Our series on planning continues with a look at those significant trends in corporate staffing identified through our 2009 research.
Trends are sneaky. You’re immersed in the day-to-day with your nose to the pavement, coping with events one by one as they arise, when suddenly you look up and notice the scenery’s changed. Somehow you’ve drifted to a new location and you have to get your bearings and figure out where you are.
At Staffing.org we focus consistently on trends for two reasons: first, many of our clients are so immersed in the daily grind they don’t have time to take frequent bearings; and second, trends eventually change the game. They are the currents on which all staffing boats float. Ignore them for too long and when you look up you may be flat out lost for a while. That’s not a desirable situation in today’s demanding business climate.
(2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report)
Globalization, competition, demographics and technology have precipitated a string of interacting events in staffing over the past decade which are creating a radically different landscape for staffing professionals from the one they were trained for. The brouhaha over social networks in recent months is only the latest example. These interactions are so complex that there appear to be at least 11 legitimate trends to track, which whether we realize it or not, form the current that is dragging us into new territory. Here are two:
Limited Access to Infinite Access
We are now dealing with the most accessible job market in history, millions of jobs and millions of personal profiles accessible from any web-enabled computer. This is now old news and those new connections are now more or less familiar to almost all candidates and employers. This is hardly a landscape where most people are completely lost.
If that is so, where are the blind spots? On the corporate side we see a couple. Because one can easily jump into the Internet job market and produce some kind of useful result, most people tasked with sourcing candidates remain undertrained. Even with little background and today’s imperfect tools a novice can still pull plenty of resumes off job boards. Consequently, there is little appreciation for the difference between best practice and novice practice. Yet those differences are substantial and growing, which unfortunately means that most companies receive far less value from the system than they could. The return on their Internet recruiting efforts is low.
(2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report)
Second, few employers understand how much an Internet-centric job market has empowered candidates and changed their habits and psychology. For example, traditional wisdom says that during difficult economic times employees, feeling insecure and risk-averse, retreat from the job market. The data clearly shows this to be false. Internet job-hunting is now so easy that virtually everyone is in the market.
The old distinction between active and passive candidates has blurred considerably. Those that are not actively job-hunting are very often job sniffing. Presented with the right opportunity in the right way, most of them tell us they would jump. Candidates clearly understand that posting a professional profile on LinkedIn is tantamount to posting a resume, the intended goal being to advance one’s career by any means. Access to new opportunities is assumed and desired under the right circumstances.
Missing this aspect of the trend toward infinite access means that you aren’t aware of how increasingly tenuous your employer-employee relationships are becoming. Infinite access won’t do you much good if your own recruiting ROI remains relatively low and your most valuable people are increasingly vulnerable to prospecting outreach by companies who have invested heavily in sophisticated, up-to-date recruiting, at which they now excel.
Moderate Complexity to Extreme Complexity
If recruiting has always been complex and hard to do well, the advent of Internet recruiting has only made the job harder and more complex. The efficiency data we annually compile clearly show a static bell curve, with a few leaders, a few laggards and most companies in the middle. This curve hasn’t changed shape much in recent years despite increasing executive awareness that managing human capital well provides competitive advantage, and despite the best efforts of innumerable best practice coaches, publishers and consultants, ourselves included.
Why not? Our research suggests that it’s because recruiting has become a corporate specialty badly in need of a makeover. It is now simply too complex to be discharged efficiently by a team that handles each requisition end to end and that uses traditional procedures to find and vet candidates. Today’s sourcers, for example – the people charged with filling the top of the recruiting funnel – have to be fluent in Boolean logic and search springs; know how to market to 50,000 domestic job boards; understand how social networks really work; know how to build sticky, persuasive job sites; have mastered all the traditional candidate sources like job fairs, referral programs and college recruitment programs; and be able to quantify the relative efficiency of each channel in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Forget doing that job well on a part-time basis.
As with our first trend, not paying close attention to this one also carries significant penalties. There is a marked difference in efficiency between companies at the front and the back of the curve, often more than 100% within the same industry. This means that where the mean recruiting cost is, say 10%, companies forming the bell in the bell curve are paying between 13% and 7% for the same services. In a company hiring tens of thousands of workers each year, the extra millions add up quickly.
The implication for recruiters: process efficiency is a cornerstone of efficient business. Globalization and competition have placed it even more squarely in the spotlight. By now, every CFO on the planet has been charged with squeezing excess cost out of his enterprise. Recruiting departments are already feeling the heat, especially this past year. That pressure is not going away because the drivers of cost reduction, globalization and competition aren’t going away. They are here to stay.
Inefficiency in a business process inevitably has this reckoning. Somebody looks at the expense and asks these two questions, “Is this process core to our business?” and “Can we do it well?” If the answer to either question is “no,” that process will eventually be outsourced. This has happened to payroll, to call centers, to software, to media buying, printing and dozens of other business services. And it will happen to recruiting departments that fail to understand the trend toward added recruiting complexity and take steps to adapt.
Next week we’ll look at two more trends and their implications: from selective visibility to universal visibility, and from strong social contracts to weak ones.
Editor's Note: Haven't downloaded the 2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report? For more information and to purchase click here.
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