A Talentist

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 8

8.)        In RMS, Usability Drives ROI

Recruitment Management Systems (RMS) bake-offs almost always follow the same script: a group of “early adopter” recruiters who like technology control the sales process. Employment management sees recruiters at the table actively engaged in providing input to the selection process and believes they have recruiter buy-in. This group of recruiters (the “Power 10” from a previous example) almost always select based on the coolest feature / functions shown in the product demonstrations. Unfortunately these feature / functions rarely drive overall user adoption. In fact, often they work against adoption by the Invisible 80 due to increased system complexity.

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 7

7.)        Don’t Forget the Invisible 80

The most common mistake in any technology selection and implementation process is to forget what I call the “Invisible 80.” Experience shows that in any group of technology users there is a roughly 10-80-10 distribution of recruiter affinity for an implemented solution. In other words, 10% of your users aren’t going to use the technology you implement no matter what you do and 10% are going to love almost whatever you implement (the “Power 10”). That leaves this large mass of users in the middle: the “Invisible 80”. The Invisible 80 will use the solution you chose and implement as long as it doesn’t get in the way of their preferred processes and workflows. They are the ones that make (or break) your system’s success.

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 6

6.)        Don’t Let Technology Make you a Commodity

Employment is sitting on top of a gold mine of information. Employment data is the gateway to most social networks, demographic analysis and competitor intelligence (for the best piece I know of on the topic you should read John Sumser’s “Roses in the Thornbush” white paper). Don’t sell your technology investment to management as “getting people in here cheaper and faster.” This tells senior management that employment is nothing more than a standardized process that can be automated, or worse, outsourced completely. Focus on buying “strategic information capability” and not on “a better electronic filing cabinet.”

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 5

5.)        Once You Are Sold, Keep Selling

Select a solutions partner who will provide you with the tools, knowledge and support needed to keep the internal sales job going. Forget about selling on the standard “Cost per Hire” and “Time to Hire” metrics. These measures focus management on the tactical nature of your work. Instead focus on metrics which differentiate you within the business: return on human capital, top-line growth in supported businesses, and the direct attribution of that success to your insights, analysis and service offering.

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 4

4.)        Technology is Not a Solution

If you are accountable for identifying, buying and / or implementing your organization's next Recruitment Management System (RMS, or ATS if you like), then you need to understand that technology in itself is not a solution to whatever business problem you are trying to solve. Your solution lies in technology and process optimization and strategic alignment and constant feedback loops of relevant information.

Most (though not all) of the really hard RMS technical issues have been solved. So whatever you do, don’t pick an RMS vendor based on their technology. Pick a solutions vendor who can be a trusted advisor to you and your management. You need a solutions partner who can speak directly to the core issue: “How are your technologies and services going to enable me to be strategic partner to my business lines, leverage the information I can capture to add value to the enterprise and help create value in both hiring efficiency and business effectiveness?” Picking a technology vendor because of a technology feature is the same as choosing your surgeon based on how they hold a scalpel.

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11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 3

3.)        Partner with IT, not Purchasing

At a time when your technology solution vendor selection is ever more critical to your organization’s ability to become a strategic partner to your business lines it would be a big mistake to turn over vendor selection to your purchasing department. Most purchasing departments are designed to evaluate cost and risk. While those are important factors in vendor / partner selection, they are secondary to finding the vendor whose unique mix of technology, services and insight align to your strategic needs. These needs should include developing a roadmap that works backward from your organization’s overall goals (begin with the end in mind), aligning processes to those goals, ensuring that you are capturing the data needed to prove your ability to meet those goals, and then (last of all, and perhaps least), supplying a technology that can support your objectives in all of those areas.

Purchasing is just not set up to evaluate the strategic capability of a vendor. Worse of all, having purchasing running your vendor selection communicates that the vendor is not important and that you are merely buying a commodity. Even if a good vendor wins, they will have fewer resources, time and inclination to make you a success, no matter what their sales people say.

Partner with IT instead. IT is in the same situation you are. They have cost and risk mandates from management at the same time that they are looking for innovative ways to take their key assets (in your case people, in their case technology) to help their business lines get strategic top-line traction. IT is looking for partners within the organization to make a strategic difference with. Recruiting is the right partner.

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 2

2.) Cheaper, Faster AND Better

“Cheap, fast or good…pick any two” used to be a great way to get across an important idea: most projects are constrained by either money (cheap) or time (fast) or money AND time (good). It’s typically the best way project managers have of constraining client expectation while managing resources effectively. But it’s usefulness is decreasing. The recruiting / employment systems of the future must be able to address all three. But whereas most employment systems vendors have made progress in the areas of “cheap and fast” the recruitment technology market must start to focus on the concept of “good.” One way to do this would be to define “good” beyond just the standard metric of “quality of hire” (i.e. “does the system help me hire better people”). This kind of “good” is still broken at the definition level. Quality is defined by variation to specification, not by happy hiring managers. So until such time that people can solve that problem, we should be defining “good” (at least in as applied to recruitment technology) as “which vendor will partner with me to get me the information I need?” Can the vendor develop an end-to-end business process and measurement vehicle that will deliver the kinds of strategic information you need to help your clients accelerate top-line growth? For example: which sources of hire result in better products? Better customer satisfaction ratings? Better on-time project delivery? Which contingency recruiting partners? Which brand messages yield a superior close rate on hires that resulted in a better product? More sales?

11 Thoughts on Recruiting Technology - 1

Some pithy, (hopefully) some profound, 11 days and 11 thoughts on recruitment and recruitment technology.

1.)        Recruitment = $ = Core Strategic Asset

Many talent execs speak passionately of their frustration at not being viewed as a strategic player inside the enterprise. The entire business rises and falls with human capital so It seems obvious that the department responsible for human capital acquisition should be a core strategic player at the executive roundtable. We all know this is not often the case.

If business is to continue to develop competitive advantage in world markets U.S. companies will have to acquire, manage and train the world’s best people. Developing and staffing the “right” jobs and the “right” people is more critical than ever.

But "strategic" usually means "revenue." Recruiting's inability to map its ROI to the top-line of the P&L is hurting it's ability to become more strategic. Aligning business strategy, recruiting process, data capture and metrics / analysis to yield data that can speak to how much money recruiting is making for the company is one key. Being able to understand the business well enough to track the effect of talent on their efforts is another. Technology that is enthusiastically adopted by non-specialized users (as in, "not specifically trained to operate a system") is critical to acquiring, developing, maintaining, integrating and analyzing the information needed to make either of these happen. This is the next phase of enterprise software development.

Some Cold Water on RPO

It pays to look at your own blog every once in a while. It is apparent that I set expectations with my "RPO War" post and then never did anything with it. My delusions of adequacy were well ahead of my time availability. But with Kevin Wheeler's post today about "RPO being in, contingency being out" I did want to get some of my ideas out about this.

RPO in itself is not bad (although I think the only people who will make money in RPO over the long term are the consultants who recommend outsourcing, as they will be the same consultants who recommend bringing recruiting back inside in five years). The problem with RPO is that it is seen as a panacea for a deeper problem: a lack of understanding of the value of recruiting. If recruiting is just a way to get butts into seats (which it is at many companies), then reducing the cost and risk exposure of that function is a logical objective. RPO makes sense in this case. But if your business really does rise and fall with the quality of the talent in the organization (most high tech, entertainment and creative firms for instance), then total RPO is absolutely the wrong way to go. RPO firms are not accountable to the shareholders of the organization: they are accountable to the Service Level Agreement (SLA). And since you can't quantify (or even qualify) "quality of talent" effectively the SLA can't cover holding the RPO vendor accountable for the ability of the client to compete in the marketplace. Corporate recruiting departments must be accountable for shareholder value, and RPO firms simply never will be.

The easy-to-understand benefit of RPO is the "one throat to choke" theory of staff function management. HRIT is fighting with staffing, who is fighting with HR, and so you have "three throats to choke" if you have a staffing problem (the geeks, the recruiters and the hiring management interface). If the “C” level can make it so that there is only one group to blame when the jobs website goes down, or when time-to-fill is out of hand, or when hiring managers are disgruntled, then the belief is that they will get rid of a lot of headaches. This is the real RPO pitch. Firing employees is harder than beating up vendors.

All of this is baloney of course. US employment contracts are at will and therefore have far fewer protections under corporate law than an RPO vendor does. The switching cost from one internal recruitment leader to another is a fraction of the switching cost of one RPO vendor to another. Given the size of most RPO contracts, the RPO vendors understand that they have a built-in annuity that is almost impervious to client satisfaction.

RPOs can gain process efficiencies and cut costs, usually through call center sourcing methods and reducing the cost overhead of recruitment professionals. Again, if recruiting is a purely administrative function in your organization, complete RPO makes sense. But since RPO is being pitched as the cure-all that will solve world hunger and air pollution, it, like every other business fad before it (vertical integration and reengineering are two that immediately come to mind), will rise meteorically, fall just as fast, and then stabilize somewhere around "We have someone else hire for non-critical / high-volume positions, but the core recruiting organization, process and ownership is strategic and therefore kept inside."

Finally, the "one throat to choke" theory of management can be inspiring to the "C" level manager who feels overwhelmed by the thought of being accountable for a staff function that they don't understand and which feels like a non-stop liability. But if your staffing organization is failing because the geeks, recruiters and hiring manager interface are all fighting, then you have a lack of leadership that an RPO contract won't solve. You can band aid that problem by giving it to someone else, but the issue will raise its head in other areas. Better to solve the real problem rather than play corporate "whack-a-mole" as each successive leadership-inspired problem raises its head.

Its not as thorough as I would have liked, but there it is.  RPO can solve some problems, but should be viewed as one of many tools available to the corporate recruiting problem, not as a cure for the common cold.