Part 4: Recruiter Development Beyond the Training Agenda

Following in our series on Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities, the question I get asked the most is: how do I help my recruiters develop into Talent Advisors? And it is certainly a challenge. Less than 1 in 4 recruiters is satisfied with their overall development, compared to about 2 of 5 employees within an organization.

The main trend I see happening to address this challenge is the creation of formal training agendas for the recruiting team. This is a good start and can instill a focus on learning on the team, but these agendas alone are insufficient to build the Talent Advisor capabilities we need in our recruiters.

Recruiters also need to activate the learning potential from on-the-job experiences. These experiences provide three times greater impact on recruiter performance than formal training programs. (Not to mention on-the-job learning is usually less expensive than formal training.)

Focus on the following activities to give recruiters high-impact work experiences:

• Access to best practice—Activities that teach the right approach to a problem (e.g., working with a lead or executive recruiter)
• Scope expansion—Activities that increase recruiters’ responsibilities (e.g., contributing to a workforce plan)
• Change and adversity—Turbulent situations that build flexibility (e.g., working on a requisition with rapidly changing circumstances or requirements)
• Challenging relationships—Situations that develop relationship skills (e.g., interacting with uninterested candidate leads)
• Persuasion and teaching—Activities where recruiters learn to influence (e.g., communicating a difficult decision to a hiring manager)
• Difficult decisions—Activities where the costs of making mistakes forces reflection (e.g., defining hiring needs for a new position)

CLC Recruiting members, see an inventory of high-impact on-the-job experiences for recruiters—for each of the main Talent Advisor capabilities—coming up on our Web site next week.

Week End Roundup: July 30th

In this week’s Week End Roundup: Rising optimism with respect to hiring; organizations focus on green job creation; Chinese graduates face discrimination during interviews; and organizations are hiring more contingent workers.

Cautious Optimism: One in Three HR Managers Say Their Company Will Hire in Third-Quarter 2010 (Society for Human Resource Management)
According to this survey, hiring is not expected to increase in a widespread manner. That said, a higher number of HR professionals report optimism than pessimism with respect to hiring. In the third quarter of 2009, 37% of HR professionals expressed some level of optimism with respect to hiring. This number has sharply increased to 50% for this year’s third quarter.

40% of HR Professionals Report Their Company Is Prepping for Green Job Creation (World at Work)
In a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, 40% of HR professionals report that their company is preparing for green job creation, and another 5% plan to do so shortly. Sixty-seven percent of employers are providing or will provide on-the-job training, while 31% are paying for employees to take skills courses, and 28% are paying for employees to obtain related certificates or licenses.

Grads Face Job-Hunt Discrimination (China Daily)
According to a recent Research Report of Discrimination among the Employment of College Graduates, 60% of college graduates were the victims of discrimination when interviewing with private companies. Discrimination with respect to job hunting is mainly related to gender, appearance, and height. In China approximately 70% of employers have gender specific requirements, while 17% require employees to be neither married nor have babies.

Companies Are Becoming More Dependent on Contingent Labor (Business Wire)
According to a report published by the Aberdeen Group, 60% of organizations will become more dependent on their contingent labor programs over the next two years. Companies are expected to hire a greater number of statement-of-work, independent contractors, and services-based work employees to reduce overall employment costs.

Part 3: How to Spot a Talent Advisor

As part of our series on Building Next-Generation Recruiter Capabilities, Collin wrote a couple weeks ago about how to define Talent Advisor capabilities in our recruiters. He explained that Talent Advisors collaborate with hiring managers to influence staffing decisions, rather than fill orders and drive for satisfaction.

That’s nice as a goal, but you may be wondering, how do I gauge how well recruiters fulfill their role as Talent Advisors? Keep two things in mind:

• When hiring recruiters, focus on observation over description when assessing recruiter candidates—Traditional external sources of recruiters with strategic skills, such as recruiters with sourcing or sales backgrounds, aren’t as effective as many think. You need to rely on effective selection practices to find them. Use role plays in recruiter interviews to have them show you how they would influence hiring managers, or have them create a sourcing report for a mock opening at your organization. (CLC Recruiting members, see how one organization excels in assessing Talent Advisor capabilities in recruiter candidates.)


• When setting role expectations for current recruiters, measure strategic expectations as you do operational expectations—Most recruiters are held accountable for process metrics such as volume or time-to-fill. But, when recruiters are held accountable for “business impact” metrics such as new hire retention, they exhibit 25% greater performance. Decide what best indicates Talent Advisor behaviors on your recruiting team, provide discrete measures of strategic effectiveness, and weight these measures alongside traditional process-based metrics. (CLC Recruiting members, see how one organization excels in measuring recruiters on Talent Advisor capabilities.)

Check in next week for a summary of how to develop recruiting team into Talent Advisors.

Week End Roundup: July 23rd

In this week’s Week End Roundup: One-third of U.S. companies return to hiring mode; workforce to stay lean post recession; increase in hiring of Chinese graduates; and employee referral programs are prevalent in Canada.

Companies Step Up Hiring Plans in Latest NABE Survey (Wall Street Journal)
Reports released by the National Association for Business Economics indicate that 31% of U.S. employers hired additional employees in the second quarter of 2010, the highest since before the financial crisis. The report marks a near reversal from a year ago, when only 6% of companies were hiring and 36% were cutting staff.

Work Forces Stay Lean After Slump's Cutbacks (Wall Street Journal)
According to an Accenture survey of global organizations that reduced staff during the last 12 months, 64% report that they will either definitely or probably not rebuild their workforce to pre-recession levels any time soon. Organizations are able to maintain a lean workforce in part due to efficiency gained through technology.

Employment Rate of College Graduates up in 2010 (China Daily)
According to China’s Ministry of Education (MOE), the unemployment rate of Chinese college graduates increased by 4.2% for 2010. The ministry is encouraging graduates to teach at rural schools by offering favorable policies. They are also ordering research institutes to hire more graduates as research assistants and are further encouraging more graduates to join the army.

Turn Your Workers into Company Scouts (Globe and Mail)
According to a study by CareerXroads, more than 25% of external hires are sourced via employee referrals. This trend is prevalent even in Canada where many organizations are looking towards hiring future employees via the employee referral programs.

Week End Roundup: July 16th

In this week’s Week End Roundup: British unemployment rate declines; U.S. engineering graduates prefer to stay in school; resource boom in Australia is leading to job creation; and hiring practices in China intensify gender bias.

British Jobless Claims Decline (Wall Street Journal)
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) states that the unemployment rate in Britain has been declining over the past five months, and in June it reached a 15-month low, bringing the jobless rate to 4.5%. The ONS also reported that during three months to May employment rose by 160,000, the largest increase since August 2006.

Economy Pushes Grads to Stay in School (Wall Street Journal)
Many engineering graduates from premier institutions like Stanford and Berkley are opting to continue with their graduate degree rather than joining the workforce. This trend is subjective because schools are still gathering data about their most recent graduates. Further, the trend is a contradiction, as Silicon Valley hiring is picking up again after the recession. Hence the situation is not likely to be permanent, because more students tend to stay in school during poor economic cycles and flow back into the workforce when the economy picks up.

Boom Helps Put 100,000 in Jobs (The Australian)
The resources boom in Australia has helped generate more than 100,000 new jobs in the past three months. Within the last month, 45,600 new workers were added to the workforce. Western Australia and Queensland have led the employment growth, with more than 30,000 jobs created in each state. The pace of recovery in employment is faster than the overall growth in the general working population.

Job Market Fueling Gender Bias (China Daily)
Many Chinese companies prefer to employ men, as they think hiring women would increase their labor costs due to the stipulation of paid maternity leave. This practice is fueling the already present gender bias in the country.

What Does Recruiting Have to Do with Retention?

From our featured guest blogger Lynne Mayers, Director, Corporate Leadership Council:

Back when I was a member of the CLC Recruiting research team, I had many conversations around how Recruiting can add value and be a “strategic partner” to the business. The focus then as now was: deliver high quality hires fast and cost effectively; drive workforce planning; support development of competitive employment brands.

Now that I work across our CLC practice areas and talk to Heads of HR and Talent, I see a couple of additional opportunities for Recruiting to act as a strategic partner. One of them is retention of high performers and high potentials.

So what does recruiting have to do with retention?

Our CLC Human Resources data shows that one in three high potentials is currently planning on leaving his or her job in the next 12 months. And organizations are making some fatal mistakes with respect to high potential management, driving those risk levels up.

Some line leaders, though, remain unconvinced that retention is a burning issue. One Head of HR we work with recently shared how his CEO had been galvanized into action when his own daughter announced her decision to leave her employer for a rival organization and went through 4 or 5 “exit interviews” designed primarily to woo her back. Of course by that time it was too late—and she told her father that if the organization had put half as much effort into keeping her before she decided to leave as they put into wooing her back after she announced her intention to leave, she wouldn’t have been looking in the first place.

What does this have to do with Recruiting? Not all line leaders will have the benefit of that “aha” moment before they start losing their best talent. But Recruiting is close to the decisions that candidates make, and how they feel as they make them.

As you successfully dislodge talent from their current employers you are in a position to learn: what drove their decision to leave; what did they struggle with; and how did their organization react when they announced their decision to leave? You can use this not only to help inform retention plans for the individuals that you woo, but also to share with your partners in HR so they can bring to life for their line clients the potential risks they face, and the dangers of assuming that all’s well with their top talent.

In other words, sometimes it takes more than data to make a business case—sometimes a great story can make people sit up and think. Do you have some great stories to share?

Week End Roundup: July 9th

In this week’s Week End Roundup: U.S. employers face skill shortage; employment in Australia rises; and Canadian employers plan to hire through the second part of this year.

Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage (New York Times)
Employers in the U.S., particularly within the manufacturing sector, are adding an increasing number of jobs. However, there is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed for these jobs and the kind available in the job market. This is mainly due to the fact that organizations changed work processes during the downturn and now require workers to manage the new, more sophisticated processes.

Weak Private Hiring in June Shows Tepid U.S. Recovery (Reuters)
Employment fell for the first time this year in June as thousands of temporary census jobs ended and private hiring grew less than expected. The government laid off 225,000 temporary census workers.

Jobs Boom Revives Rate Rise Risk (Business Day)
The Australian unemployment figure has dipped down to 5.1% for the month of June. Further, the total employment rose by 45,900 to 11.101 million. This might lead to wage pressure that could build and develop inflation in the country.

Gradual Hiring to Hold Steady in Second Half of the Year (Canada Newswire)
According to a survey by CareerBuilder, 58% of Canadian hiring managers said they plan to add new employees in the months of July through December. More than half of hiring managers reported that, despite a big talent pool, they still have positions for which they can't find qualified candidates.