hrandtalent

Throughout my career as a senior Recruitment Leader and now as an Organizational Talent advisor to a number of companies, I have been fortunate enough to work with a large number of great organizations who gave me the opportunity to partner with them on developing and implementing new practices to enhance their recruitment function and hiring outcomes.  A few years ago a large Canadian organization asked me to come in and partner with them to build an in-house recruitment function for them from scratch – what a great opportunity to put my recruitment experiences and beliefs into place.  The company had no centralized recruitment function in place and the business had been responsible for their own recruitment over the previous 5 years…..this organization was a true recruitment agency “cash cow”.  The year prior to me working with this company, they had spent over $8 million in permanent recruitment fees and weren’t happy with the level of quality hiring across the organization.

My first action on this project was to meet with each of the separate business unit SVPs and gain an understanding of their needs and wants while managing their expectations of what could be done and how quickly.  Obviously to build a new recruitment function, there needed to be a budget.  I knew through my experience the best way to do this was to set up a budget separate from HR and paid into directly by the business units themselves.  Most people will immediately assume this is a tough sell trying to solicit money from the business units. Based on my experience of working on a number of similar type of projects over the years it is actually a very easy sell.  The reaction from the business to my budget proposal is consistently “whatever you need for this company to hire better talent”.  These leaders recognize that great recruitment leads to great talent which leads to better outcomes for their business.  This mindset is ideal when it comes to changing the way an organization pays their corporate recruiters…….changing the pay model to more closely mirror how sales people should be compensated – based on success and outcomes!

The SVP of Sales with this company said to me “Simon, if your new recruitment team can hire top sales people for my team and the new sales talent exceed their first year sales goals, I will gladly ensure your team receives a cut in recognition of their role in our team’s success.”   This started the ball rolling as I was able to work with the Compensation, HR and Sales leads from the company to build a great compensation model for the recruiters supporting the sales division.  We built a compensation structure modelled similar to their sales roles in the company.  The Recruiters would be offered a lower base salary but a significantly higher variable pay component.  We designed the variable pay component of this Recruiter role based on specific performance milestones and achievements.  The performance milestones were primarily recruitment outcome focused (Quality of Hire and Recruitment Service Delivery Excellence) and not the traditional recruitment process focused metrics (Time to Fill, Interview to Hire ratio).  There were no ceilings put on the variable pay component so there was an opportunity for the Recruiters to make significant earnings but based on real performance.  We wanted to design the compensation to reflect the need for these Recruiters to be fully engaged to do the best job possible.  It would be a true WIN-WIN scenario – the Recruiter recruits better sales talent who in turn drive increases revenues for the company who in turn rewards the Recruiter for the better organizational performance.

This company had no problem attracting the top Recruiters in the market to join them using the different compensation plan as the carrot.  Knowing a number of great Recruiters like I do, I know they are all confident in their abilities to succeed and would have no hesitation in accepting this type of opportunity.  Great Recruiters share many of the same personal attributes and behaviours as great sales people so why not offer them the opportunity to align their earnings more closely to their success and outcomes.

So what was the outcome for this company?  Well, three years later this organization continues to use this compensation model for their Sales Recruiters and they have tweaked it for the other Recruiters on the team to follow who work with the other business units within the company.  Annual sales from the new sales talent have exceeded the company’s goals every year.  The Sales Recruiters are still fully engaged and committed to the success of the organization and have more than doubled the salaries they made prior to joining this company.   The entire recruitment function has also made its mark saving the company over 80% of what they had been paying for recruitment previously mainly through recruitment agencies.  The organization is very happy with their return on investment with their new in-house recruitment function.

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Simon Parkin is the Practice Leader for Recruitment and Talent Management at The Talent Company – www.thetalent.co     Simon is recognized as a global thought leader in the acquisition and management of top talent and has successfully transformed the Talent function for organizations of all sizes. Simon works closely with clients to build, develop and innovate their Recruitment, Talent and HR functions. He is a former global leader of Recruitment and Talent for a Fortune 100 company. Simon is a featured speaker at a number of HR and Recruitment conferences across North America and an author of many acclaimed articles on innovative Recruitment, Talent and HR trends and best practices.  Simon’s full profile can be found at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/simonparkin1

Recently I facilitated a session on “Recruitment Trends and Best Practices” for a large group of senior Recruitment and HR leaders from a large global technology company at their annual HR Leadership offsite in Chicago.  This organization is one of the better ones I have worked with in terms of their focus and investment in talent.  They understand that the acquisition, development and engagement of talent is the number one priority for their HR team.  Their partners in the business look to them as experts in talent.  They don’t care about the traditional recruitment metrics so many companies get too focused on such as “cost per hire” and “time to fill”.  They see the acquisition and development of talent as an investment for their business and not as a cost.  Anyone who has worked with me knows that I share a very similar view when it comes to talent so working with this client over the past few months has been a great experience for everyone involved.

During my session with them, we spent a great deal of time discussing one of my favourite subjects – the candidate experience.  I could tell right away by the audience’s initial reaction to this subject that this wasn’t one of their leading practices…..which puts them on par with most organizations.  In their goal to invest and build a robust recruitment function focused on the acquisition of the best talent in the market they had neglected to look at their process from the candidates perspective.  A successful recruitment function must take into consideration the perspectives of the recruiters, the business leaders and the candidates in terms of each stakeholders’ experience throughout the process from beginning until the end.  Not a lot of organizations take the time to understand what their candidates go through in their hiring process – if they talk to any candidate, it’s usually the one who is hired so tough to separate the great feeling of being hired versus the actual experience they went through.  I have written a lot over the past years that organizations need to take the time to understand their function from a candidates’ perspective – it’s just not about the impact to recruitment but to your business as a whole.

This is a very reflective exercise for the HR and Recruitment leaders from the companies I work with on this subject.  We all have the advantage of being a candidate at some point in time so we have walked in their shoes and need to remember what was it like for us as a candidate.  Getting back to this session I was facilitating, we discussed all the areas of the function and process that they were concerned with in terms of a potential negative candidate experience.  What was very interesting to me was the one area of the function they failed to identify as possibly leading to a negative candidate experience was through their extensive use of search firms.

This organization leverages and invests in as many sourcing channels as possible to find talented candidates.  They partner with a large number of search firms not afraid of the monetary investment in this pricey sourcing channel.  Their interview, assessment, and selection process is one of the more comprehensive I have seen.  Everything this organization does within their recruitment function aligns directly to their HR Mission Statement of acquiring, developing and engaging top talent but when I asked the question of what was the experience of their candidates when sourced and presented by their search firm partners, none of the leadership team could answer.  They estimated that around 40% of their hires were through search firms and nobody had even thought about the impact to a candidate’s experience.

Again, thinking about the candidate experience in dealing with search firms can be a very reflective exercise.  Most of us have likely been contacted by a search firm or independent recruiter at one time in our career.  My experience has been both positive and negative – there are a few firms I really respect and appreciate the way they dealt with me but there are a larger number of firms who were frustrating to deal with as a candidate.  The great firms were the ones who treated me as a candidate with respect and provided timely and honest feedback and communication.  The poor firms  were the ones who seemed to be playing games with me and lacked transparency and timely communication.  How well do you know your search firm partners and the way they deal with your candidates?

Most organizations fail to realize that the search firms they partner with on candidate searches are an extension of their own employer and business brand.  You have given the search firm the authorization to represent your company in the market.  Search firms touch so many candidates throughout a search and most companies don’t spend the time to understand the search firm’s process and candidate messaging.   We hold our internal recruiters to high standards in terms of the way they communicate and manage candidates so why don’t we hold our search partners to the same standards.  When’s the last time you asked a candidate presented to you by a search firm how their experience was…..especially the candidates who didn’t get the job?

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Simon Parkin is the Practice Leader for Recruitment and Talent Management at The Talent Company – www.thetalent.co     Simon is recognized as a global thought leader in the acquisition and management of top talent and has successfully transformed the Talent function for organizations of all sizes. Simon works closely with clients to build, develop and innovate their Recruitment, Talent and HR functions. He is a former global leader of Recruitment and Talent for a Fortune 100 company. Simon is a featured speaker at a number of HR and Recruitment conferences across North America and an author of many acclaimed articles on innovative Recruitment, Talent and HR trends and best practices.  Simon’s full profile can be found at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/simonparkin1