Are you Recruiting Reactively? You’re Fired!

If your recruitment team was a sales team, they’d be fired.
If your recruitment team was a marketing team, they’d be fired.
Somewhere along the way, you’ve managed to convince yourself that 68 days average time to fill an open role is okay. In any other part of the business, that delivery is really NOT ok.
Even if your time-to-hire was less than 30 days, fired.
Why?
Because quality talent is the life of any business, and every day that someone is not in that role being productive, the business is slowly dying. CEB global research puts that lost productivity cost at $407/open role/day.
That’s not even taking into account your recruitment teams’ time during those 68 days.
[bctt tweet=”If you think 68 average time to fill an open role is okay, you’re sorely mistaken says @mikealexhaywood” username=”ATCevent”]
So, how many open roles in your business? 50? 100?
That’s $2-$3 million a year, that you’re costing your business with a reactive recruitment approach.
Time to hire has more than doubled in the last five years, from 28 days to 68 days. Meanwhile, the average lifespan of a large company has shrunk from 75 years to just 15 years. Companies are being creatively destroyed by smaller, more nimble disrupters because they can’t access and hire diverse and creative talent in a timely fashion.
This is how companies stay relevant and survive. You and your team are the most important function in the business for long term survival.
Unfortunately, your business doesn’t currently know that, because the world has convinced you and the business that recruitment is ok to be reactive, and reactive areas of business are known as “support functions”, cost centres; not a key driver of productivity.
Let’s role play for a minute. Try to imagine sales operating like your recruitment team:
Your sales manager comes into the office and says, “Hey, in-order-to grow faster, we need to sell more of our product or service, can you find me a sale?”
You say, “Okay great, thanks for the heads up! I’ll start to look for some potential customers right away.”
You think, “Hmmmm, where will I find some new sales? I know! I’ll put an advert up on a sales board, asking some new prospective clients that happen to be looking, to apply. Genius!”
Hundreds of low-quality leads apply. Because for the last 10 years sales advertising boards have convinced the world that’s how it should be done.
Since there are so many applicants, and some of them you may not want to talk to, you use this awesome Client Applicant Tracking System where the sales leads fill in a long and convoluted multi-step form to make sure they are okay to talk to you, and the automated emails are perfect for filtering out those who don’t.
You look at maybe 20 of them because, let’s face it, it’s a lot of work to look at all of the applications!
You create a shortlist and take it to your sales boss.
But none of the applicants want to pay what your product is worth, or they have actually been applying to buy lots of other company’s products at the same time and are no longer interested. So you start again.
68 days later you get lucky and go to your sales manager and say, “Surprise! I’ve managed to find that sale you asked me for several months ago.”
You’re fired.
And so you should be. If you thought that process above was not acceptable for sales, then why is it acceptable for recruitment?
The best companies today have reinvented themselves away from reactive recruitment. The best recruitment teams have convinced their company that they are important and worthy of serious investment.
Their recruitment teams now consist of:
Talent Marketers: That magnetise talent to their Talent Communities from a wide range of channels online.
Talent Poolers: That proactively organise the quality talent into Talent Pools for every role in the business, setting targets for volume, quality, diversity, and inclusion.
Conversationalists: That engage quality talent in the Talent Pools on one to one basis, and start to better understand their capabilities, attributes, and cultural fit. That deliver a candidate experience worthy of the customers these people actually are.
[bctt tweet=”Recruiters, it’s time to start being proactive with your recruitment efforts!” username=”ATCevent”]
The best recruitment teams can do this because their technology platform has gone beyond processing people like paperclips and one-way automated job alerts and email communication. Their recruitment software automatically keeps talent data live because the talent own their own profile and data, and choose which companies to share it with as part of a private ecosystem.
These companies no longer see it as a war for talent. They see a vast blue ocean instead of a red one.
They use smart analytic dashboards to proactively deliver future workforce and link employee performance to data so that they can optimise their talent pools of future candidates through machine learning.
They drive productivity and have big budgets because they can track 5–10 times return on investment through a well presented business case to reduce time to hire, whilst improving quality of hire.
So which ocean will you be in this year?
In three years’ time, will you be at the top of your game or just catching on?