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Library Article

8/24/2009

Getting the Jump on 2010
David Earle

The annual Q4 evaluation and planning ritual will begin shortly. Corporate staffing will receive grades on their performance against 2009 goals, learn the enterprise game plan for 2010, and be asked to prepare new operating budgets. Now is the time to begin preparing: identifying problem areas, gathering data, and researching solutions. If you wait until the process heats up in October/November, when everyone – yourself included – is sweating spreadsheets and deadlines, there won’t be time for thoughtful dialogue and creative problem-solving.

Here’s a helpful tool we used in this year’s Recruiting Metrics & Performance Benchmark Report (thanks to Taleo for reprint permission).

As a schematic, we love the framework it offers for explaining the complexities of staffing to non-staffing partners and executives, and appreciate how the myriad parts link together. We would structure our own annual report by simply following the arrows. But we like it even better as a strategic planning tool that can help you frame these early dialogues with your boss, your hiring manager partners, and the higher-ups at corporate.

To get you started, we’ve colored five boxes red based on the results of our research into candidate behavior and staffing best practices so far this year. (read more)

If you color every square yellow or green, you’re probably: a) kidding yourself; and b) need to get out more. We haven’t seen a single enterprise staffing process that’s perfect end to end. Even the best programs have areas of greater or lesser efficiency, areas that need modification or perhaps wholesale rethinking. For example, even if the ATS that runs your resume pool merits a green rating this year, next year it may not be able to handle the new CRM-based candidate pool that we have been discussing in recent UPDATES.

Our five red boxes:

Process and Sourcing Metrics – This remains an area of pervasive weakness, with a minority of firms having solid reporting in place for even half the top 10 core metrics we report on annually. Fewer than 25% of the companies we surveyed this year would merit a green ranking and over half would merit yellow or worse. This is especially unfortunate because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and consistent, documented improvement is the name of the game in the C-suite. Business as usual doesn’t cut it in today’s hyper-competitive world of business.

Requisition Creation – Most job descriptions as written and posted on the Internet today are no better than flypaper, designed to snag whatever flies by. The simple efficiency of posting a single job to the whole world has revealed the massive inefficiency of a process constructed around computers trying to match millions of outgoing requisitions with millions of incoming candidate resumes. Cleaning up this mess will start with companies posting detailed and thoughtful job descriptions written to repel as well as to attract.

Sourcing Strategy – Most companies are doing a bit of everything as they always have while adding new wrinkles – like social networking – as they have the time and resources. We see very few that have actually sat down and worked out where the best candidates are coming from, how to maximize that flow, and how to tailor it to tomorrow’s workforce needs. Competitive staffing in any significant volume now requires dedicated sourcing specialists. If you can’t build that competence in-house, you’ll need to find an expert partner.

Candidate Pool – Most candidate pools today are database black holes into which resumes disappear forever unless fortuitously plucked out again by job matching software. As currently structured and used, they might just as well be purged every six months and repopulated from scratch. Collecting and storing useless data is a waste of resources, particularly if your customers (the candidates) hate the process of supplying it. Want to be best-in class? Rethink your technology and process to create a dynamic exploration and communication center where candidates and employers interact extensively and intelligently to match people and jobs.

Acknowledgement to Candidates – As candidate pools become more dynamic, the traditional “thank you…we’ll let you know” form letter will be replaced by a rich menu of communication options selected by each individual candidate, according to his interest and availability. Traditional newsletters, corporate updates, press releases and annual reports will all be part of the mix as will newer social media tools like blogs, wikis, social groups and yes, even Twitter.

By all means use this diagram to organize your thoughts for 2010. Even better, use it to prove you know what’s really going on in your department, where the world is headed, and what items need discussion, analysis and creative problem-solving as we enter the next planning cycle. Start your scoping and analysis now. Jump-start the process and cruise into planning season with a head start: identified problems, worked-out solutions, and impregnable budgets.

If you're interested in this article,check out our newest report: 2009 Recruiting Metrics & Performance Benchmark Report.