Monthly Archives: July 2021

The One Reason It Is Almost Impossible to Remake Your Recruiting Department!

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I got asked by a CEO of an F1000 company last week how would I build a Recruiting Department from the ground up if I was given the chance. Clearly, she was not happy with her current TA team and the results.

It’s a fun thought exercise to run through and we were talking socially, so we both played along. The problem is, in enterprise-level organizations, you never really get the chance to start from scratch. Anyone who would come in has plenty of legacy issues to deal with: technology, process, and the biggest issue, the people.

The people on your TA team become the biggest hindrance to you truly changing your talent acquisition function!

Why?

Not because they’re bad. In fact, some of them might be world-class. It’s because, especially in large shops, everyone is empire building! Okay, you want me to reinvent Recruitment Marketing, well, it starts with “Me” at the top, and then how many of my current team do I keep, and how many new heads do I get, and…

Recruiting Ops, Sourcing, Recruiting tech, etc. Every single leader you have has a number of goals and one of those goals is to grow their team! If you bring all of these people together, let’s say it’s you (the biggest leader) and all of your VPs and/or Director levels (let’s say 5 of those). If you truly started from scratch in your design, immediately you might not need three of these legacy leaders.

It takes a very, very, very, special person to throw themselves on the chopping block and say, in the new organization, I’m not needed! Like this is a one in a thousand type person. The rest all will work not with an open mind to what is best for the organization, but what is best for me and the organization, as long as the two things are running parallel to each other.

True story

If I do 100 recruitment consulting gigs, 99 of those times the leader will tell me how great the team they have is. Yet, they are totally failing!

They are open to change anything, except let’s be careful when we start talking about people. They’ll go to great lengths to save most of their people, even when facing team failure and ultimately probably termination.

“You can change the people, or you can “change” the people” – was a phrase a great leader use to love saying to me. Meaning, you can physically change people. Fire some, hire new ones. Or you can actually change people and help make them better. Both take a lot of work, but not “changing” the people, isn’t the right answer!

Back to my CEO friend and starting from scratch…

So, I reminded her I wrote a book about this very thing! But like most leaders, she just wanted the highlights. I went through at a high level what I would do, and she would jump in and say, “oh, we can’t do that, “Mary” is good and that’s her role…”

That’s when I became the thing I hate the most. Tim Sackett, Life Coach.

You asked me what I would do to remake your recruiting department. You didn’t ask me to remake your recruiting department with all the current people. That’s impossible. Mary might walk on water and maybe there will be another role for her, but I don’t need her the role she’s in, in my “new” recruiting department.

What we really discussed was how far could we use technology in today’s modern recruiting and where do people then fit within that modern recruiting tech stack? There are definite roles that are much needed, but there are also roles that I think could be done away with if technology was fully utilized.

It’s a fun leadership experiment to have with your team if you’re looking for certain behaviors. You’ll see immediately people trying to hold onto their territory, protecting their empire, not really even comprehending they really aren’t trying to remake your function, but only trying to build and maintain their empire.

The First Sign You Suck at Hiring!

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Hiring people to work for you directly is probably the single hardest thing you’ll ever have to do as a manager of people. To be fair, most people are average at hiring, some are flat-out kill and probably 20% are awful at hiring.

The first sign you suck at hiring is your new hire turnover is an outlier in your organization, your market, or your industry.

So, what constitutes new hire turnover?

I find most organizations actually don’t measure their hiring managers on new hire turnover but use this to judge effectiveness on their talent acquisition team. That’s a complete joke! That is unless you’re allowing your TA team to make hiring decisions! New hire turn is a direct reflection of hiring decisions. Period.

When should you measure new hire turn?  Organizations are going to vary on this based on your normal turn cycles and level of the position. Most use 90 days as the cap for new hire turnover. That is safe for most organizations, but you might want to dig into your own numbers to find out what’s best for your own organization. I know orgs that use one year to measure new hire turn and orgs that use 30 days.

How do you help yourself if you suck at hiring?

1. Take yourself out of the process altogether.  Most hiring managers won’t do this because their pride won’t allow them. If you consistently have a high new hire turn comparable to others, you might consider this, you just have bad internal filters that predispose you to select people who don’t fit your org or management style. Don’t take it personally. I suck at technical stuff. I shop that part of my job off to someone who’s better. You might be an exceptional manager of your business, but you suck at hiring. Shop that out to someone who’s better!

2. Add non-subjective components into your hiring process and follow them 100% of the time. Assessments are scientifically proven to tell you what they’re designed to tell you. If you follow what they’ll tell you, you’ll be much more likely to make consistent hires. If that assessment gives you better hires, then keep following it, or find an assessment that does give you that consistency.

3. Analyze your reasons for each misfire hire. Were there any commonalities in those? What I find is most poor hires stem from a hiring manager who gets stuck on one reason to hire, which has nothing to do with being successful in your environment. Example: “I want high-energy people!” But then they work in an environment where they are stuck in a 6X8 foot cube all day. It’s like caging a wild animal! 

Numbers don’t lie. If you consistently bomb your new hire turnover metrics, it’s not the hires, it’s you! In the organizations where I’ve seen the best improvement in reducing new hire turnover, it was in organizations where new hire turnover metric results were solely the responsibility of each hiring manager, and nothing to do with talent acquisition.

It’s the 80/20 rule. 80% of most new hire turn is usually coming from around 20% of your hiring managers. Fix those issues and ‘magically’ your new hire turn improves.

In HR (and life) the story that wins becomes the truth!

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In HR we hear a lot of stories.

We love to tell ourselves we are hearing the truth from one side and a lie from another side, but the reality is both sides are stories with a little truth and a little lie built-in. We then ‘measure’ who we feel is telling more truth than lie, and that side becomes the full truth.

Throughout history, this plays out. The winners of war decide what the truth is, not the losers. One side is good and righteous, one side is bad and evil. Before the war, both sides were just trying to make it through the day and make their society better. Truth.

We fire someone because they harassed another person. That person is a bad person. The person who got harassed is a victim and is a good person. The problem is, that’s not really reality, is it? Many times the person we fire is actually a pretty good person and the victim is a piece of garbage. But, the winner gets to decide the role they want.

We fire an employee because we are told by their manager that they are not performing well. We trust our manager. We have to it’s what our structure is built on. If we didn’t then what are we really doing? The employee claims they weren’t trained properly, they weren’t given good direction, they were put in a position to fail. You’re fired, you’re a bad employee. You lose, you don’t get to decide the truth.

It’s one major reason why I tend not to really care that a person was fired from a job. The reason probably matters. I don’t want to hire someone who embezzled from their former employer or some other major offense, but if it’s performance, let’s talk. I’m willing to talk because I know there are always two sides to the story. It just happens that this candidate lost their last story, but they might win the next.

It’s important as HR pros and leaders we understand this concept, not just for hiring, but also that we understand most times we don’t deal in complete black and white wins and losses. In HR we deal in the middle, in the gray. Once we make a determination, we are making a determination of ‘win’. We are validating one story over another. We like to tell ourselves and our leadership that this one story is the truth, but it’s really just another version of a story.

So be careful this week as you decide which stories will win and which ones will lose. Truth can be a pretty powerful thing even when it’s just a story.