Thank you to all who answered our December poll on staffing information priorities for 2010. These are your new rankings for the topics we cover in our annual Benchmark Report and how they compare to last year’s rankings. They reflect your revised planning and budget priorities and we will augment and diminish our research coverage in this year’s report accordingly.
These priority changes confirm our conversations with individual clients as well as the shift in editorial focus among the thought leaders and researchers we follow. No one is looking for a quick breakout in 2010 hiring, but almost everyone is forecasting increased demand at some point (most say beginning in late spring/summer) and are starting to put resources in place.
LESS IMPORTANT
Time and Cost - Economic difficulties increase the importance of efficiency metrics like TIME and COST. Their decline in the rankings suggests that you consider the tough work of “leaning out” your personnel and processes to be already accomplished. "Congratulations!" In 2010, the issue then becomes retaining that optimal efficiency as hiring demands increase. Please don’t respond by staffing back up and sourcing as you would have in the past. If you do, you’ll be taking backward steps. The staffing world is not what it was even a few years ago. You’ll be much better served by exploring the natural efficiencies of internal sourcing, internet sourcing and strategic outsourcing.
Recruiting Trends - Better times ahead also means less concern about understanding where the staffing world is today and where it’s headed tomorrow. But don’t pack away the telescope. Technology continues to evolve quickly, and both management scrutiny and the demand for business relevance will continue to increase. Demographics, globalization, and candidate mobility will also continue to affect your performance no matter what path you take. In a rising market, competition for talent will increase. The world of staffing remains in motion. Don’t return to the old ways.
Measuring What Matters - Slightly less important to you but still in the top five, so we won’t consider it less important than, but rather still linked to, management metrics. They both deal with translating staffing data into information that has meaning to non-HR top management. Remember, the traditional staffing metrics of time, cost, candidate quality and hiring manager satisfaction are mainly useful for internal HR scorekeeping, seldom carrying much weight in the C-suite. Measuring what matters means proving that superior staffing performance affects corporate growth, productivity, profitability, agility and stock performance.
MORE IMPORTANT
Quality - We’re delighted to see you put this in the number one spot. Research has documented that the business significance of candidate quality over the long term is far greater than the significance of either staffing cost or time to hire. We’ll have much to say on this in 2010, helping you document the business advantages of placing “quality” in seats rather than “butts.”
Candidate Sourcing and Internet Best Practice - These two topics are linked and we have the data to help you shine. Our two landmark studies of candidate behavior pinpointed exactly what candidates are doing to find new opportunities and what they expect to see when they investigate your company. We’ll keep that information updated and pass it along. The good news is that despite the explosive but somewhat confused breakout of social networking, we know a lot about what already works.
Retention - Retention’s large rise in the rankings (3 spots) is also welcome news. The business cycle we’re emerging from proved unequivocally that the traditional “hire’em in good times, fire’em in bad times” staffing response to business cycles is both an employer branding liability and a productivity killer. The metrics prove it. Poor retention, calculated fully as cost-of-vacancy, is a big number. Taking responsibility for that number will make staffing even more consequential in the C-suite (which is what we’re shooting for, right). Why didn’t we figure this out sooner?
Recruiter Workload - Up a notch, but still not high in the rankings. We can see that you’re looking ahead at increasing staffing demand and wondering how to evaluate your team. Don’t worry, we have the formula to make workloads logical and consistent, no matter what type of assignments are involved.
Candidate Availability - So you’re still not overly worried about this. Well, that’s forgivable given the surplus of talent on the market recently. However, that surplus is short-term. A confluence of powerful, long-term trends predicts increased competition for talent in general, and in particular for the superior talent required to move the business needle in this new decade’s increasingly competitive world.
Thank you again for your input. We’ve already started assembling the reports you want. Oh, and Happy New Year.
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