health systems lack a rigorous approach for matching clinician supply to the demand for various health services.  As a result, patient care and clinician morale suffer—and costs cannot be controlled effectively. Essentially they discuss the need for better workforce planning:

“Few health care systems forecast their workforce demands accurately. Predicting the number of doctors who will be needed in ten years’ time isn’t enough; it’s also necessary to figure out how many general practitioners, specialists, nurses, and allied health professionals will be required. The length of clinical training only compounds the problem.” – McKinsey, Managing The Clinical Workforce

We concur with McKinsey’s recommendations and have added a few of our own from the work we do with our clients.

Our collective suggestions on creating proper workforce planning and staffing optimization structures include:

  • Forecasting:   Begin with accurate forecasting focused on demand of services by job clusters.  What types of jobs does the system need– now, next year, and the year after?  What types of jobs will need to be refilled or created based on market needs and system growth plans?  Work with finance to get accurate budget projections – this should be something you do every year at the beginning of your fiscal cycle and at least once during the fiscal year to track changes.
  • Determine Baseline Demand:  For each job category, determine your baseline demand.  This would be a charting of hiring needs for at least the past year, ideally two years, by job family.  Again this would involve working with finance to map the potential needs over time. You can also look at actual hires made month to month for the last year or two to get a sense of the fluctuations.
  • Forecast Changes in Demand:  Map potential changes in hiring demand based on various factors, including demographic changes, retiring workers, consumer expectations, medical innovations, policy shifts, or productivity improvements.   Career progression and job movement internally are also factors.
  • Scenario Analyses:  Project various areas of impact to your model based on the aforementioned factors.  Here you get to play with the “what if” scenarios – a spike in hiring in Q2, a dramatic slowdown in August, etc.  The Scenario analysis will prepare you for these fluctuations and changes so you can be more proactive.

These are simple outlines of concepts, which of course have much more depth.  In a future post or whitepaper we’ll delve into workforce planning in more detail.

If you’d like to learn more about how we approach workforce planning and staffing optimization, and the benefits they could provide to your system contact me.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Time Management, Workforce Planning | No Comments »

Making the Lean Business Case

Friday, June 11th, 2010

During our consulting engagements and training we’re often asked:

How do I convince my leaders and associates to practice lean?

The challenge is often a large mountain to climb.  Perhaps the best way to start is to ask a different question.  “What does it take for lean to become part of your company’s culture?”  The answer begins with a matter of perspective.   How do you enable a mass of constituents, hiring managers, recruiters, and business leaders, to see the value lean can bring to the organization?

Lean is a totally different perspective which enables people to solve a problem regardless of how the problem’s been defined.  Let’s look at hiring 100 people as a common problem that a recruiter and a hiring manager would share.  As a recruiter I might define the problem of meeting my hiring goal as an issue of not having enough quality candidates.  From the hiring manager’s perspective, they could care less about my volume of candidates.  They just want the one right candidate who’ll continue to generate revenue for the business and help their department achieve the business goals, times 100 of course.   So while the two stakeholders have the same problem, they have different perspectives on what the root cause of that problem is. 

So, not surprisingly, the solution starts with communication and knowledge sharing for each stakeholder to see the problem through a “lean lens.”  We do this in our process optimization and design workshops, as well as when we develop training programs.  Utilizing a “voice of the customer” approach, the various stakeholders are gathered to share their common views of the problem, and to discuss potential solutions for the problem through their respective “lenses” or their perceptions.

The other aspect of adopting this method is communication of the value add of going lean.  As we have consistently discussed, we, as an HR function, are not as adept at communicating the value of what we contribute through the lens of the businesses we support (money, $, revenue, and $).  As we’ll reveal soon with the results of our current healthcare benchmarking study, there are thousands of hours of waste in existence within many healthcare systems’ recruitment practices, but until we begin to equate that waste into dollar amounts, our businesses will not understand our value, or support initiatives such as lean.  Our recent webinars have exposed many of you to the concepts of ‘cost of vacancy’ and other techniques to display potential ROI from lean initiatives. There will be more of that to come with the results of the study.

So consider: 

  1. Exercises and events to promote communication of common problems from the lens of all stakeholders 
  2. Communication of the value add of going lean from a business perspective that’s tied to financials.

More on this soon, but in the meantime contact me if you have questions or would like to discuss this further.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Sourcing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Leveraging the Power of Your Network

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

David released some of the initial results of our elite recruiter study a couple of weeks back . 

One of the areas that was ranked as an area for improvement was Leveraging Networks.  It just came up again the other day during an intriguing conversation with a client and I thought it was a topic that warrants further discussion.

We discussed that while 70% of people still find jobs through networking (according to Bureau of Labor), people spend less than 20% of their time “networking” to find a job. And if this is true, how much of a recruiter’s time should be spent developing relationships and networking to find quality candidates?

The point was well taken.   

To level set the discussion – The definition from our competency/skill model is as follows:

Leveraging Networks: Draws upon a wide range of professional and/or business relationships for help and support in achieving individual and organizational goals.

After I thought more about this topic, it’s not surprising that recruiters rank themselves low here.  Let’s face it.  It takes work to maintain an internal and external network that can assist you in performing your work more effectively.  This alone takes more time than most of us have in a day. 

So if you think this is an area for improvement for you, following are a few techniques to consider:

  • The Lost Art of Investigative Questioning – Of course you need to have a robust network to leverage it.  Most struggle to develop a network of professionals they can leverage for sourcing talent, etc. Using specific, probing questions with your Centers of Influence can exponentially improve your ability to build a strong network.
  • How Many Friends do you have  – If you don’t invest time in maintaining the relationships and helping out your “friends” in your network, don’t expect them to be responsive to your request!  Invest time in identifying how many true “friends” you have within your network and building upon this list over time.
  • Growing your friends network  – Check out this post to discuss some simple tactics to grow your friends network!  Some things to consider:
    • Prioritize the relationships – Focus your networking and energy on those that can help you with both your current and long-term problems.  For work-related problems, this might be a peer or someone who is a level above you.  For industry-related issues, this might be a peer at another company.  Whoever it is, block time to spend with that person consistently, and stay connected! 
    • Don’t waste your time on the wrong people - Stop spending energy on a relationship that’s not giving something back to you.  Don’t keep helping others out if you realize they really aren’t helping you.

While all these tactics will help you create and grow a powerful network, probably the single biggest deterrent from you having a robust, interactive network of friends is having the DISCIPLINE to carve out the time to develop it!

Building your network needs to become part of your daily/weekly routine.  I personally have developed the good habit of blocking off 30 minutes a day (I plan it into my Perfect Day Routine  to develop my network and hit all of my news, websites, and blogs for industry information.

I know.  This is easier said than done.  And by no means can I say I do this 5 days a week/52 weeks a year!

Some behavior modification tips/techniques to help you build this “good habit”:

  • Post a note on your screen – - Am I building my Friends Network today?
  • Have a list of your “friends” network. Set a goal each quarter to grow this list.  Make this goal “public” and post it in your office (i.e., – I will have 350 friends in my network by June 30, 2010. Review every month for growth. ).
  • Try to carve out 30 minutes of time when you are least likely to be interrupted.  First thing in morning before you leave your house for work? End of day? Lunch? Friday afternoon? 
  • Hold a contest with your fellow recruiters. Who can develop the most amount of new friends in the next 90 days?

With the instant access we have to millions of people, we often forget to develop lasting relationships that will and can benefit us in so many ways.  INVEST in your network and it will provide dividends along the way.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Deadly Sins of Waste in Recruiting, Elite Recruiters, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Sales, Recruiter Top Gun, Recruiter Training, Social Media, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Expectation versus Reality – Deliver on your promises, consistently

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Companies who are serious about their talent need to deliver on their promises consistently.  When a candidate goes to your careers website, it’s the first step they take in their research of your company. They are looking for information, drivers, and attractors that make your company a more intriguing proposition than others.  Let’s say they decide to apply and they’re invited in for the interview. 

From the moment they arrive at your office they are gauging if the company they saw online is reflective of what they see in reality.  As you go further down the path of hiring someone, expectations continue to develop based on the information you portray to the candidate. 

If the recruiter or hiring manager driving the interview process makes statements such as:  “We have a strong work/life balance at our company” or “We believe in learning and development”, or “We have an open door policy in which management is readily acceptable,” then the organization better be prepared to deliver on those statements consistently.

Take the Gen X group and the Millenials.  Both of these groups are getting a lot of focus from companies right now to ensure they fill talent gaps as boomers reach retirement.  From our research, one of the key areas of attraction for both of these groups is learning and development.  Another dynamic of these groups is a lack of long-term company loyalty.  If your company states a strong position on learning and development online during the interview process and on-boarding, and then you don’t deliver on that promise; then these groups will leave quickly.

Some best practices to address this are:

  • Make sure that the messages you state on your website, during the interview process, and beyond are consistent and truthful. 
  • Ask the employees what they think about their experience on a frequent basis through focus groups or employee satisfaction surveys. 
  • Use realistic job previews on the careers website.
  • Make sure the candidate has a chance to see the work environment and talk with prospective peers as part of the interview process
  • Train recruiters and hiring managers on interview practices 

By following some of these steps and others you’ll experience higher retention rates and employee loyalty as the key results!  Contact me with any questions or to discuss how we have worked with clients to bridge this gap.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Candidate Pipeline, Elite Recruiters, Employer Brand, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Talent Aquisition, Uncategorized | No Comments »

The “Elite” Employer Brand

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I teed up this concept of an employer brand .  Here are some key areas to consider when measuring your employer brand.

First, you must measure it.  You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.  If an organization wants to maintain and consistently improve on the performance of its employer brand it must have a meaningful analytical philosophy that seeks to apply a quantitative and objective view to its brand.  Without this, there can be no analysis and comparison for improvement. 

Source effectiveness – The lifecycle of your employer brand begins with the first contact, which is typically an organization’s careers web site and subsequent sourcing stage.  At this stage an organization should measure the effectiveness of the methods they have relied upon to attract candidates.  This can allow the organization to view the most effective sources of attraction and consistently return to those sources based on the ROI achieved.  We capture this in our current benchmarking study and what we find is people may be measuring it but they’re not taking action.   If they see overspending in a certain area, they don’t adjust their spend in time and often wait until the year has passed. What should take place is that there should be an immediate shifting of the spend to the most effective sources as quickly as possible.

The recruiting process – This is a series of measurements at each stage in the life-cycle of the candidate’s experience during the entire recruiting process.  The recruiting process is one of the most critical aspects in making the decision to join an organization, and often the most overlooked.  An organization should measure the effectiveness of every single step a candidate attains in the recruiting process.  Each touch point the candidate makes with your organization should be considered beginning with the online application, assessment, interviews, the offer, and orientation.  If there is a negative impression that occurs during the initial online application stage of the recruiting process, then there may be a dramatic decrease in the candidate pool.  In the initial discussion with a candidate, another negative impression may cause a candidate to withdraw from the process, and tell others about their negative experiences.  Negative impressions at any stage of the recruiting process can dramatically reduce the candidate pool, and may provide fuel to create a significant gap for an organization that must meet their hiring needs. 

Recruiter Effectiveness – In our elite recruiter benchmarking study  we’re taking a groundbreaking look at the competencies and skills of elite recruiters.  What we’ve found is that effective recruiters engage candidates with the promise of the brand experience (EVP) and continually deliver on the promise.  The elite recruiters even check in with their hires to make sure promises are being kept, and the expectations delivered when someone was hired match the reality of their experience. 

Fit – How a candidate perceives their fit within your organization, the culture, and the position you are offering are critical elements in the messaging of your employer brand.  Organizations should measure the effectiveness of the messaging in all elements of the employment brand through various media channels.  These channels could be print or interactive media marketing and can also extend to the communication with the candidates recruited and interviewed by your company.  Analyze the effectiveness of the messaging communicated about the culture within your company to improve the long term impact that fit can have on the attraction of your needed talent.

So the key takeaways here are that the brand is pervasive, and all encompassing across someone’s life-cycle of experiences with your company.  It must be measured through the sourcing, recruiting process, and fit of a candidate and then through the employee with your company.  Finally, you as the recruiter, play a critical role in the portrayal of the brand promise, and should act as an ambassador to ensure its delivered!

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Changing Role of the Recruiter, Elite Recruiters, Employer Brand, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Training, Talent Aquisition, Time Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Measuring Your Employer Brand

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I can only go a few days without having an insatiable craving for Starbucks or Caribou Coffee.  Sure I can make coffee at home, but it’s just never seems as good.  In addition, there’s the great atmosphere when I enter the coffee shop. The wonderful, helpful staff that remembers my name when they greet me. 

And to top it all off – - for only four dollars – - I walk away with beautiful drink in a cup with cool logo and colors!  

Okay I may be taking that a little too far, but as a consumer I have that passionate and long standing relationship with these brands.  These consumer brands conjure up indelible images that resonate and remain with me.  These are brands I will consistently use and recommend to others based on my experience and the feelings I get from patronizing their organizations.

So how do you define an employer brand?

Quality candidates – - whether they say so or not – - are looking for the same experience with an organization’s employer brand as a consumer would.  The messages, images, and feelings presented shape the candidate experience they will receive. The “feeling” they get as they move through the recruitment process will not only be pivotal in their employment decision but in their recommendation of your organization to others!

Simply put, an employer brand is a long-standing relationship cycle of experiences between the employee and employer. 

Your employer brand should resonate like a consumer brand with a distinct difference in the messaging.  The messaging should be tailored to the future employee, and should be understood by all stakeholders – both current or future employees, and even customers.  Having an effective employment brand means providing an enticing proposition for one to seek the opportunities at an organization.  It begins at the sourcing stage and carries through the entire life cycle of the recruiting process, and continues throughout an employee’s tenure with the organization.

While most employers understand the value of an effective employer brand, they struggle with how to measure its’ effectiveness to ensure that their branding efforts are achieving the necessary ROI. 

Some brief questions to ponder for next week’s post:

  • How do you measure your Employer Brand?
  • How do you know if you have an effective Employer Brand? 
  • Do you have a gauge on how your sources tie into your employer brand?
  • How are you measuring your customers’ recruiting experience?
  • Do you have a sense of why people join, stay, or leave your company?

In my next post we’ll begin to discuss these questions in more detail.  Also look for us at ERE San Diego where we’ll be talking about this during our session.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Changing Role of the Recruiter, Elite Recruiters, Employer Brand, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Boot Camp, Recruiter Sales, Talent Aquisition | No Comments »

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