Last month we attended a workshop with several dozen heavyweights, people running large, corporate staffing operations noted for their efficiency, effectiveness and forward thinking. Two of the presenters, Elaine Orler and Mark McMillan, conducted an exercise. They challenged the audience to fill in a simple staffing technology inventory sheet.
Take ten minutes, they said, and write down the basic information about all the staffing-related software you currently use. So we did. For exactly one minute we worked independently. Then we started cheating. First we asked the other people at our table what they used to see if it sounded familiar. Then we asked people at the next table. Then we started working the room. A half dozen people tried to get their IT departments on the phone. In the end every one of us flunked. We felt like dopes. Elaine and Mark smiled.
It turned out we were enrolled in a sort of tech rehab 101, a program designed to reintroduce us to some of the basics of staffing technology competency. All of us were experienced. No one was tech-phobic. In fact, there were at least a couple of people in the room who would legitimately qualify as tech experts. (They flunked too.) We were accomplished tech gossipers and gripers who considered ourselves pretty well informed, but it quickly became clear that none of us really had technology under control. We exploited it to run our departments and earn our paychecks, but in important ways we were just its prisoners.
Mark and Elaine of course knew all this, which is why they were standing and we were sitting. After the inventory test, they toured us around today’s technology landscape. When I returned to the office, I compared my notes with the technology-related research we’ve compiled for our upcoming reports.
We Don’t Own Our Problems
Staffing departments tell us they view technology with mixed feelings. The complaints most often expressed to us are:
- We inherited a system that is out of date
- We’re not a corporate priority
- We don’t control IT decision-making.
Issues like these are telling. Our research confirms that first-class enterprise staffing can no longer happen using second-class technology. An out of date ATS, a bolted on sourcing module to an enterprise ERP, siloed data, or poor sourcing records will simply not get the job done. Yet these are the situations that consultants encounter time after time when they meet new clients. What they all point to is that staffing does not sufficiently own its technology issues. Someone else, IT, HRIS, or management does. Staffing has become resigned to what is rather than what needs to be.
Staffing technology must unquestionably coexist within the technological ecosystem of the enterprise as a whole. The old, fragmented, every-department-for-itself world has departed forever. But with a nod to that reality, some party has to take responsibility for choosing and using the machinery that governs staffing’s productivity. That party can only be staffing, for two reasons:
- Only staffing thoroughly understands the work that needs to be done.
- Only staffing is responsible for the business impact of that work – finding, landing and retaining talent.
If staffing does not own its problems, someone else, probably IT, will. And if IT owns them, IT will make decisions based on what is easiest and most practical for them, not for us. We are not demonizing IT here. They are hard-working professionals trying as hard as anyone to do good work. But that is reality.
We Haven’t Done Our Homework
DRAM, MIPS, CPUs, PNG, FTP. Like all specialties, including staffing, technology has its own language, which needs to be learned. Fortunately we don’t have to live in tech land full-time, so we don’t have to master the whole lexicon, but we do need to visit regularly. We need enough fluency to be informed consumers and to have intelligent conversations about our own needs. Much of the content will be only semi-technical, for example:
- Why we’re using the technology we’re using
- How satisfactory or unsatisfactory its performance is
- What alternatives are out there now
- What’s coming down the road tomorrow
- A basic understanding of how things work and how they fit together.
We Don’t Know Our Inventory
We flunked our inventory test. See if you can do any better. If you can’t, go buy pizza for the IT department. Mushroom and pepperoni is particularly effective. Get them to look in their files and help you fill in the blanks.
We Gripe Better Than We Analyze
Every staffing-related task performed by a computer was once done manually. Were there aspects of the old processes that worked better than what we are doing now? Are there processes we are “stuck” with because that’s how the current software works? If we could wave a wand and “fix” the software, what would we wish for?
These are critical questions. The most brilliant piece of software in the world is useless unless it does the job we want done. Also, every piece of commercial software is a compromise, designed to cover as much common ground for as many clients as possible. We have to figure out how well that common ground fits our own processes and, if it doesn’t, what is missing. All software can be customized, all the way up to completely custom configurations. But that’s expensive and complicated. If you want to stay within your pizza budget, do as little of it as possible.
Thoroughly analyzing processes is difficult, time-consuming work. But note that this is not an especially technical exercise, it’s really about dissecting and reconfiguring our own workflows, which we happen to know more about than anyone else on the planet. Improvements to any technology system must begin here with careful analysis of exactly what needs improving. If we don’t complete the analysis, these improvements will be dictated by software, not by us.
We’ll explore these topics and others in more detail in our upcoming Corporate Recruiting Report.
RELATED READING from Staffing.org and other sources:
Introduction to the Discipline of Human Resources Technology
Seven Attributes: Exploiting Technology
Why Corporate Recruiting May Be Doomed
Ready to Invest in New Technology? |
