Tuesday, February 07, 2006
A brave new world - how to evolve to more than just a recruiter
I have seen the best and worst of recruiting, high tech booms and crashing stock-prices. To parody Dickens, I have seen a tale of two markets. I have also seen two very different hiring philosophies stem from both markets. I will try to explain in this blog, my thoughts and observations for both approaches to staffing.
The business groups and/or clients that recruiters traditionally supported in the earlier market, say pre millennium, was a recruiter reliant and H.R driven model. If the organization that needed to hire had a strong recruiter, I saw this model be effective and successful. If it didn't, I saw this model be problematic and ineffective. The business's hiring success was largely dependant on the recruiter or the staffing organization at hand supporting them.
The evolution of the new market has been to the business driven recruiting model. Traditionally, business groups only participated in the selection process, with the other components of the hiring belonging to staffing. The later market, being the new evolution has moved to a model where the hiring managers have more ownership and control of the recruiting process, with less reliance on the recruiter. Hiring groups are taking more control over the interviewing and closing processes and in some instances even sourcing; areas that recruiting traditionally owned. The result of this new market has been that recruiters have become secondary stakeholders, with more of an operational role as opposed to the value-add specialty, solution and delivery based role.
The reason this new organizational model is becoming more accepted and mainstream as opposed to an anomaly is similar to why mammals out survived dinosaurs. Dinosaurs couldn't evolve quickly enough to compete! An example of a doomed dinosaur that comes to mind is with a drive company I worked for as a consultant in 2003. Due to the inception of the fast moving mobile devices space, this very large Disk Drive Company needed to inject specialized scientific and business talent to exploit this fast moving technology. The problem was that the recruiters rejected and feared change and progression, which put them at odds with the companies vision. I had my first eyewitness view as to why customers were becoming impatient with staffing and becoming more self sufficient. The recruiters were more interested in manilla folders than great candidates or serious business partnerships. Their recruiting processes and approaches were a time capsule, to a pre-eighties recruiting era, in every essence, it was the lost world.
Their customers through sheer frustration started to do their own networking and their own sourcing, they were the ones building rapport and closing the candidates. It was an important void they needed to fill because it wasn't coming from the recruiters. Staffing had painted themselves into a corner, with no presentable value than being the masters of red files and green files and nicely updated documents and databases. Even though this is a fairly extreme example compared to most staffing departments, the baseline is there, and that is that you have to differentiate yourself from being an administrator or that is what you will become.
The new organization, or the swift mammal, I believed evolved from the increasing belief from business groups that the value and service that recruiting provides is primarily a process or administrative role, as opposed to a serious business partnership or specialized skill set. This phenomenon seems to be mostly directed to high-tech companies, but I feel it is not isolated to high-tech. The start-up boom and talent war of the late nineties contributed greatly to this. Engineers and managers had to wear many hats and one of them was recruiting, thus enabling them to be more self sufficient. When these teams would eventually work with recruiters, there would be a sense that they could do a better job or saw better results when they were recruiting for themselves. As these start-ups grew up to be larger companies, a culture of viewing recruiters as specialized business partners became less evident, and thus recruiters were confined to a life of just creating offer letters and updating HRMS databases.
For recruiters to reclaim their value would require them to evolve with their customers, to present themselves as a valuable and essential business partner, and not as an administrative arm of recruiting. The best way to do this is to learn the language that your customers speak. In high-tech, they speak in terms of release dates, milestones and obstacles. You need to be the resident expert on how to acquire and add intellectual property. To be effective you need to take an interest in the technology your team is creating, to understand their competitors, fringe competitors and the market they operate in. You need to prepare them for the obstacles and delays that lay ahead when finding talent. You need to give them SLA's and deliverables and you need to engage them in all processes of recruiting, from sourcing to offer preparation to closing.
For the past two years I was leading the recruiting for an extremely aggressive R&D hiring group at Amazon.com. From the time I had arrived to Amazon, this group had their own ideas on how to recruit, and subsequently, did not respect recruiting as having a specific and unique skill that could help them find the talent they needed. I realized at that point, that the role I needed to take was a consultative role, to guide them instead of control them, to include them when coming up with creative solutions. I came to find that by including them in the process of discovering and closing candidates, they realized how hard "good" and effective recruiting actually was. The control they wanted eventually subsided more and more, as they saw the value we provided, and the advice we gave, we were able to gain their trust. To have a group so controlling meant that I had a group that was engaged. The secret is to not fight your group for control; it is to influence them by partnering and taking the time to understand their pressures and deliverables. I had to position myself as a valuable commodity to help them meet their goals by placing people in teams to help them deliver products. I did this by learning their language and applying my recruiting knowledge in terms they understood.
To summarize, a disenchanted or cowboy type of hiring group can actually be more helpful than the group that is more than happy to give you the reins. The secret is learning how to influence and not how to fight for control
The business groups and/or clients that recruiters traditionally supported in the earlier market, say pre millennium, was a recruiter reliant and H.R driven model. If the organization that needed to hire had a strong recruiter, I saw this model be effective and successful. If it didn't, I saw this model be problematic and ineffective. The business's hiring success was largely dependant on the recruiter or the staffing organization at hand supporting them.
The evolution of the new market has been to the business driven recruiting model. Traditionally, business groups only participated in the selection process, with the other components of the hiring belonging to staffing. The later market, being the new evolution has moved to a model where the hiring managers have more ownership and control of the recruiting process, with less reliance on the recruiter. Hiring groups are taking more control over the interviewing and closing processes and in some instances even sourcing; areas that recruiting traditionally owned. The result of this new market has been that recruiters have become secondary stakeholders, with more of an operational role as opposed to the value-add specialty, solution and delivery based role.
The reason this new organizational model is becoming more accepted and mainstream as opposed to an anomaly is similar to why mammals out survived dinosaurs. Dinosaurs couldn't evolve quickly enough to compete! An example of a doomed dinosaur that comes to mind is with a drive company I worked for as a consultant in 2003. Due to the inception of the fast moving mobile devices space, this very large Disk Drive Company needed to inject specialized scientific and business talent to exploit this fast moving technology. The problem was that the recruiters rejected and feared change and progression, which put them at odds with the companies vision. I had my first eyewitness view as to why customers were becoming impatient with staffing and becoming more self sufficient. The recruiters were more interested in manilla folders than great candidates or serious business partnerships. Their recruiting processes and approaches were a time capsule, to a pre-eighties recruiting era, in every essence, it was the lost world.
Their customers through sheer frustration started to do their own networking and their own sourcing, they were the ones building rapport and closing the candidates. It was an important void they needed to fill because it wasn't coming from the recruiters. Staffing had painted themselves into a corner, with no presentable value than being the masters of red files and green files and nicely updated documents and databases. Even though this is a fairly extreme example compared to most staffing departments, the baseline is there, and that is that you have to differentiate yourself from being an administrator or that is what you will become.
The new organization, or the swift mammal, I believed evolved from the increasing belief from business groups that the value and service that recruiting provides is primarily a process or administrative role, as opposed to a serious business partnership or specialized skill set. This phenomenon seems to be mostly directed to high-tech companies, but I feel it is not isolated to high-tech. The start-up boom and talent war of the late nineties contributed greatly to this. Engineers and managers had to wear many hats and one of them was recruiting, thus enabling them to be more self sufficient. When these teams would eventually work with recruiters, there would be a sense that they could do a better job or saw better results when they were recruiting for themselves. As these start-ups grew up to be larger companies, a culture of viewing recruiters as specialized business partners became less evident, and thus recruiters were confined to a life of just creating offer letters and updating HRMS databases.
For recruiters to reclaim their value would require them to evolve with their customers, to present themselves as a valuable and essential business partner, and not as an administrative arm of recruiting. The best way to do this is to learn the language that your customers speak. In high-tech, they speak in terms of release dates, milestones and obstacles. You need to be the resident expert on how to acquire and add intellectual property. To be effective you need to take an interest in the technology your team is creating, to understand their competitors, fringe competitors and the market they operate in. You need to prepare them for the obstacles and delays that lay ahead when finding talent. You need to give them SLA's and deliverables and you need to engage them in all processes of recruiting, from sourcing to offer preparation to closing.
For the past two years I was leading the recruiting for an extremely aggressive R&D hiring group at Amazon.com. From the time I had arrived to Amazon, this group had their own ideas on how to recruit, and subsequently, did not respect recruiting as having a specific and unique skill that could help them find the talent they needed. I realized at that point, that the role I needed to take was a consultative role, to guide them instead of control them, to include them when coming up with creative solutions. I came to find that by including them in the process of discovering and closing candidates, they realized how hard "good" and effective recruiting actually was. The control they wanted eventually subsided more and more, as they saw the value we provided, and the advice we gave, we were able to gain their trust. To have a group so controlling meant that I had a group that was engaged. The secret is to not fight your group for control; it is to influence them by partnering and taking the time to understand their pressures and deliverables. I had to position myself as a valuable commodity to help them meet their goals by placing people in teams to help them deliver products. I did this by learning their language and applying my recruiting knowledge in terms they understood.
To summarize, a disenchanted or cowboy type of hiring group can actually be more helpful than the group that is more than happy to give you the reins. The secret is learning how to influence and not how to fight for control
