The traditional 20th century corporate staffing model is dying. In its last bastions, small companies, it is still hanging on and may have some life left, but everywhere else it’s on life support. That model was designed fifty years ago for a different world - pre-Internet, pre-globalization, pre-worker empowerment, pre-outsourcing, pre-technology, and pre-metrics.
Everywhere we look we see clients wrestling with its deficiencies: staffing metrics that don’t improve, uneven candidate quality, boom and bust hiring cycles, inadequate budgets, regulation minefields, outdated technology and management indifference. What should be wonderfully interesting, challenging and consequential work - supplying the human capital that powers every organization on earth - has increasingly become a thankless slog through an endless swamp.
This week we’re announcing the publication of what would be our Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report, though we’ve finally and mercifully renamed it the Corporate Recruiting Report. Eleven years ago, this report consisted of four short chapters explaining the most basic staffing metrics - time to hire, cost per hire, candidate quality, and hiring manager satisfaction. Back then it was hard to set benchmarks for even these because so few companies kept data. Benchmarks for individual industries occasionally had to be calculated from only a handful of companies. Hard to believe now, but that was leading-edge stuff.
By comparison, the 2010 report has four robust sections containing 21 chapters.
Staffing remains essentially what it has always been: a competition to locate the right candidates and match them efficiently and effectively to given tasks. And as far as metrics go, most companies can now monitor to some extent how well they manage to do that. But the ballgame is now being played on a new field, with new equipment and new rules. The gap in best practices between old school and new school is widening. We encounter winners and losers every month.
How has the Game Changed?
We quickly acknowledge that for small local enterprises, nothing much has changed. The sign in the window, the referral from down the street, and perhaps the craigslist posting still produce an adequate supply of acceptable candidates. But step up to the regional, national or international level, and the old model breaks. It isn’t responsive enough to handle rapid changes in competition, economics and markets; it isn’t discriminating enough to accurately match talent to task; and it isn’t sufficiently business-focused to provide measurable bottom-line business results.
How is the New Model Different?
The new staffing model has a number of distinctive characteristics. Here are four of the most important:
- It routinely embraces and relentlessly exploits new technology.
- It operates as a branding and marketing engine.
- It is governed by highly developed business analytics.
- It focuses primarily on candidate quality and workforce planning, outsourcing whatever else it can.
Think about this with respect to your current HR organization. For example, what is the relationship with technology: grudging, frantic, suspicious, resigned, frustrated? Undoubtedly there are good reasons for all these reactions. Technology can be maddening. But unless your relationship is also welcoming, curious, optimistic, determined, and patient, you cannot implement the new model. The future of staffing is fundamentally about technology, and your ability to harness and exploit that fact will weigh heavily on your success.
Here’s a quick test to determine where you are on the old model to new model continuum.
- Have your recruiting cost ratios improved dramatically in the last five years?
- How about your hiring times?
- How about your candidate to hire ratio?
- Is your recruiting technology less than two years old?
- Does every job candidate receive a personalized initial response within 24 hours, a definitive response within one week, and an online status update anytime s/he wants?
- Can you produce a short list of candidates for every critical position in your enterprise within one business day?
- Do you have a staffing representative in every executive level strategy planning meeting?
- Does HR/staffing report to the CEO or COO of the company?
Our research suggests that 20% of you answered mostly “no,” 10% of you answered mostly “yes,” and 70% of you said “well, sort of.”
Now, one last question: Professionally speaking, are you having a good time?
This answer is worth a bit of thought. Our 2010 Corporate Staffing Report describes the path to the new model, but model changes are hard work. Your success will depend, more then anything else, on whether you want to make the journey.
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