Recruiter Chicks

It is not a product or service that can guarantee an organization’s success – at least for the long term – because your competition will catch up.  It is your organization’s talent and their ability to manage and utilize data/information that can give the ultimate competitive advantage.  Last month at SourceCon in Dallas, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on how Sourcing and Recruiting can and should differentiate themselves as a critical business function based on these same concepts.  This is part 1 of a 3-part series based on what I presented at SourceCon12.

Driving Better Decisions

Sourcing and Recruiting are vital to the success of an organization, yet the function is often undervalued and underfunded — probably because we have not mastered the art of capturing and/or analyzing the right data to help us or our organizations make better decisions around talent. If we learn how to do this right we can have influence and demonstrate value by

• Finding/targeting more and better quality candidates
• Improving candidate assessment and recruiting processes
• Making better hiring decisions
• Building better business cases (budget, headcount, …)
• Providing decision support for the function AND the organization

 

Those first four bullets are a bit more obvious — and I think you will find, once you have started to really conquer those areas, your Recruiting function will likely have the kind of credibility to use the data/information we can tap into to help drive other critical business decisions across your company. Like what?  Here is an example of other areas where my past teams have had success…

• Workforce planning
• Succession planning and executive hiring
• Talent management/Career development
• Due diligence during M&A projects and merger integration projects
• Scouting locations for a new development center – domestic and global (think talent market conditions, availability, trends)
• Off-shoring product(s)

 

Yes — even decisions on what products should be considered during off-shoring discussions.  After working with the head of product development to understand how many developers it would take for each product, I used data to demonstrate what we could realistically hire based on our bandwidth, budget, and most importantly the availability of talent — at what we were willing to pay, and  brand awareness in the marketplace.  As a result, informed decisions were made on what products could realistically be transitioned to off-shore location and when.

Without data, you can’t have knowledge — so next Tuesday in Part 2, I will explore both data and knowledge a bit deeper.  On the following Tuesday, in the final part of the series, I will actually step through a past hiring project as a case study on how these concepts were used to fund and drive a successful recruiting project.

I would love to hear from anyone that has other example of business decisions you were able to impact or influence!!

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