HR has been in gradual transition for several decades. The thought leaders who over the years have envisioned a unified business discipline called human capital management are seeing it come into focus. Individual companies like GE (management training, leadership development), IBM (workforce optimization), and Intuit (recruiting, workforce planning) have taken traditional HR practices and blown them out to their logical limits, thereby acknowledging their enormous potential for business advantage.

In short, integrated, strategic human capital management is where the profession is headed. And where you should be headed as well. 

2010 Corporate Recruiting Report

Today’s staffing frontier is located wherever the conversations like those below about candidate availability, capability, quality and performance are taking place: read more>
 

We have long viewed staffing best practice through the lens of four core benchmarks: cost, time, quality and performance. This year we add another core metric, retention. While we won’t have breakouts for industries and company size until our survey scheduled for later this year, we can report on best practice, which can be summed up as:

If you are not tracking at least first-year turnover, begin doing so now.

While turnover is the second most tracked staffing metric (after time-to-fill/start/hire), it is only tracked by a small minority of firms (about 13%). Most departments operate on the basis that once a candidate is hired, responsibility passes to the hiring manager. In their view, Staffing’s job is done. We suggest that for numerous reasons, this thinking is both outdated and misguided. Reducing Staffing’s role to a transactional silo, separated from the rest of the employee lifecycle, diminishes that role significantly at precisely the moment when it needs to expand.

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All hiring managers live with a mental dashboard of staffing performance. When disproportionate terminations occur, or when too many candidates fail to perform satisfactorily, they look for causes. One they invariably seem to find is that the staffing group is not locating appropriate candidates. A consistent quality measurement program, however, can stop such finger pointing in its tracks.

At present, hiring managers do have a valid complaint. According to our data, only about two-thirds of all hires meet quality standards, meaning they meet or exceed the job’s requirements. One-third do not. Recall also the statistic in last week’s UPDATE that the failure rate in senior executive appointments runs 40-50% in many companies. That’s an awful lot of expensive mistakes.

Can we establish a measurement system that monitors quality from both the hiring manager and recruiting manager perspectives? Of course. Here’s one example. Note that most of the metrics are not “hard,” like recruiter workload, time to hire and cost. We do have hard metrics (such as retention) that relate to quality, but the measurements here are “softer” because they report opinions, which are subjective and less precise. However, that doesn’t mean they are less valuable. Most of the grades we ever received in school on essays, reports and term papers, and many of the scores in personnel reviews, have this subjective basis.

Corporate Recruiting Report - 2010 Edition

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