The title may first have you thinking this blog is about failures recruiters make. It’s not. If you are looking for someone to blame, stop reading here. If you want to know the most valuable things you can do to build your organization, read on.
This blog is about what hiring companies, managers and human resources professionals must avoid. While not exhaustive, it presents the most common 5 ways to fail using recruiters.
You are a manager, Human Resources professional, or other business leader. You know that building your organization is critical to achieving your corporate goals. Skimping on the requisite tasks you or other leaders in your organization must do to build your organization is penny-wise, and pound foolish.
As in all things, it is true in your relationship with recruiters, you get out what you put in.
Unfortunately, the norm is to blame your recruiter for failing. But if you are reading this far, you are a leader with an open mind, looking for the right questions to ask in learning from failure and ultimately building your organization for results.
Here are 5 ways you can fail when using recruiters.
- Don’t do an initial bench-strength assessment. Before you hire, assess bench-strength. Human Resources professionals know this should be done annually. If your management team doesn’t sit down to assess what talent you do have, and map it to the talent you need to achieve your goals, you have failed before you start. Luck is a poor strategy to find the people to do undefined jobs. You may find you have an appropriate candidate inside ready for advancement!
- Don’t write performance-based job descriptions. Ask what activities need to be performed to successfully achieve the goals for the job. Find people that have the ability to perform those tasks and the interest in doing them for your organization. Experience-based hiring fails. Hiring someone with 5 or 10 years experience ensures you find an employee that lacks initiative, is falling behind improving their skills, and may be bored and quit in short-order.
- Ask your recruiter to find people without a job description. It happens all the time. Hiring managers know they need help, and want a recruiter to send over resumes. The recruiter asks for a job description, and the hiring manager sees this as a barrier to progress. If you can’t write a job description, then you don’t know what you are looking for in the new employee. The recruiter will not know either.
- Be unwilling to pay recruiter fees for their work. It’s true, some managers are too busy to write a job description. Recruiters read, review and refine job descriptions constantly in order to do their jobs. Ask your recruiter for help in building a competitive job description that will attract candidates, be performance-based, and position your company as a great place to work. But be willing to pay for that service. It has great value, and is worth it.
- Low-ball salary or recruiter fees. An obvious way to cut recruiting fees is to lower salaries that fees are based. Your corporate strategy fails by not building the right organization to execute it. When salaries are lower than market for work expectation demands, only weak candidates are interested. This results in misdirected dissatisfaction with your recruiter.
With recruiters, and organization development in general, you get out what you put in. Sourcing, screening, interviewing, coordinating, and on-boarding people is real work. It has great value to the success of your organization. In the long run, it is worth the fees you invest.
Companies and finance managers come up with all kinds of tricks to reduce first-order fees that hit the bottom line. Unfortunately, when it comes to organizational development, these hit the bottom line in second-order fees that result in costs from bad hires, training and retraining, risk insurance, unemployment costs, and a host of other costs and barriers to success for your operation.
Leaders rely on their recruiter for good advice. If your recruiter or search and placement firm flips and flops tentatively to whatever whim you or your managers throw their way, find a stronger search and placement firm that can be firm about the work you must do to achieve results. Plug them in at the top to match your corporate strategy.
Barton Professional Placement Group is here to help leaders achieve organizational development goals. Our philosophy is to provide premium service as your business partner. We are not timid about sharing advice and information that will accelerate your corporate goals and objectives through effective organizational development. Call us today for an unbiased, direct assessment.
