I’ve been in Chicago a couple of times this fall. The restaurant scene in Chicago is off the charts, just like it is right now in New York, LA, etc. It’s a great time to be a person who loves food!
If you like going to new restaurants you’ll find out quickly that the restaurants of today are not like the ones we grew up with. In Michigan, and my wife still makes fun of this, any non-chain restaurant serving “American” food basically has the same menu where they serve burgers, seafood, Italian dishes, Mexican dishes, breakfast, hell they would serve Ethiopian if people would order it!
Basically, they serve a little of everything, but nothing especially noteworthy!
The new restaurant scene has changed this completely and now you’re lucky to have 8 main dishes that are served on a menu, BUT every single thing kills! The entire menu is one side of page and seems like almost no options but each dish is better than the next. Chefs of these new restaurants found out the way to make money is to focus your menu and make fabulous dishes.
You have lower food costs because of less wasted ingredients, you’re more efficient in cooking fewer items, less complaints because you know each dish is awesome and you create signature asked-for dishes. Focus = success.
When I speak with most TA Leaders they are trying to serve a menu that caters to everyone with their TA strategy.
When you ask what they are focusing on you get an answer that sounds like this, “Well, candidate experience for sure, and branding, that’s really important to us, our tech stack is a disaster we need to figure that out, big project right now with onboarding, looking at some CRM products, new career site in the works, definitely analytics is a priority and working to really get our arms around the employee experience as well.”
What!? Sound familiar?
Their “focus” is to focus on everything! It’s the I can’t see the trees through the forest mentality of focus. It’s also a huge strategic recipe for failing in talent acquisition.
What should your focus be? Well, that depends on what’s important you to and your organization, but it surely isn’t everything. What I find is that great TA shops have one main focus and one or two minor things they’re working on. The main focus might be analytics and to help with that they’re also implementing some new technology and building out what impact those results will have. Those results will then become the next focus, and so on.
Do a few things really, really well, then move on to develop something else that will be world-class.
Agreed. Over the past few years, when we transform / rehash a recruiting function (usually 100+ team members or a recently invested in business) we actually install Service Offerings. Very defined services that have a product feel, and in many cases even an internal bill back fee or external standard price. Doing so makes communicating with the business LESS transactional, oddly enough, mainly because the products either ground the hiring manager to execute a certain way and ask how OR recognize that what they desire may be special and require additional care. That additional care may be considered but usually the hiring manager simply partners appropriately and they are the ones who step up and do additional work. Its fascinating to see it at scale 🙂