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2008 Hire Velocity White Paper: Leveraging Recruiting Resources through the "Bricklayer" Model

Friday, October 10, 2008

If you ran a construction company and had a world-class bricklayer, would you make them carry bricks?

If you have a world-class bricklayer, you would probably have one person carrying bricks to him and another mixing mortar. By doing so, the world-class bricklayer can ply his trade more efficiently and make a beautiful and well-constructed building or wall. This would also save your construction company a great deal of money as the bricklayer is paid three to five times as much money as the laborers carrying bricks and mixing mortar.

In corporate recruiting departments, are we applying the same logic? I have asked many in corporate America what makes a “good” recruiter. The overwhelming response is that a “good” recruiter is someone who handles candidates well and develops strong relationships with the hiring managers. It is a rare response that even includes anything related to sourcing or screening.

From a behavioral perspective, working well with people (candidates or hiring managers) falls in the people-skills category. Putting a finer point on it, the best recruiters are generally speaking, good sales people. In other words, their genius is selling the right candidates on the company and the hiring managers on the right candidates – closing deals. Persuading, influencing, convincing people to do something are the basic attributes of a sales person.

Finding the right candidates in today’s world is long on process/procedure and short on persuasion/influence. Sourcing, in particular, is very process-driven, mundane, and repetitive work. Even with the best tools in the world, this job consists of about 90% sitting in one place reviewing resumes to select the best few candidates who match the job description or profile. Up to this point, there is virtually no people work involved.

The next step in the process is to reach out to the best few candidates and attempt to screen them over the phone. The screening process is also very repetitive and mundane – you have to ask all the candidates the same questions and document the answers consistently so that the appropriate candidates are moved through the process; not to mention the need for OFCCP compliance and other legal issues involved.

Once you find the appropriately skilled and screened candidate you must then get them into the Applicant Tracking System (ATS); either by having the candidate apply or by entering them into the ATS directly. Again, this is a very administrative, process-oriented activity. So, sourcing is more of an administrative or process-driven job, in which the ability to stay in one place and work for hours without interaction with people is required.

Over the years, I have found the separation of these two major functions in recruiting to yield far better results at both ends than asking one person to do both. Sourcing, to be effective, has to be closely watched, measured, and tuned to produce the most effective results. Recruiting (using my analogy) is far more difficult to apply clearly defined, accurate metrics. We all try to measure the source of hire, time-to-hire, submittals-to-interview ratio, interview-to-offer ratio, cost-per-hire, and myriad other measures of recruiting metrics. Asking a people person to keep track of these is difficult at best, impossible at worst. Asking administrative people to track these items makes them feel comfortable.

Another major benefit of separation is the ability to scale the sourcing function. At times of highly active hiring, the sourcing team needs to be able to step up and produce large volumes of candidates. When hiring slows or stops, you will likely have to reduce the team size or maybe even eliminate the group altogether, depending on the conditions your organization faces.

After that, determining what to track, how to track it and who is responsible for monitoring and correcting problems is also important. Determining if the sourcing function should be centralized function or decentralized requires an answer as well. There are arguments for both. Where at all possible, centralizing is the most cost-effective because you can more easily track the metrics and performance of your team, as well as shift work load around more easily. Company size and complexity may require more than one sourcing group.

In the world of corporate recruiting, are we asking our bricklayers to carry bricks? Recognizing that the two major activities in the full lifecycle of recruiting are two totally different job types is a first step in building a more effective recruiting organization. The next step is determining what ratio of the two types of skills your organization requires. The volume of hiring, availability of talent, complexity of the jobs, among many other factors will determine the ratios.

Byron West
President, Hire Velocity

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