Hire for Attitude, Train for Skills

It’s not a new saying, but whenever it’s used now everyone instantly agrees, it should be a resourcing mantra, particularly in tougher times.

As recruiters we spend most of our time looking for people with a skillset, with a historical CV that ticks the boxes that clients want.

It’s changing.

Job description tick lists are no good, because you will rarely find the people who tick every box, and if you do there is no guarantee that they will succeed.

Past performance can be a very unreliable indicator of future achievement.

I was intrigued to read a blog from Katie McNab – Customers Aren’t Always Right.

Read it! Because she is UK Recruitment Manager for one of the largest FMCG brands on the planet. And she wants her team to challenge hiring managers, forget what may suit them and start looking at what the business needs.

My favourite part is:

A line manager with a team of 5-6 people might recruit once a year. He or she will have a very short-term goal in mind. They want someone to fill the “empty chair”. And while they don’t recruit very often, they usually still have some very firm views about what “good” looks like.

But we recruit all the time. We live and breathe this stuff. We know our markets, our industries and our legal obligations. And that gives us the right and the responsibility to challenge line managers on their requirements.

How many 3^rd party recruiters challenge a client? We also live and breathe this stuff, but how many of us push back and really help the client to be creative?

Very few I guess.

Are we too scared of losing the brief? Scared of missing a fee? Do we want to just fill empty chairs?

Have we lost the bottle to invest time in building credibility with the client by bringing some real INSIGHT to the process? Because that’s how long-term relationships are developed.

Ah yes, INSIGHT.

If you read my last blog you’ll know that the good people from LinkedIn said that the number one priority for a 3^rd party recruiter focusing on maintaining some form of market position is Insight over Data.

I would grab this as an opportunity to forget searching for historical CVs and start looking for real talent, with real potential and real attitude.

Clients use us because we can give them an insight to the market, a window onto the world of potential talent that is available, either actively or passively.

So stop giving them what they can find themselves…and start finding people that they can’t.

Rarely a day goes by without talk of a skill shortage…and most recruiters nod compliantly and see this as an opportunity…but an opportunity for what?

If the skills aren’t there, then they aren’t there. So instead of acquiescing, and firing out dozens of headhunt calls, and placing numerous online job ads, just STOP!

Remember Katie’s hypothetical example?

Given the choice of a solid Brand Manager from a global competitor or the owner of a small start up who has managed to launch a fantastic product with limited resources, and really creative solutions… I think the managers would instinctively lean towards one option. And I think the business as a whole would lean in the other direction.

3^rd party recruiters need to be able to offer the same approach, the same confidence…and the same INSIGHT.

Stop looking for skills and start looking for attitude…then let the best companies take care of the upskilling.

War?? What Is It Good For??

(It’s a Question of Appropriateness of Language)

There is no war for talent.

I’ll re-phrase that…

There is no war, for talent.

There is talent everywhere.

I was reading an article about how Accenture are going to hire up to 50,000 people this year, but that 40% of hires would be through social media (mainly Linked In and Twitter), and you may have thought that as a 3^rd party recruiter I would be concerned by that. I should have been…but what really concerned me was the lame, gratuitous use of the word ‘War’.

‘Currently there is a War for Talent’ opined their head of recruitment.

Really?

In the UK alone we have 2.5 million unemployed (sorry, claiming jobseekers allowance…lord knows how many others aren’t) almost 2 million economic inactives, not forgetting about 1 million working part time who would like to work full time…there you are, abundant talent.

Sorry, maybe unemployed people aren’t talent. Those who have to take part time work to keep a roof over their families possess no talent. Clearly the 900,000+ under 25s who are desperately searching for a chance, any chance, to learn and prove themselves, have no potential.

Of course the original phrase ‘War for Talent’ sprang from a report by McKinsey, which really dealt with what companies need to do about the impending ‘talent’ shortfall to avoid ‘war’. (If you haven’t yet done so then I recommend you check out Gareth Jones’ excellent blog Talent Management : The Emperor’s (Not So) New Clothes)

Yet some of our biggest companies would rather see themselves at ‘war’ with one another. But do they know what war really is?

I propose that anyone who thinks that 2 or more companies trying to hire the same person/people is a war should be parachuted straight into Helmand for 72 hours and find out what war is…failing that, maybe some time spent with the bereaved families of servicemen who have actually fought in a war may provide a reality check.

Back in the day, in the masculinised world of 80s business, when lunch was for wimps and no self respecting executive would be caught without his copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, when companies saw themselves as armies fighting over consumer turf, military comparisons were seen as the only way to grow.

But not now, surely. Not when there are real wars being fought on the planet, when we are in the middle of a recession/depression that no-one really knows the end date of, when the misery, desolation and hopelessness of long term unemployment haunts so many.

How can NOW be a time to use the language of military triumphalism in such a glib, gratuitous way?

All of us in HR and Recruiting should try to ensure we use language that is considered and compassionate, appropriate to the situation. Not lazy and lame, misleading and mis-representative.

…and In My Very Humble Opinion, companies are not in a ‘war’ for talent…talent is in a ‘war’ for real opportunities… (but that is a different post)

Race For The Prize? What’s Your Hiring Process?

What does your hiring process say about your company?

We talk about culture, employer brands and employee brands…we talk about social recruiting, attraction strategies, talent pipelines and puddles…but what of the process in between?

You can find the talent and onboard the talent but in between you have the hiring process itself…it’s often said ‘you can tell a lot about a company by the way it goes about recruiting its staff’ …is this true?

Let me illustrate the point by talking about a particular client that I recruited for a few years ago. They were mainly a sales led, aspirational business, and many people I approached on their behalf wanted to talk to them. Their process was:

1) First interview with internal recruiter, primarily for fit and motivation

2) Second interview with 2 or 3 different managers to ascertain into which team they may best fit

3) Possibly another couple of managers or more usually a divisional director

4) At this stage there would be one or two teams that they were considered right for so they would come and meet a couple of people from these teams

5) Now is when they would come in and meet the Managing Director who, if he liked them, would suggest which team he thought they should join

6) They would come back and meet most of the rest of that team and, usually, leave with an offer from a Director

Phew! That all took over 12 hours, nearly 2 whole working days spent on interviews!!

Now here’s the thing…they had a high proportion of new employees who didn’t make it and left within 12 months! Discussing it with the MD one day he said…

‘The trouble is they come in thinking the prize is to get a job here…they’re wrong, if they’re good enough we’ll hire them anyway…the REAL prize is to succeed here’

So I explained that maybe, just maybe, having a recruitment process that resembled the Labours of Hercules set an unrealistic expectation, with the securing of a job becoming the prize. The harder you make it to get something, the more that the getting it becomes the goal rather than the starting point.

The client reasoned that the process was the best way of letting the candidate see a lot of the business, and the business see a lot if the candidate, which was important to negate any surprises once employment started.

My own opinion is that the longer and more tortuous you make the process then the more likely you are to lose sight of why you started the process. In this client’s case the candidate was focusing on which team/director was right for them and the company was also focusing on which team/director would be the best fit. Which is all well and good if the decision has been made to hire and accept, but as part of a recruitment process this is likely to lead to an assumptive hire rather than a qualified hire…

…the Labours of Hercules is not a talent acquisition strategy that I would recommend!

Not that all clients use a long process. I have also recruited for businesses that like to offer after a first interview…gut instinct is good, the person feels like a fit, hell let’s just get them in before someone else hires them. It won’t be a surprise that this approach also carries a high chance of not succeeding…

…easy to hire, easy to fire is not a talent acquisition method that I would recommend either!

Many companies spend a lot of time designing perfect recruiting processes that deal with the metrics, that provide quantifiable information to management, but how many look to create processes that actually reflect culture, values, expectations, and a picture of what success will look like to both sides?

Talent acquisition strategies and processes tell you a lot about a company…candidates will reasonably expect them to be reflective of the business priorities and principles.

What are the ones that have worked for you?