The media has been filled with reports calling the recruitment industry to change their operational methodologies and justify seemingly exorbitant rates. I have also heard hundreds of complaints from candidates about the increasing efforts by organisations to find exact fits for narrowly defined positions. What can these two divergent issues possibly have to do with each other? It might just be symptoms of a real need to change – both by recruiters and client companies.
The Harvard Business Review recently quoted a 2003 survey of executives, saying that "nearly 60% of executives admitted they were not cultivating even enough talent to sustain their current business models or innovate for growth, let alone manage an unpredictable future." It seems a constant that no matter how much time and effort organisations spend on succession planning, they end up needing to find outside talent that has not been pre-identified or planned for.
One of the primary reasons for this is that circumstances change more than anticipated, and whatever talent was previously identified is no longer adequate. It is a part of human nature, perhaps, to always try to chart the future by looking in the rear-view mirror. We imagine worlds that are simple extensions of the one we inhabit, and we rarely anticipate the amount of change that will be needed. Combined with this, companies have narrow position definitions and a lack of flexibility.
In times of rapid corporate change, perhaps it is time that recruiters were placed in a relationship more central to the succession planning process rather than on the margins. Most organisations leave recruiters entirely out of the succession planning process, bringing them in only at the last moment to fill urgent positions. Even at this point, the recruiter may be bypassed. For senior-level positions, organisations will frequently engage a second, specialised executive search firm for privacy reasons or because they believe the regular recruitment company is either not well-connected and knowledgeable enough or too busy to be effective.
There are three significant ways that recruiters can add real value to the succession planning process. First of all, they should be able to provide a competitive analysis of the labour market. Secondly, they should contribute to the overall talent plan and projections on a variety of possible staffing scenarios. Finally, they should create and maintain flexible talent pools.
1. Competitive analysis
I believe it is the bedrock of future effective recruiting. Every profession needs to have a deep understanding of its supply chain. Recruiters need to know the general availability of a range of talent and have a precise estimate of talent depth and availability, as well as the organisation's ability to attract whatever specific, key talent may be needed.
This means using tools such as the recruitment company’s in-house electronic database, the Internet and proprietary research to draw these pictures and keep them up to date.
2. Talent planning
Recruiting has to make a business case to be involved in talent planning at a corporate, divisional, and unit level. This is to enable companies that no good talent leaves the organisation unless everything has been done to retain it. The first hurdle is to simply identify good talent. This is often a one-dimensional process of taking a manager's word for who is good or not, but should also take into account real performance appraisals. A person one manager may find annoying or insubordinate might be exactly the right employee in some other part of the organisation. This is where the external recruiter can play a neutral role, looking at skills and competencies and recommending a transfer or redeployment.
The second part of talent planning is to combine it with the competitive analysis data and draw pictures of how scarce certain types of skills are in your markets. The scarcer the talent, the more effort should be expended in retention and training internally.
The third piece of this planning process should be scenario planning — putting together, with managers, all sorts of possible futures. The more possible future directions you can help mangers identify and the more you can loosely identify the needed talent for each of them, the better you the talent pools that can be created.
Historically, recruiters have put way too much emphasis on looking for people with certain specific skills and talents that have been (or the company thinks might be) successful at a certain job function. These assessments are often completely wrong. A large percentage of South African CEOs don't have university degrees, yet if a line manager or recruitment firm were asked to write a job description for a CEO I am certain one of these would be requirements (a requirement based on no quantitative data at all). Talent planning should be about scenario planning combined with the appreciation that we cannot predict the skills firms will need in the future with any accuracy. And that takes us to the third way recruiters can create a better service offering.
3. Talent pools
Arguably, the highest art of modern recruiting is the constructing, maintaining, and modifying of pools of diverse candidates with a wide variety of skills, backgrounds, and interests. Coupled with this is the ability to match these diverse skills to the emerging positions and needs that exist.
The ability to do this effectively really separates amateur recruiters from professionals. Hiring managers, at a loss to fill positions effectively, will look to the talent experts to help them put together a picture of what a successful employee should look like.
These profiles will have to be based on tests and selection criteria that are far removed from the guesswork and ordinary interviews recruitment consultants do currently. They will require the gathering of performance data from new employees, experimenting with different mixes of skills, and follow up by monitoring productivity and performance over time and then inputting this back into the mix.
This is by no means an easy or fast process, but over-reliance on narrow skills definitions, the endless tinkering that happens to job descriptions, and the lack of flexibility on the part of hiring managers will all impede economic growth and the prosperity of organisations. The time has come for the recruitment industry to play a far greater role in the talent management of key corporate clients.