Waste Management, Inc. Gets Better, Much Better
by David Earle

Two recruiting examples from last week:

• Employer #1 has a U.S.-based workforce of 6,000 and is targeting 5,000 new hires in 2010. Growth? Nope, turnover. They’re in the banking business and need tellers and other front line personnel in high-turnover positions.
   
• Employer #2 has 45,000 employees in 48 states and has to recruit most of its new hires in 2010 from Manpower’s 10-hardest-jobs-to-fill list. They need thousands of sales reps, technicians, drivers and laborers.

This isn’t elite retainer search, it’s down-in-the-trenches, grind-it-out internal hiring: lots of people for entry level jobs, those core, get-it-done positions that make these types of companies run smoothly and are its everyday face to customers. Without such people, both businesses would quickly shut down. Company #2 is Waste Management, a case in point below.

Last week’s UPDATE article was about Microsoft succeeding on a recruiting frontier, social media. Waste Management’s equally important story is about taking recruiting basics back to square one and rethinking the whole staffing process.

Changing basic processes in a large, successful company is tough and Waste Management (WM) is both these things: dominant in its industry, with revenues north of $13 billion, and ranked in the Fortune 200. They know their business and have staffed themselves successfully for years. Peer companies have proven cultures and systems. They’re experienced and competent, which makes them inherently resistant to change. If it ain’t broke..., as the saying goes. But Waste Management’s staffing story over the past several years is one of major change in a very short time, which makes it doubly noteworthy.

Here’s a summary of some of WM’s key accomplishments :

They don’t intend progress to stop there. Additional improvements targeted for 2010 include:

Waste Management clearly considers metrics to be a key to progress, something we have preached for years. What may not be so obvious is the way their metrics encompass the entire employee lifecycle. Really great recruiting means not only finding good people but also keeping them. Halving turnover, as WM has done, means a great deal of coordinated work to define and describe work accurately, onboard thoroughly, communicate relentlessly and monitor retention and referrals, which are the ultimate gauges of employee loyalty. WM’s staffing metrics address all these issues.

Change Management
Another not-so-obvious point of excellence is effective change management. Specialists will tell you that as challenging as the diagnostic and analytical components of change may be, most of the work consists of changing people’s behavior. Old habits and routines are notoriously resilient. WM didn’t neglect this either. They carefully analyzed the roles of their recruiters and hiring managers, which resulted in:
 

• Recruiters being refocused on sourcing, candidate relationship-building and HM engagement.
  
• Hiring managers being refocused on late-phase candidate relationship-building, new hire coaching, longer-term talent assessment and acquisition issues, more accurate job descriptions, better interviewing techniques, faster requisition processing, and recruiter feedback.

Note the clear inference of partnership here, in stark contrast to “here’s the req, please fill it.”

Funnel Management
And finally, WM tackled the applicant funnel, an increasingly inefficient part of candidate selection at all job levels, but notoriously so with high-turnover, entry level positions. Their solution was two-pronged:

• First, improve the overall candidate experience by providing clear, comprehensive, high quality information that encourages good candidates. To that end, the company has produced an exceptional set of prospecting, onboarding and employee reference tools.
   
• Second, remove poor candidates more quickly by improving and expanding assessments, and moving them forward in the funnel. Assessments now occur at five points in the application process. While this is often viewed as only benefiting the employer, candidates favor it as well. They tell us repeatedly that they would much rather receive a clear response to their application quickly, even if it’s negative, than wait in ATS purgatory.

Two final points: 1) The direct cost savings noted here address only the savings in HM time. Although this may be all that management needs at this point, our research shows that as improvement continues, the cumulative savings realized through factors like better retention and increased internal referrals become much larger; and 2) Note that this project, still in only its second year, has accomplished a tremendous amount in a very short time.

We tend to focus on changes in the recruiting profession, which often means explaining new models and new ways of doing business. It’s nice to report a back-to-basics success, too, like reporting here on a Waste Management team (Brent McCombs, Robert Scharringhausen, et al) that tackled a big, average staffing program, made it clearly better, and did so at warp speed.
 

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