The Recruiting Inferno

The calls and emails have been coming in; the voices imperceptively waiver: The recruiters are nervous. Corporate leaders and naifs are looking out there windows, some even waiting for the call to come. Third party firms are wondering where the callbacks are> Who is Satan and who is the Saviour?

Satan is real and you are the Saviour but you don’t know this yet. Satan wants you to be afraid; he wants to cull the herd. Don’t let him scare you.

Push for long term planning; get away from your desk and meet them. Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace. The good ones always need places to meet; offer your company’s plushest room and offer victuals and drinks. Don’t forget the shwag. Business cards? Forget them – pocket stuffers. Do better.

They’re more than just a resume; they’re flesh and blood and intellect and emotion. Do you know when they celebrate their birthday? Do you send them cards? Is your CEO truly engaged: Are there monthly meetings with outside HIPOs? Will your CEO make a call?

It doesn’t have to be End of Days; but it will if you don’t plan and attack.

An old cowboy proverb asserts that “Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat.”

Recruiting is the most difficult function within HR yet too many seem to be taking low-work shortcuts – like asking for assistance in finding “engineers” after exhausting all their “creativity”…perusing resumes off job boards. Ahem???

Because of this, I offer the second tenet of the Poupon Principle:

Hard work are two four-letter words (come to think of it, GenY is also a four letter word)

[for the quesy GenYers who are sick of being called prima donna whine babies, this isn’t what I’m referring to – I just wanted an emotional uptick from the people who actually read my stuff. Laziness is not confined to any one group but there sure are a bunch of recruiters who are afraid to work hard enough to break through a critical barrier]

Why so afraid of the hard work?

Read The Poupon Principle

Read Do you have any Grey Poupon? But of course…

Several varieties of Grey Poupon exist, each crafted to address one’s primal need for mustard. But like the original commercial, within the recruiting community there exist factions of recruiters and recruiting pundits/experts who believe that if you don’t follow in line to their proselytizing you are open to ridicule.

For instance, take Applicant Tracking Systems – please! How many are there? Rhetorical question. How many recruiters believe their choice is the best ATS out there? Another rhetorical question. Yet the number of “best ATS” discussions has proliferated on every recruiting forum with each discussion becoming more heated as contrarians and purchasers of other systems proffer their opinion on why their choice was best.

They’re all failing to cut the mustard because each misses out on explaining how their specific processes, budgetary constraints, IT departments, ad naseum influenced their decision. This would constitute real information that would be useful to the community.

So why don’t we offer said information?

Because of the first tenet of the Poupon Principle:

It is easier to assert than to explain.

I’ve lost track at the number of recruiting pundits and experts who spread (or have spread) their ascerbic viewpoints about all things recruiting – sourcing, hiring, technology, etc. They’re here on ERE, RBC, individual blogs that spot (kind of like an incontinence) the Internet – all tossing around clever hyperbole (make a Rush Limbaugh voice when saying “clever hyperbole”) about our craft (is it an art or a science? Ask it again like Rush).

Seems that no one can agree on anything recruiting related!

The next time your brow displaces another wet, salty drop on your keyboard as you offer some clever retort or twitterism, and your face is reflected in the glistening pool of sweat, ask yourself if you’re adding value or are you just concerned with the number of Google hits you receive upon searching for your name?

Recruiting is about cutting the mustard and not talking it. So I’m introducing to the masses the Poupon Principle – can you cut the mustard when you’re finished typing?

Well can you?

Know the adage “When you become so good at using a hammer everything begins to look like a nail”? Same thing holds true for recruiting and the notion that peeps must have specific industry and/or product experience to be considered a viable employment candidate.

The only data is the self-fulfilling prophecy held by many hiring managers when they hire someone out-of-spec – the HMs spend a good deal of time “looking” for reasons to prove recruiting wrong and create structures that practically ensure a negative result.

Consider the best reason for hiring out of range…creativity. When you hire 100% within spec, you’re genetically engineering creativity out of your organization. Fewer ideas from other areas is like incest – you end up inbreeding all the bad stuff.

Read here about how some in finance actually embrace variety in their function. And be sure to subscribe to CFO.com and it’s newsletters – the best “tools” a recruiter can find these days – financial knowledge and how organizations are really managed.

Read here.

FYI, I’ll be putting together a panel of students who are graduating in December 2008 and May 2009 for one of the NYC metro area’s staffing groups this fall.

Comprised of students who are interviewing this Fall to find jobs, my goal is to open the eyes of the HR/recruiting community by hearing it straight from the horses’ mouths about attitudes, beliefs and values of potential entry-level employees.

Stay tuned… 

“A Japanese labor bureau has ruled that one of Toyota’s top car engineers died from working too many hours, the latest in a string of such findings in a nation where extraordinarily long hours for some employees has long been the norm.”

Karoshi, or overwork, was cited as a prime factor in the death of a 45 year old engineer who worked for Toyota on their Camry line.

Read one of the articles here.

Wouldn’t it be great if job specs included truthful descriptions of a company’s culture rather than the recycled crap that permeates almost every company’s website and employment brand copy?

It’s time for a revolution – as recruiters we know what we should be saying but are often shot down by higher ups who are simply ignorant.

“As long as the person has all of the skills, or satisfies enough of the skills requirements, if he has a good attitude, he’s worth his weight in gold. After all, you can teach technical skills!”

Wonderful discussion on TechRepublic.com about Hiring new people: Choosing between skills and attitude. Say what you will as a result of your experience as a recruiter but when you read what non-rectruiters say, think about how you feel.

The readers’ comments are below the article. 

Another Industry Radar article that tickled my reality bone, Managers Behaving Badly: Five Killer Results. How do these relate to hiring managers? Hmm…let’s see:

Cargo Cult Management

It’s a classic – you see a successful practice at another company and copy it. To a “tee.” It’s the same thing that happened when Jack Welch used to appear on the cover of Fortune or Forbes; the article extolled the virtues and attributes of some GE initiative. Every head of HRA would cringe upon seeing the cover because they knew that the next day their CEO would come by and wonder why “we aren’t doing this here?”

Unfortunately – and this holds for hiring managers – is that you don’t get the same results because the company that did employ a specific practice did so after understanding their processes, culture and environment.

The most challenging job of a recruiter is to help the hiring manager understand existing processes, culture and environment before adopting any new policy, practice or procedure.

Playing “Guess What I Want”

Any of you divorced out there? Remember what communication was like with your ex? When something was wrong would they shoot back with “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”?

Same with hiring managers – they don’t offer their expectations for behavior and performance and let’s be realistic, most recruiters don’t offer their side. Instead, they guess.

When people guess they will either guess wrong – bad, bad, bad – or will not act until they know what you want. Very bad for recruiting…

 Feedback Avoidance

Ever work with a hiring manager who is lovey-dovey face-to-face but speaks poorly of you to their superiors? Why couldn’t they give you feedback in the first place? Maybe they’re uncomfortable doing so despite the fact that we judge others – in this case, the hiring manager judges the recruiter – by their performance. Instead of having the feedback talk that could point inward, many hiring managers protect themselves at the recruiter’s expense.

Half a Loaf Decision Making

Implementation is missing link during decision-making. You and the hiring manager can talk all you want about process but if you don’t get to the walk-the-walk part, all the work is moot. The hiring manager can agree that their charges should attend local user groups or professional conferences but if the hiring manager then creates an environment where people aren’t rewarded for doing so, what difference does it make that a plan was created?

A decision is never done until implemented.

Potemkin Village Reporting

I found out about Grigory Potemkin when I read the article.

Grigory Potemkin was a soldier. He achieved immense power in the Russia of the late 18th Century first by becoming the lover of the Empress Catherine, and then by being very good at power games.

Catherine appointed him the Governor of what was then called “New Russia”- the Southern Ukraine. Potemkin sent back reports about what he accomplished. But he often reported accomplishments that he hadn’t gotten around to yet.

When Catherine came to tour the territory and see Grigory’s accomplishments for herself, Potemkin erected facades of prosperous-looking villages for the Empress to pass through. That’s where we get the term Potemkin Village for “a pretentious facade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition.”

Potemkin Village reporting displays the good, the beautiful and the profitable. It hides the bad news deep in the verbiage in the middle of the document. Sometimes the bad news is left out altogether.

You’ll be tempted to do Potemkin Village reporting. You’ll be tempted to make your work seem better than it is. Don’t do it. Your reputation is the most important thing you have in business or in life. Potemkin Village reporting will tarnish it.

Recruiting must be above board and truthful. When it’s working well and the results are coming in, talk it up, celebrate it. But when the results are less than desired, do the very same thing. You can’t improve what you never discuss.

Talk to your hiring managers about this but keep your performance in focus as well. On any two way street traffic flows in both directions…

Last week, the Industry Radar offered an article on “What Tim Russert Taught Me About Dealing With People In The Workplace…” – it’s a must read for anyone working with people. To summarize, here are the key lessons:

Don’t interject your opinion into the conversation unless it’s relevant.

Put everyone at ease with some stage banter.

You can be an “A” player without being a jerk.

At the end of the day, you’re judged not by the number of carcasses you dragged in, but the fact you were good at what you did, and most importantly – if you were a good person – how you conducted yourself daily.

Allow me to interpret these as they relate to recruiting…

Don’t interject your opinion into the conversation unless it’s relevant. “I have the perfect person for your open req.” Really? Amazing – since you haven’t spoken to anyone here or have the foggiest notion of the specific problems to be solved by the folks we’re going to hire. Recruiters should learn to become consultants rather than overt flesh peddlars. If you want to be a pimp, go into politics.

Put everyone at ease with some stage banter. If I had a gallon of gas for every time a recruiter has called me and immediately launched into a no-breath sales pitch about how no one in the galaxy recruits as well as they do, blah, blah, blah or how the corporate side recruiter immediately begins the assessment process upon sitting down with a potential future employee, then I’d have enough to give away to all my ERE friends. When did “building a relationship” become such a rare commodity in recruiting?

You can be an “A” player without being a jerk. Having been part of the ERE community since its inception, I’m increasingly dismayed by the number of participants who use other members as dart boards; I can only assume that these recruiters are equally boorish with candidates and clients. What ever happened to just being nice and helpful? In the end, everyone appreciates those who can both perform at a high level and do it in a way where everyone they touch believes that they’re receiving special attention.

At the end of the day, you’re judged not by the number of carcasses you dragged in, but the fact you were good at what you did, and most importantly – if you were a good person – how you conducted yourself daily. This is where many agency managers are disserving their neophyte recruiters – teaching cut throat over customer relationship management and corporate recruiting leaders are stressing metrics at all costs. How about teaching recruiters that a placement or hire without a solid relationship behind it a sure fire way to over-fishing a swimming hole? What if all recruiters practiced using their ears and mouths proportionally? Do you know anything about your candidates or clients outside of the position they hold? Do you know when they celebrate their birthdays? On and on, the questions that make the most difference to the very best recruiters are those that are personal in nature and not information that can be gleaned from a job posting or a resume.

Next week: The Recruiting Secrets of George Carlin – or Why Dead People are Great Role Models for Recruiters…