Another original ERE oldie – this one about the Workforce Planning…my, oh, my how slowly change marches on.
Is it LinkedIn? Don’t think so (although some people who read this might have an online recruiting coronary – considering I like these folks, that would be a bad thing).
Is it blog recruiting? Nah, although at a recent interview I was asked whether – or more accurately told, that blog recruiting is IT. Oh, really?
Is it a user friendly ATS that makes it easy – and quick – for people to apply for a job? Not yet although taking a page from Amazon’s ‘one click’ system would clearly be a paradigm shift in my mind.
How about an email system that screens out Nigerian scam artists (although I’m still waiting to hear from Barrister Donatus Okobi with some notification as to when I can expect $20 Million to be deposited into my account; after all, I did faithfully send him my Social Security Number and checking account number)? Nah, why destroy the national economy of Nigeria.
How about a new more intelligent browser from Google (again, cool stuff, but it will not radically change the way recruiters source and recruit)?
All of these might make it easier to find talent but only one thing can substantially ensure that will find talent – success all begins with planning (and sadly, often ends by NOT planning). Planning is not something that I’ve recently discovered – my experience includes high level enterprise planning (that changed the strategic direction of a Fortune 150 company), technology planning (completely revamped the technical focus while fueling a 100% increased in R&D funding), HR planning (pretty much from a personnel to human capital investment focus as well as within the functional elements of HR), and of course, recruiting (overall as well as on a search by search basis).
What all strategic planning processes have in common are most of the following steps (major steps are in bold; supporting steps are not):
- Identification of Vision and Mission
- An Environmental Scan (Look at Michael Porter’s Five Forces Model or a personal fav, the SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats – model) analyzes information about external environment (economic, social, demographic, political, legal, technological, international factors), industry, internal organizational factors (looking for emergent issues that are learned or unintended)
- A Gap Analysis (Is Now versus Should Be)
- Benchmarking (What are others doing)
- Identification of Core Strategic Issues
- Development of Strategic Goals and Action Plans
- Evaluation of Strategy
Do you plan your attack before leaping into a search? Is it a formal document – perhaps a one pager – that can be used to evaluate the strategy after the search is finished? Or is your plan to leap before you look with results that occur more by chance than by calculated action.
The way I see it, it’s much harder to create an overall recruiting strategy if you haven’t created a search strategy for a single position.
I’m curious as to how many ERE people actually put together a formal search document – I’m not talking about a full-fledged position assessment like those developed by executive search consultants (I’m not forgetting those on the contingent side who do this too – they’re just too few and far between) – before diving into Google or posting on a job board?
If you’d like, email me a job that you may be having a challenging time with and I’ll post what I would consider to be a strategic recruiting plan for the position. It just may help you get past whatever roadblock you’re hitting.
