Have you ever hired a great candidate only to have their evil twin show up for work? During the interview process you met an individual with great credentials who you knew would fit into your company culture, but this is not the person who is now working for you and you find yourself questioning your ability to screen and hire.
In the many businesses we work with the hiring manager is often a person who has significant other time consuming responsibilities. Hiring is seen as a real problem for many managers, they usually are in a hurry to hire and they don’t have all the skills and tools at their disposal to make an informed hiring decision. How many times have you heard a hiring manager say that if the new hire doesn’t work out in 3 months they will try someone else. This is a signal that the hiring manager really does not know what they are looking for or how to look and is willing to gamble with new employees coming into the organization.
Ok, lets for a moment assume that the hiring Manager does indeed have well developed interviewing and selection skills and that they have also sourced candidates on their own via postings, etc.
Recruiting is about being highly skilled in interviewing and selection but just as importantly, it is about being connected and having a large network and knowing how to access various talent pools out there, especially with the advent of Social Media.
There is a difference between good recruiters and great recruiters. Many of us agree that great recruiters are great networkers and relationship builders.
We are seeing hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals/professional recruiters working together to define and create a combined talent strategy with the ultimate goal of hiring best of breed candidates from targeted sources. Some organizations have come to realize the importance in leveraging the networking capabilities of their current employee population to develop a list of “soft” targets – which develop over time for future opportunities.
As mentioned, excellent recruiters are excellent networkers, they engage people, and have a good solid system of evaluation, ongoing candidate contact and information storage. In other words they have a large list of ‘soft targets’. Our experience tells us that most hiring managers are not very well networked, not all, but most. We see this quite often when managers are in job search mode and they don’t even have 3 or 4 industry contacts to network with!
In recruiting, having the hiring manager with well-honed interviewing and selection skills is actually only 50% of the required skill set. What most organizations are missing is the sourcing capabilities, or being networked into their own industry in a talent identification sense; knowing how to tap into talent pools, where to look, or having candidates in waiting, ready for that that next matching opportunity. Even having well developed interview skills internally in an organization, but going after a smaller talent pool because of lack of sourcing technology and capability can have an unknowingly negative effect on quality of new hires. In other words, you may have found the best candidate, but only in the 10% of the available sources or talent pools you looked at. In fact hiring from a posting is looking at a very small portion of the talent pool out there…the ones who just happened to see your ad, and who were actively looking. Having said this, sometimes you do get ‘lucky’ from an on-line posting.
This brings us to the question – who is in charge of networking and identifying talent pools at your company? More often than not, nobody. This is a full time job. Even internal staff recruiters often do not have the proper time to do this.
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By: Ron Guest, Senior Partner www.twogreysuits.com
