Working Smarter: 6 Ways to Be a More Productive Recruiter
By Kevin Wheeler – Published Oct 28, 2004
©2001–2008 Global Learning Resources, Inc.
Recruiting is always about too many people chasing too few positions (or too many positions) with not enough qualified people to go around. We bounce back and forth, hiring recruiters, laying them off, and trying to balance everything with contractors or outsourcing. Balance is rarely achieved, and recently the trend has been to ask for more from existing staff.
Can recruiters work any smarter than they currently do? Is it possible for the average recruiter to make any real improvement in how much they can accomplish or in how many positions they can fill?
As we have recently seen, organizations move work to wherever it can be done for the least cost at an acceptable level of quality. In fact, corporate charters and laws require management to do whatever they can to maximize shareholder return. The CEO of Peoplesoft, for example, was recently fired partly because he said that no matter how much he was offered per share by Oracle, he would not sell. The board said that by making this statement he was not exercising fiduciary responsibility to PeopleSoft. It's all about money, in the end.
The recruiting function that thrives will know how to add value to their organization by providing great people in a timely fashion with the fewest recruiters.
So how can a recruiter become more productive? If you could shave an hour or two off your current work schedule every day, you would get five to ten hours a week to focus on other candidates or additional positions.
The manufacturing world lived through the drive for greater productivity for two decades. They grappled with how to be more efficient and raise productivity while at the same time raising quality. Recruiting will have to do the same thing this decade, or organizations will find some other way to get the job done.
There are a lot of ways to work more productively. I have outlined five of them below. Almost all of them require you to do things differently and to think outside the usual recruiting box. You should always ask yourself out-of-the-box questions. Ask yourself why you have to interview everyone, or what would happen if you simply got managers to agree to make offers to the first people who met the criteria for the position without further screening. By forcing some different thinking, you can come up with a dozen ways to save time and money without compromising anything. These are a good start.
1. Simplify everything you do.
Don't make your own work process complex. Cut out the steps that aren't absolutely essential to your success. And I mean absolutely essential. Most of us either create or inherit steps that are, at best, only marginally needed. We often put ourselves into a process unnecessarily.
For example, I know recruiters who spend time conducting a 10 to 15 minute telephone screens of candidates even when their resumes are excellent and they meet all the requirements. These recruiters feel they are adding quality, but I am almost certain they are wasting time for the most part. The candidate and the hiring manager would both prefer a face-to-face interview. When I work with recruiters, we almost always find two or three hours each day where time is being wasted on similar nonessential steps.
I suggest you keep a log of everything you do for each day for a week. At the end of the week, take an hour or so and carefully review your log. Ask yourself what you could have not done and what you could have done differently or faster. If you do this for a few weeks, I guarantee you will find time you didn't know you had.
2. Concentrate your efforts.
Rather than spreading yourself over several candidates and positions, focus on one or two at a time and set a goal on when to have them filled. Focus is powerful and helps you to get spend the time you need to source, screen, interview, and hire people much faster.
When you are dealing with five or six candidates and hiring managers at the same time, productivity goes down. While parallel processing is sometimes more effective (in computers for sure), most humans work better with serial processing ? doing one thing and then the next. Ideally, each recruiter would focus on not more than three types of positions and build the appropriate candidate talent communities to support those. This is what headhunting firms and staffing agencies have always done.
3. Leverage technology.
I know that you have heard me say this over and over, but technology is your friend. Without it you can make some marginal improvements to productivity, but with it you can make big leaps. Rather than thinking about technology as automating the process, think about it as a set of tools to help you and candidates optimize your time.
The recruiting website should be the hub for all your activities. You should use it to deliver pre-screened, and even pre-assessed, candidates. You should move administrative activities such as scheduling, dealing with applications, and processing background checks to fully automated processes.
Many ATS tools offer this kind of automation and, sadly, it is often not used. Anything that is transactional in nature is, by definition, of no value and should be automated or outsourced.
4. Put the candidate in control.
Use tools such as online profilers and online screening, web-based videos, and electronic information about jobs and what they consist of to give the candidate control over the process. Let candidates schedule their own interviews if they meet certain criteria and let them complete online applications. Provide them information, tools and tests and then get out of their way.
Contrary to what many recruiters believe, candidates enjoy being in control and will provide information you need without much complaint. Several organizations have reported getting "fan" mail from candidates who thoroughly enjoyed the sense of control and the freedom from feeling like they are at a recruiter's mercy.
5. Have a talent community you are always in contact with.
Spend any of the time the above productivity suggestions give you to work on developing a community of people you have already screened to some degree and know something about.
These people are most likely qualified to work at your company but will need to go through some final interviews. They should be "in the electronic loop" as to what your recruiting plans look like and why you are still (or no longer) interested in them. This act of informing them via email or other web-based means will build loyalty and make it easy to recruit them whenever you need to.
Very few organizations will ever hire the number of recruiters that worked for them in the late 1990s. The focus for the next decade will be on productivity, automation, and a move toward letting candidates and hiring managers interact directly. Your job will be to facilitate that process, put in place the gates and screens, and keep everything at the highest quality.