Hiring and Keeping Good People
1 May, 2004
By: Paul RathblottQ: I am the head of HR for a wholesale business supply company. Our sales are handled by our call center, which is struggling with hiring and keeping good people. We’ve been thinking about automating our staffing procedures -- do you think automating is a good way to beef up our hiring?
Uncertain in Utah
A: Dear Uncertain:
It’s no surprise you’ve caught the technology fever. Without a doubt, technology has some terrific benefits. It’s certainly a major step up from the days when the typical HR routine was having an applicant fill out an application, having a recruiter look it over, and then after an interview the person was hired. But all too often, technology hasn’t met its promise.
There are simple reasons for this failure. Frequently, technology does little more than speed up a process that didn’t work well in the first place. Also, technology often is put into action with unclear or—worse yet—wrong goals. Everybody wants to speed up the hiring process or reduce the paper-burden, but that can be shortsighted when what you really want is to hire quality candidates who will perform better and stay longer. Remember the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel work in a chocolate factory? Their job is to take the candy pieces off the conveyor belt and fit them into the paper holders inside in the boxes. The belt whisks the candy along, but they can’t keep up with the speed. Soon caramels and truffles are spilling all over the place. Here’s a situation where automation not only didn’t help, but it brought the whole process to a stop.
Shopping for technology requires doing some homework. The glitziest technology in the world is worthless if it doesn’t rest on the right foundation. Before you start your vendor search, you should address these critical steps.
1. Meet with the people most affected by the particular hiring challenge—in this case sales—to establish the company’s real needs and then translate them into particular goals.
2. Develop strategies to achieve those goals. You’ll need different strategies for different goals, although some will build on others. For example, increasing the flow of applicants will lead to a better pool of candidates by giving you more to choose from and that, in turn, is likely to increase candidate quality.
3. Design plans to implement your strategies.
Without addressing these foundation issues, it’s a waste of time and money to introduce technology solutions. Unfortunately, most HR people, when given the task of hiring more people, take off running to find bodies. Hiring becomes a numbers game focused on quantity rather than quality.
This is the most common junction of disconnect—and complaint. You’re recruiting the wrong people and they’re quitting left and right. Don’t go searching for people until you’ve met with your managers and operations staff for a clear understanding of what kind of staff they need. Ask key questions, such as, “What are the criteria—the skills, background and attitudes—the jobs require?”; “How will people be trained and motivated to stay?“; “How important is it to fit the company culture?”
With answers to these questions, you can then set goals such as:
• Increase applicant flow
• Separate out quality candidates. (Look for an assessment tool that has well-documented scientific validity studies and one that offers “norming” against your company, not a generic group)
• Reduce the time it takes to fill open positions
• Increase retention of the best performers
• Identify the best-performing recruiters
• Train hiring mangers how to better interview and select
By the way, when was the last time you went back to a manager and asked whether you were delivering candidates that met his or her goals? If you consistently fall short of filling the manager’s real needs, technology will only speed up what you are doing wrong, not correct it.
Skipping this process is why call centers have a notoriously high agent burnout and turnover rate. Automated staffing won’t be the answer to your hiring and retention problems if it doesn’t evolve in response to a blueprint for hiring people who match the company’s aspirations. This mission lays the groundwork for using technology more effectively, not simply to generate more applicants.
A solid approach to providing technology systems is to emphasize the process of first creating the foundation. Without that, you’ll be disappointed when faster doesn’t wind up being better.
