Last week we outlined an overall best practice evaluation framework for measuring candidate quality. Here’s another tool that allows us to compare individual recruiters on the key performance attributes that affect that metric. We’ve put nine of these critical skills in a form.
First things first. Evaluating individual recruiters is not our first order of business in raising candidate quality. Individuals are the trees; the system they work in is the forest. If your forest is inherently bureaucratic, unresponsive, formulaic and impersonal, it will drag down everyone’s scores, including those of your best performers. Bad systems trump good people every time.
But once we’ve addressed those systemic issues that affect everyone (admittedly no small matter), how our in-house recruiters or our contractors perform individually will be the next differentiator.
So how should we evaluate them?
Here’s a grading sheet with a 1 (low) to 5 (great) scale. Note that the measurements here are not “hard” like the recruiter workload metrics we will provide in our 2010 Corporate Benchmark Report. We do have hard metrics (such as retention) that relate to quality, but the measurements here are “softer” because they report opinions, which are less precise and can vary from individual to individual. 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.
Also, our list is not definitive. It should be adapted in whatever way makes sense for your organization. As you do so, though, please note these few things of primary concern to us.
Technology - Quality recruiting is above all a set of “people” skills, but increasingly it has a technical component. The advantage of sourcers with high-level Boolean search skills over those with poor skills is one example. Highly skilled people have better control of quality at the top of the funnel because they are able to cast a wider, but more specific, net for desirable candidates. Simply, the better the quality at the top of the funnel, the better it will be at the bottom.
For better or worse, this technology differentiator is currently growing, which it always does when technology evolves rapidly. During such periods, software programmers work feverishly to raise the bar while we poor users struggle along at the back end trying to jump over the old program. Recruiting related software, and this includes everything from front end social media sourcing tools to back end quality measurement tools, is still in an adolescent state. It will be a few more years before it matures, settles down and allows users to catch up.
For the moment, therefore, the technical proficiency of individual recruiters is especially important as a differentiator. Individuals who resist using it or don’t use it competently will drag down overall recruiting performance. We include two technology related measurements in this assessment, sourcing and ATS, but we encourage you to add sub-categories that rate fluency in the particular tools that you use.
Relationships - Our grading sheet measures two kinds of relationships, institutional and candidate. The candidate relationship has four measurement criteria while the institutional has two. This should not suggest that candidate relationships are twice as important.
Our research confirms that poor institutional relationships are the most glaring deficiency in staffing performance. Particularly in large companies, those relationships are most often defined by a general type of institutional knowledge and by what’s written on the job requisition; not by personal relationships with individual hiring managers, by an understanding of the specific cultural nuances that characterize divisions or departments, or by detailed job performance criteria.
In two-thirds of all companies (68%), recruiters and hiring managers don’t have any mutually agreed upon definition of candidate quality before recruiting starts. How good can it ever be if that’s the starting point?
Candidate Care - If technology and institutional relationships are the soup and salad of staffing, and signing is the dessert, the wooing and assessing of candidates is the main course. This is a complex and fascinating process that relies on many proficiencies, grouped here into four general categories, which loosely corrals the process but should not define it.
Selection and assessment is practiced very differently from company to company, and experienced recruiters have widely varying views on what produces the best candidates. Some swear by an exhaustive interview process. Others place great faith in testing. Yet others feel that a candidate’s past performance is the best indicator. We recently read an academic study claiming that performance in school, no matter how long ago, was more accurate than all of these.
Even if all this is unclear, we can provide one critical piece of information based on our research: that candidates and companies have very different opinions about the selection process. To put it bluntly, most companies think their recruiting processes are pretty good, while most candidates think those processes are pretty bad. (See our upcoming 2010 Corporate Benchmark Report for how to correct this.)
So if you’re going to do yourself one favor, make it a point to ask candidates not only why they turned you down, but how they felt about your whole selection process. And don’t just ask the finalists, also ask the semi-finalists and the quarter-finalists. Even better, ask everyone. Keeping close tabs on candidates’ reactions to both your overall process (your forest) and its trees (your individual recruiters) will give you terrific insight into how your brand is actually experienced in the job market.
Next week, look for our promised WEEKLY UPDATE on turning quality measurements into ROI measurements.
Related articles from other sources:
It’s Time for a Candidate’s Bill-of-Rights
Candidate Relationship Management
Are You a “World-Class” Recruiter?
Recruiting Metrics for Management
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