We’re editing and proofing the final draft of the 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report this week in preparation for next week’s release, so this will be an abbreviated UPDATE. As we work, I am struck by the changes between the 2006 edition, which was 79 pages long, and this edition, which is more than 280. Is corporate staffing really that much more complicated? Has our professional world changed that much?
In a word, yes. As I scan the chapters, I see the new model sketched out. The old assembly line-style recruiting funnel with its familiar job postings, funnel ratios, benchmarks, assessments and retention rates is clearly morphing into a version that will be more efficient, more effective, more powerful and better able to serve the enterprise needs of this century.
This is not any longer your grandparents’ staffing world, or your parents’, or even your elder siblings’. Sources, technology, processes, candidate attitudes and behaviors, and management attitudes are all evolving rapidly. There’s an awful lot going on.
So here’s the big picture summary: the task of filling requisitions is becoming the task of creating and managing efficient workforces. Huge difference. Filling requisitions remains a part of that, but only one specialized part of a much, much larger, more complex and more consequential business function.
As I write this, I see many of the old guard nodding skeptically. “Sounds dandy,” they say, “Well we’ve been hearing about all this future stuff for years, and you know what, it never seems to quite happen. I’m still doing the same damn things I did when I started in this game. Nothin’s changed, at least not in my shop.”
I don’t disagree. I have a publisher’s memory of the last commercial letterpress machines operating at Kingsport Press in Tennessee, just as computerized typesetting and web presses were taking over the book industry. The textbooks we wrote were typeset on screens in the plant’s new wing, under clean, dropped ceilings, in long, brightly painted rooms filled with cubicles, the tops of heads and the faint clicking of keyboards. From there, film was sent to one of the vast, factory floors where 10-ton paper rolls fed 100-ton printing machines holding banks of roaring cylinders turning at blurred speed. Paper in one end, thousands of finished books per hour out the other. The new, efficient world of commercial printing.
Once, because I asked, they took me to the old wing where white-maned men in stained aprons set manuscript into type by hand and heaved their forms onto clanking, thumping, 100-year-old, black cast iron presses, still lovingly greased by other white-maned men in stained aprons who had tended them since their apprenticeships 50 years before. In that wing, the 16-page printed sheets were pulled into stacks, checked by eye, then pushed down to the bindery to be hand bound into books. The old, romantic, hand-crafted world of commercial printing.
I was told that the old machines didn’t make money but were kept going out of respect for the old ways, to honor the tradition of printing craftsmanship, and to keep the old fellows employed until they retired. Ten years later all was gone.
Well, the old recruiting model may still work where staffing demands are limited. But in larger companies the story is clear. We see the numbers. The future is now.
Visit our store today to order your copy of the new report. We're still offering $100 off the regular price ($550) until we publish next week, so take advantage while you can.
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