Recruiting

I’ve never been helped by a recruiter. In fact, I’ve started identifying organizations who actively use recruiters in an effort not to waste my time following them. I believe that organizations who outsource or delegate recruitment to be archaic, bureaucratic, and don’t care about their employees.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in people & their individual talents; I don’t believe in outsourcing or delegating recruitment. The typical recruitment process focuses on vetting potential candidates based on skills, past experience, and education. In some creative fields, there are additional material to consider; portfolios, auditions, sizzle reels, etc.

Ever since I’ve been actively working, I’ve been receiving communications from recruiters. This has always seemed contrary to what I was taught growing up; that employees are the key to an organizations success. If employees are the key to an organizations success, why would a business owner trust a person offering recruitment as a professional service? This seems like the one thing a business owner should be vested in. The key to the organizations success.

I’ve recently helped an international organization structure a digital department that is capable of managing all of its web properties, in-store digital signage, CRM initiatives, and all of it’s social media channels. This involved a substantial amount of “recruitment”.

The way I did it is different:

We dissolved the relationship between the organization and the outside recruitment partner. This wasn’t because the recruitment partner was sending us unqualified candidates, or had a substantial turn-over rate; it was because we wanted to try personality-based recruitment.

We stopped focusing on teachable components of a candidate, and started focusing on tacit talent. For this organization, imagination, empathy, and creativity were prized above education, experience, and stated skill sets.

We re-defined how talent is perceived and evaluated within the internal department. We realized that the even if we found someone with years of experience, education, and skills; they may not thrive within the organizations environment or within the specific team.

We started playing games. We started by playing Monopoly, and eventually developed our own card games. We wanted to introduce each candidate to the team, and evaluate the candidates strategic thinking, imagination, empathy, and ability to express ideas with the actual team he’d be working with.

We developed a personality test. We utilized the Jung & Briggs Myers personality test as the foundation; and developed personality types for each team; then the overall department. During this process, we developed our own card game, which replaced the “Monopoly Interviews”.

We recruited based on personality & role. Instead of just recruiting for a role, we (internally) had an understanding of the personality type we were trying to recruit to our team.

Having evaluated a couple dozen recruiters as part of a competitive analysis, I found that the majority believe that skilled individuals just need some time to ‘get used to’ working with a new team. Suggesting that evaluating experience, education, and skills is more important than team-fit.

I believe the opposite is true, as long as you’re evaluating what’s important to the organization. I saw recruiters skimming over, or deliberately eliminating, perfectly good candidates because they didn’t have “enough experience” or didn't have the “right skills” on their resume.

Most of the recruiters that are considered “good” from the general community, are simply less-offensive. Many have worked at an organization, developing connections; then leave the organization, building on the connections, developing a network of talent. These recruiters rely on their network to make introductions and recommendations; taking some percentage or fee from the hiring organization.

These recruiters don’t normally do anything substantially different from each other. They like to think they understand the intricacies of the roles and organizations they work with; but inevitably rely on 2nd hand knowledge of the candidate, a search on Google or LinkedIn, a resume, and an interview.

The results I’ve seen since I started this process at the beginning of the year have been fantastic. Not only have we seen no attrition, the new employees satisfaction results are far higher than before. Additionally, we started measuring employee satisfaction across the department, and have found that existing employees are reporting improved productivity, and job satisfaction.

It’s still early, but if I was biased against recruiters before I dove into their world; I’m that much more biased now. It’s unlikely that I’ll get this heavily involved with structuring an internal department within an international organization ever again; but this was another eye-opening experience I wouldn’t trade for anything.