Structure seldom ranks highly in our annual surveys of critical staffing issues. Offer a webinar or a paper on employer branding or social media and you can pack a room; offer one on staffing department structure and most seats will be empty. Yet some of the greatest benefits of the 21st century staffing model stem from the way it forces us to rethink familiar staffing department structures and roles.
In stable business environments, established habits, refined over time, are often an asset because they represent a long, productive process of trial and error that has produced a tested best practice. But in unstable business environments, such as the current one, they become liabilities because they lag behind reality, causing us to act inefficiently or ineffectively. Experienced CEO’s consistently report that many of the toughest battles they fight involve culture: changing the historical patterns of their companies – their structures, work flows and thought processes - to adapt to new business realities.
Three Developments That Will Change Your World
There are three advances in staffing best practice that have major implications for traditional staffing structure and process: CRM, centers of excellence and flexible staffing.
CRM
The term CRM originally stood for “customer relationship management” and was applied to a body of best practice developed for making sales and managing customers. More recently it has been applied to staffing tasks as “candidate relationship management” because the process of turning prospects into buyers is very similar to that of turning candidates into hires.
Corporate sales and marketing departments have refined the principles of effective CRM over many years to sell and service complex products. Jobs are just such offerings. Here is the logic underlying their efforts, couched in staffing language:
- Candidates are simply another form of customer.
- The best candidates aren’t those who are “sold” but those who decide to buy.
- The desire to buy is created by supplying a candidate with information.
- Well-educated candidates make better employment decisions and tend to be happier employees.
- Happier employees become more productive, long-term contributors.
- The best and most profitable employee relationships are long-term.
- Happy employees, in turn, foster the two most effective recruiting tools, positive marketplace branding and referrals.
Centers of Excellence
The movement to establish corporate staffing centers of excellence reflects the ongoing desire of large, complex organizations to optimize the efficiency, effectiveness and strategic value of every facet of their business. There can be a variety of motives and objectives including:
- Setting common goals and objectives
- Dealing with specific issues and problems
- Planning and strategy
- Technology integration and upgrades
- Setting performance standards and targets
- Setting policy
- Consistent regulatory compliance
A successful center of excellence is not just a reorganization of the same old deck chairs. It has a specific agenda and should be able to demonstrate a positive ROI through problem solving, better purchasing and vendor coordination, better planning, better process efficiency or all of these.
Flexible Staffing Model
The Flexible Staffing Model offers an alternative to the traditional internal-only staffing model. The old model relied on salaried, in-house, end-to-end recruiters who managed all aspects of the staffing funnel from job posting through on-boarding. The new model exploits a mix of resources – researchers, contingent recruiters, contract recruiters, RPO firms and other specialists – to achieve better efficiency and effectiveness.
The flexible staffing model offers a number of advantages to large complex organizations, including:
- Efficient personnel adjustments when demand changes
- Better employment brand control
- Demand delegation to the most efficient sources
- Risk reduction
- Diverse staffing perspectives and experiences, stronger skill sets and knowledge.
The models we have seen provide a metrics-based end-to-end view of the staffing process that allows accurate scenario planning as well as very precise budgeting and sourcing efficiency comparisons. All this allows for very effective, fact-based communication with senior management.
The most efficient and effective staffing organizations will tell you that best practice excellence invariably consists of improving a myriad of small things together with a few big things. The small things are usually easy to spot and relatively easy to fix. Their individual impact is small, but their cumulative impact is large. The big things are harder all around because they involve more complex thinking and more rigorous analysis on the front end, coupled with bigger stakes and bigger risk on the back end. Because they also involve more stakeholders, they are also harder to organize and sell. But the big things, like structure, are also where the biggest economic gains are and where reputations are made.
We examine each of these best practice developments in greater detail, as well as their impact on staffing roles and structure, in our upcoming 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report. The report is currently being offered at a special pre-publication price for a limited time. You can order your copy today for $100 off the regular price.
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Abraham Maslow, SPIN Selling, and Recruiting
Implementing an Agile Talent Management Strategy
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