Quality

Quality is not "goodness." Quality is the continuous improvement in the reduction of the scope and frequency of variance to a specification that yields targeted economic gains.

Read Demming and Juran and Crosby. Read the old TQM papers of the early 80's. There was a lot of work and energy put into this early. A lot of money was spent figuring this out by the Japanese, the Tigers, and finally the early hi-tech industry and GE.

That's why it is so hard to see recruiting working so hard to get this wrong. Recruiting tends to define "quality" in one of two ways:

1 - Client satisfaction. Quality is defined by whether the hiring manager is happy with the service they got and the result of the hiring process (a "great candidate".)

2 - Candidate satisfaction. Quality is defined by whether the candidates who were considered enjoyed their hiring experience.

Notice that neither of these two items speaks directly to "quality," at least as it matters to the business. It is important to get client satisfaction right, especially if recruiting is going to be a serious P& function. And it is important to get the candidate experience right, especially if talent is more expensive than capital.

But neither of these factors drives the business. Happy hiring managers and impressed candidates don't drive revenues and profits. They may be secondary factors to economic success, but they are no structural or fundamental to the organization's ongoing economic success.

The job of recruiting is to "manufacture employees." Before I get a lot of flaming emails telling me that "people aren't machines" please let me clarify. The question is whether recruiting is a procurement function (people are the raw materials of production, and management and training are used to fashion the finished product), a sales function (people have to "buy into" participating in the company's success and so therefore must be persuaded that life with company A is better than life with company B), an administrative function (people are a liability required in order to achieve an end result, and therefore must be managed for risk and cost) or a manufacturing function (people are the underlying platform that, when assembled with other parts like technology, knowledge and support, are an output which is valuable in its application to the market's needs).

I hope that any of you have read my previous posts are clear that I don't believe that recruiting is an administrative function (unless, as previously stated, the company profile dictates that people are it's greatest liability). And if recruiting is a "procurement function" then it should be disbanded and left to the purchasing department (where it, along with the company's core competitive advantage, will die a slow, agonizing death).

Recruiting is either a sales function or a manufacturing function. I would say that this is an “AND” function. Recruiting is manufacturing AND recruiters are in the business of sales. This is why I have been a proponent of recruiting owning organizational development, workforce planning, succession planning and resource management. "Recruiters" are therefore only one part of "recruiting." Recruiters are the sales people who have to close on the raw materials to get them into the build process. Recruiting (as in recruiting management) actually should own the "talent base," just as finance owns the "capital base."

The fact that management of the "talent base" is so widely distributed across multiple HR and administrative functions speaks directly to the fact that talent is not seen to be as valuable as capital. If talent is more expensive than capital then you have a distinct function for its management, utilization and asset management.

So what does this have to do with quality? Again, quality is meeting specification. In manufacturing this originally meant a bias towards test after production (in the recruiting case, that is the "review post hire" scenario). But Crosby and Juran and Demming proved through methods like statistical process control that this lead to high costs and faulty designs. In a manufacturing environment you don't test to quality. You design it in.

In a recruiting environment this means that the collective "talent base" management of OD, RM, etc. etc. have to be unified in their approach to aligning the identification, assessment, transfer and / or selling and development of talent towards the strategic plan of the organization. We must be even more rigorous in our application of this global talent plan than the capital mavens are in the budgeting processes (since they are just trying to manage for risk, and we must be willing to design for opportunity).