The Missing Pieces of the Recruitment Puzzle

According to the ABS, there were 201,300 job vacancies in Australia in August this year. That’s a whole lot of applicants, shortlists and interviews.

It seems that recruitment is a never ending attempt to fill the leaky bucket of resources, we do so much of it, that we can’t help but wonder whether we are on “autopilot” and in fact have lost our way in understanding the central objective of recruitment.

The very use of the word vacancy conjures up the notion that the role of recruiting is to simply find missing pieces in our puzzle board of budgeted headcount and it would appear that many of us don’t think too much more of it than that.

But what is it? What should it be? What must recruitment be in order for us to be successful?

Traditional recruiting professionals work in a highly efficient way. They have developed an operating rhythm that enables them to process an enormous volume of traffic in their portfolio and place candidates at an increasingly alarming speed. More and more, particularly with the launch of new technologies, recruiters are getting faster and faster at finding and placing the pieces in an intensifying battle for talent.

The competition for talent has never been greater, the speed with which candidates are placed has never been faster, the lifespan of an employee has never been shorter and the retention of employees has never been lower.

All of this makes us wonder, should the headline of this post read: ‘Recruitment! You’re doing it wrong!!!’?

Lets look at the puzzle we are trying to solve. Are we merely looking for any piece that looks as if its the same shape as the piece thats missing?, or is there more to completing the picture of talent?

It seems to us that if you are trying to complete a puzzle without understanding the final picture you are making, you are going to get it wrong more often than you are right, but isn’t that what we are doing all the time?

What we should be trying to do is find pieces that compliment the incumbent puzzle and enrich the picture of talent that effectively shapes the performance of the business. From a priority point of view it seems to make little sense to spend all of our energy analysing and selecting pieces when we don’t understand the picture they fit into. In fact, its safe to say that for any successful completion of a puzzle of any nature, a deep understanding of the final picture is the greatest of priorities (its why the picture is always on the box).

There is a lot of talk about high performance teams, but how do you make them, if not one piece at a time? And how do you assess a piece without understanding the picture of performance you are building and the required nature of new pieces in order to add value to the existing picture?

When it comes to the job at hand, an assessment of all the feasible alternatives, perspectives and approaches can certainly be exhausting:

• Do we outsource to an agency and how would we brief them on team dynamics and priorities?
• Will I save money if I do it myself and what is a reasonable fee for finding talent?
• Are recruiters more sales people than talent identifiers?
• How important are soft skills and when do I screen for them with Psych tests and the likes?
• Am I recruiting for expertise or attitude and how would I understand both?
• How do I find someone that both fits the culture and improves the status quo? What is the culture exactly?

…. and so on, and so on.

• 40 % of executives fail within 18 months of starting, with the main reason being due to a poor cultural fit and
• Employees that leave within 6/12 months of starting costs the organisation 2-3x that persons salary to replace.

So effectively what the numbers tell us is that focusing on the piece and not the picture is costing us time, money, productivity and reputation.

This is precisely why the focus must be on having a thorough understanding of the picture and a very specific view on the optimal pieces that come together to form high performing teams.

But wait there’s more; it looks like even if we get the fit right, our follow through needs some serious work:

• 70% of employees who have a tenure of 3 years + say the main reason for their tenure is due to having had a structured onboarding program
• Yet Only 33% of employers seek feedback from their employees about their candidate experience

So once we make an appointment, hopefully one that considers the needs, dynamics and culture of the team, we need to pay closer attention and time to ensure the success of appointed candidates.

With all this in mind, its time we took a good hard look at the practice of Recruitment, who we engage and what we engage them with.

In the hunt for talent, recruiters spend the majority of their energy on the hunt, without any reasonably accurate idea of what they are looking for or why in the context of the team? With employee churn at an all time high, we are quick to blame new generations and attitudes to workplaces for the numbers, but when you look at the practices and habits in recruitment, how much of this trend do we bring upon ourselves?

All that to say but one thing: it’s time we focussed on the big picture and not the random available pieces if we want to get this right. We have to move away from filling vacancies to adding value to teams.

We have to take selection far more seriously and realise all of the pain we are otherwise inflicting upon ourselves, by being ineffective.

Successful placement relies on a recruiter’s ability to understand the culture and the cultural fit of its candidate. Only when recruiters are invested in this, will the negative trends in recruitment be reversed. Emergent technologies can help us do better quality faster, but the focus must be on quality before speed, must be on fit before fill rates and must be on success well in advance of merely making a placement.

Its time to wake up to the problems we are creating. Its time we chose far more wisely.

Paul Hatlee
Head of Talent Acquisition

Contact Paul