Courage Quotient: How many organizations have the courage to hire and retain the best people?

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When it comes to hiring - most of the organizations set up noble mission of hiring the best of the best – at least to hire best people by their respective standards and no organization in the world disagrees with the fact that hiring inferior quality leads to destruction of the organization. In same way every organization tries to put together all possible measures to retain them, the Irony is it is the best they lose every year, and add “not so great people” to replace the best. I think organizations end up in this paradox because of the below reasons. It will be good if HR teams monitor and put a check otherwise all the efforts will go in vain.

“The sin called – “he is overqualified, let’s not hire him”

All of those who are part recruitment would relate to this statement really well because they  would get to hear this sentence frequently, Organizations reject candidates because someone has couple of years of more experience than what the job description says, their argument would be “He/she will be expecting a bigger role” and we cannot keep them happy. Sometimes feedback will be like “he has done better things already I don’t think the work we have will excite him” It could be true in some cases, but the crucial point that the interview panel/Organization miss here is that particular candidate will not remain in the same role over period of 2-3 years, he/she will grow and need to grow to help organization better. So keep the future needs in mind and hire people. Hence it is worth enough to hire such people that will help organization in the long run even it means paying 2-3 lakhs more than the usual salary.

Action from HR Teams

Keep a track of number of rejects under the heading of “Over qualified” every month, talk to the interview panel and later find out for what they might suit better.Have courage to create positions/Roles for such candidates who are really good, don’t lose them  

Sometimes best things do not come so easily

Great people are most sought after too, hence it becomes difficult to attract best people in to the organization, most recruitment teams settle for compromise here because we have the pressure of filling the role and they ant be blamed for the same. It is the organization who should support Recruitment teams to escape from the routine of SLAs and peruse excellent candidates, give a pat on the back to recruitment team for each great hire made. Leadership teams should identify at least few open roles/positions as “does not fall under the SLA’s – get the best” and gradually the culture hiring the best will become usual, recruitment teams will not succumb to the pressure of SLAs. If organization don’t show courage to do this. They would have to live in a scenario where people are not scaling up and not delivering expected results.

Interviewer’s insecurity closes doors for rock stars

All recruiters agree with me with the point that there are bad interviewers not because they conduct interviews in a bad way but because they get scared by bright candidates and reject them. It is wise to deal this issue from the other side.

Think once, have you ever recognized a good interviewer? If so how frequently? This does not happen in organizations. This is a costly ignorance; applaud people who are getting “best material” in to your organization. This might sound idealistic but think again once who would not like to get noticed for doing good. A thank note to a good interviewer means a lot, that sends a right message to rest of the interviewers.  You could ask me how exactly I think this is possible. Well end performance appraisal season J is the key time here; prepare the list of “great performers” who joined a year back - now go back to your files and check who interviewed these guys, that’s all, if you see a consistent trend with a particular interviewer selecting best performers award him. In the same way if you find a trend between an interviewer and poor performers caution them. It consumes some time for sure but it is worth it and volume of the recruitment and number of employees does not cause a problem at all.

Retention is high, great! But who are you retaining?

It is great to have high retention rate /low attrition rate but it is important see who are we retaining? Retaining 50 B players will not be equal to retaining 2 A players. An organization losing A players will become a huge bunch of mediocres where there is no innovation. So while doing attrition analysis, do try to know on how many rock stars have you lost this year as per previous year’s performance rating. Dont worry even your attrition rate is 30%, but worry a lot if  5-10% of them are “great players”. Retaining “Rock stars” does not mean spending more money always and giving to them regularly. In most cases it could be done by just moving them in to the team they want, changing their work, changing their manager.

Do you have the courage to listen to the outgoing employee?

We all say oye yes! We do exit interviews religiously for all leavers and document the summary of them. But what we do after that is the big question, exit interview is just a formality and the moment an employee resigns in most of the cases that employee becomes insignificant; the feedback he gives becomes even more insignificant. It is true that leaver throws out their frustration during exit interviews; it is also true that they give useful feedback because there is no need for them to impress anyone anymore. HR team should have courage to face the criticism from leavers and pay attention to them, think honestly to bring their feedback in to the strategy.

Two crucial aspects HR should focus on - measuring value addition and stop taking undeserved blame

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I was just a college pass out when the most famous (now) critic of HR Mr. Keith H. Hammonds opened up his thoughts on HR professionals and HR as a function to the whole world. I was shocked when I came across this article later, started doubting my decision making skills – did I make right choice by choosing HR as my career? But as time flew I forgot about this like any other young graduate fresh out of college. But now after having spent good time in HR, I strongly feel his criticism is not all true, but there are genuine issues we still need to address and improve on, tragedy is after 8 years of his article we still look the same in few of the areas he wrote about.

It is extremely crucial now that we focus on these areas to sustain this extremely dynamic world where the war for best talent is getting fierce day by day and taking an ugly, brutal shape. The two critical aspects HR should focus on are – creating more value, measuring that value and stop taking undeserved blame.

Does HR really add value? What kind of value is that and how can we measure it?

World called HR and still calls a necessary evil, a bureaucratic setup which kills flexibility and innovation. Few organizations saw and continues see HR as the living system which keeps everything intact, which adds life to organization, which prepares and leads them in to future. As a matter of fact most of the successful companies today have most successful HR department. So then why there are divergent perceptions, where does HR fit in to the pyramid of value addition? Take an example of a mother, who is a “home maker” ( not mean to say mother can’t earn, it is strictly about a home maker) , she ensures everything is in place at home and makes everything available for the family, she guides, consoles, sets up guidelines and code of conduct at home, brings up children, takes very key decisions, helps in decision making, the only thing that misses here is she going out and earning money, it is done by the “father”. So a home maker mother does not earn money on her own but helps the whole family to earn it. I think in an organization’s scenario HR does the same job of home maker (excluding HR consulting, where money generation is directly related), while HR does not earn money on its own it helps the whole organization in doing that. HR helps the organization deliver by delivering in its own area. In business return/Money/Tangible value takes the ultimate priority, where in a family set up there are much more things attached to it than just return/Money/tangible value addition, that is how I think people start perceiving HR as a cost center, non-value adding function. The other side of the coin most of the HR professionals perceive their function as supreme and argue that without HR an organization cannot survive or it will not exist, the fact of the matter is HR exists because of business, and ultimate decision making rests with the business itself, HR for sure will play a key role, but cannot decide what to be done over and above business’s decision, when I say business I meant the one who funds, runs the business with an objective. Coming back to the point - work of HR and its value addition touches every aspect of an organization like the mother at home, so you cannot fit HR at a particular level and spot on the pyramid. It is everywhere. So the parameter for measuring HR value addition should always be what impact its presence will have on the organization rather what felonies its absence can cause.

So when HR is everywhere obviously it becomes extremely difficult to measure its value addition, however we all know what major areas in  HR  makes it as the living blood for the whole system. They are Talent Acquisition, Training & Organization Development, Performance management, HR operations.

Adding bodies or pumping in Talent?

Talent acquisition attracts a great deal of attention whenever somebody wants to evaluate HR effectiveness, but traditionally for years the way we measure recruitment effectiveness by number of positions filled, time taken to hire, source mix  which does not reflect the real value addition of recruitment function. Parameters mentioned earlier reflects activities performed by recruitment team not the value, take an example of driving a car – if you drive a car with a speed of 100 Km per hour and reached a place in 30 mins, that is a great driving performance, not the real value, you will know value when you compare with what is that you wanted to achieve by driving, if you have reached a different destination that of you wanted to reach the effort is mere waste. Hence while measuring the value of recruitment we should get in to the very purpose of recruitment, why do we recruit people? to add great talent in to organization so that we deliver a great service/product. If this is not met, you probably are not recruiting the talent your organization wants, now how can you measure the value here, would you attribute every product success or profitability of the organization to recruitment? Answer is no, there are much more critical aspects which contribute to success and profitability. It is wise to take the data of employees recruited in a year and analyze – what percentage of people left early, how many non-performers you have from this group (for both cases they could be various other reasons why people leave, can’t perform – you would know those reasons for sure – so do not include them while measuring the value of recruitment), how many of these employees are star performers, what percentage of these have been already identified having potential to move in to the next level or perform more difficult job, take feedback from manager against each role he filled in his team, as to check is he able to get the what he wants from this resource, he might have recruited one with an aim of adding a new skill, if that skill is not added, your recruitment failed of course there is a contribution from that respective manager too for that failure. After having done all this exercise identify those areas where recruitment team needs to focus for next year, pat on their back for the areas they have done well.

Performance management – shake its fundamentals; make it fairer, understandable

I have a fundamental problem with the whole idea behind performance management, the entire HR fraternity is in love with bell curve and forced ranking may be because it looks to be scientific and more because it serves various purposes, like it helps identifying and cleaning up bottom-line, it also helps manager to satisfy their vengeance. So essentially with the model what are we expecting from employees, we are clearly telling look folks only 20% of you will make it in to the top performers so you must compete and do better than your colleague. But imagine what happens to the whole team performance, what happens to the organization, that’s where organizations fail and also results in your best guys leaving. Imagine if everybody on Indian cricket team competing to do better than the other rather striving for team’s success, will we ever win? just imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Virat kohli competing to score a run more than the other, that will result in one guy not giving strike to other, will we ever win. Might looks funny but this exactly what happens on the floor, employees look really amicable and helping each other but majority of them will not share the big ones he is working on because he does not want to give share in the salary hike/bonus to his colleague. It is time we re look at the overall philosophy of performance management and change it in a way that drives team’s performance, like let the whole organization decide what are the most valuable deliverables they had for this year – award all of those who are in those projects, couple it with 360 degree performance management for every employee , so that everybody knows and cognitive of the fact that his colleague’s feedback has value so he/she better cooperate and co-exist to succeed, not in way of Quid-pro-co, any way each feedback should be justified with examples and tangible activities. Take feedback from every employee on performance system at the end every performance management cycle. Improve, innovate it consistently.

Training or capability building?

I think this is the most difficult part when it comes to measuring value, like the recruitment most training departments traditionally measure the activity rather than value, you speak to any L&D professional they talk about how many employees participated in a training program, what percentage of total employees they covered in a year, how many hours each employee spent in training which is again a transactional piece. It is like a person going to most sacred place 1000 times and remain as what he was before, you might visit amaranth 1000 times in your life time but what is the use if it does not make you a better human being? Measuring the value of training department should start from asking are we doing the right kind of trainings that organization really needs?Do an objective analysis do not do trainings that does not add value , over a period of time it will reduce the importantance of whole training function altogether, after every training we ask for feedback asking how was the trainer, environment, facilities provided rather asking the important question – where do think this training will help? Which part of your job you will be able to perform better after this training?

Let us go back to the point of how do we identify right set of trainings to be delivered over the next year, take an example of a software firm having a product, at every release which part of the product you will find more bugs? UI side, Database? That is the area you exactly need to focus and get your resources trained. Track individuals who attended training whether he/she able to contribute in a better way in the areas he got trained, does he still needs someone helps even after getting trained? If this happens on a large scale it is time to look at the whole training function and start fixing it.

HR is not changing at the speed the environment it operates in changing, we need to catch up with the pace and keep reinventing ourselves, after all said and done sometimes HR role looks like a wicket keeper in cricket , you catch 99 balls and drop one, the whole stadium stands up and says his wicket keeping skills are bad, the only way to stop this undeserved blame is keep updating ourselves and being proactive before business comes back to us.

No Recruitment tool is ineffective unless the Recruiter and no tool can be a substitute for the excellence of a Recruiter

Image courtesy -Istock Photo

Let me first answer why I made that statement? Well, whenever I spoke to my friends who are in Recruitment on why their team failed to recruit, the response was like I mentioned below

·         Our salary bands are very low – we could not attract candidates with the salary we are offering

·         We just have one jobsite and we keep seeing the same resumes of those who are already interviewed

·         We do not have social media presence – no Linked account ,no Facebook page

·         We recruit for  very niche skills – not many candidates are available in the market

·         Our recruitment process is flawed – candidate engagement becomes nightmare

And the list goes on – but almost all the time they missed the actual problem that either “we don’t have good recruiters or the organization is not allowing them to channelize their efforts in right direction “

Contrary to the above whenever I asked why you could succeed - there was a simple answer that “we have an excellent set of recruiters”

Now how do we take this problem?  Is the solution to this firing bad recruiters and hiring the best? answer is no. You need to go much deeper than the quick fixes, first start looking at your recruitment mechanism as a stranger to it, pick up the job of cleaning it and make it more flexible, understandable, and practical. To be precise design it to suit the needs, just to suit the needs.

You need to start the job with 3s of recruitment – Strategize, Source and Sell

Strategize:

Service your weapon well in advance to the war – back up every opportunity follow up every challenge

Every recruitment manager needs to withdraw himself from everyday transactional issues sit back and think chronologically – write down the plan

      What are we expected to achieve? Let us say – you need to fill 300 positions in next one year. that is quite a task considering the everyday challenges you will have, now prepare the breakup of the skill sets and at what level you need to hire? Another most important thing is what is your offer decline percentage historically , let us say it is 20%,  add another 5% to it – offer decline percentage is now 25% - which means your team needs to make 300+25% =375 offers in next 9 months , considering average notice period in Indian market 3 months. Keep in mind on the end of 9^th month you complete making 375 offers otherwise you might not be able to onboard them with in time.

375 offers in an year is nothing but you are not going home without making at least one offer a day, considering you will have a day where you might get more than one offer if you are conducting recruitment drives, net 45 offers every month

B)      Consider the resources you have :

Let lion do a job what it is good at and vulture its own: What is your team size? Do you need to recruit more?  what are their strengths and weakness so that you will put them on right Job, most of the managers go wrong here, they will assign equal number of positions and try to balance with equal level of complexity – which is completely wrong, all recruiter are not same, few are good at doing mass hiring on less complex skillsets and junior roles, few are more interested and motivated to work on niche skills.

Are you rich? Or a popper? : look at the budget you have, too what extent you can depend on Consultants? If you can have 30%, go back and set the objective of your team as not greater than 25%, believe me they will achieve. I know of teams who achieved it even when they were recruiting at mad pace – I myself a witness and driver of it.

Don’t succumb to the pressure of time, it will eat you:

I know of managers who made the mistake of driving recruitment through vendors  aggressively to meet the targets and ended up at 40 to 60% vendor dependency at the end of the year – these figures won’t please at the end of the year, be careful  the moment you cut lose the boundaries drawn you will lose control.

You are a hunter you should know where your prey is:

Most interesting and complex job is to identify where are these set of people you want recruit, prepare the target list of companies by location, this target must not be built just based on the availability of skill set you must be cognitive of the fact whether you can afford them skill set+salary ranges matching makes your target list of companies – attack them continuously

Waterfall or agile: define the process of recruitment – it might sound crazy but 99% of the recruitment teams either follow waterfall or agile, I know of companies who are still following waterfall – they built COEs with in recruitment team – Sourcing team, Recruiters, offer management desk, the dangers of this method are you need to have more people in your team to avoid bottle necks ,your recruiters needs to do multiple things , he/she receives resumes from multiple people, they get stuck at recruiters desk  because he/she can’t process resumes at the same pace these multiple channels are sending, to avoid it you need to have sufficient number of recruiters, but you may not need them in the long run – which will result in firing them later  , not advisable hence safest method is agile – let them own the complete process, but you need to optimize it – you might not want your best sourcer waste his time talking to the candidate on offer – then let him source, process till the end and hand over to the recruiter at offer stage ,this puts less pressure on your recruiter too, making an offer not a very time consuming thing.

Source:

It is a challenge too, not just an opportunity - Recruitment management becoming much more complex with the emergence of social media. Today every recruiter has the pressure of recruiting through social media, because your company has spent money on acquiring social media tools for ex: LinkedIn corporate account which costs more than your regular jobsite subscription. So you need to have a comprehensive sourcing strategy which saves your team’s time and quite effective.

Manage the paradox: ‘’Quite a lot of promising candidates does not know there is an opening which suits them, and we are struggling here to recruit”

because they are not just on the jobsites, not all of them are actively or desperately looking for a job change, they are on LinkedIn waiting for a mail from a recruiter, they are on technical communities suggesting solutions to complex problems, they are checking with their friends to let them know if they come across any good opening. How do you reach of these scattered folks, biggest problem is you don’t have time and patience to go to each place and post these openings, it is much more difficult to track resumes coming from various sources because you won’t get to know unless you login to it, time waste

Get yourself a promotion on to PAN from the firesJ.

Buy a recruitment management system OR get an open source tool there are quite a lot of them it is worth it. If you have a tool which enables you to post jobs at different sources with single click and route all applications to once place, it saves golden time worth of 375 offers J

90% of your most promising candidates won’t apply for the job that is not the trend in India, you need to find and talk to them:

Most of the talented, promising candidates won’t apply for  jobs themselves ,not only because they are confident of getting a good job but also because applying for a job is considered to be as submissive as begging in India. I personally wish this trend should wither away to make the job of recruiter little more peaceful. Recruiters also need to be found guilty for it; we never treat a resume reached our inbox without our initiation valuable. Let us not get in to that discussion now. How I do find them?

Recruiter is a wine taster, you don’t have to know the science behind how wine is made – all you need to have is good “tasting buds”

First thing build a keyword document covering all the skills you need to recruit; this will help your entire team including the one who does not understand a particular skill set. All Jobsites and search e engines are like lockers you need to try different combinations of keys. 60% of the Job will be done the moment you spot the right resume so generate as many keywords as possible. Most of the recruiters/sourcing executives go wrong here while trying to understand the technologies, and come up with keywords, they try to develop a deeper understanding, that is not required at all – you are a recruiter, you are not expected to write code- you just need understand high level of it why something will be used – during the course of the time you will much more comfortable. Remember   you job is to find people quickly not becoming a techy J

Once you are done with the first draft of keywords, start sourcing – you should drive your teams in way that they exploit all the job sites so that your consultant will be not paid just for submitting a resume, what your recruiter missed out of laziness. Keep adding more key words to the documents as you progress – do this and see what difference it will bring over a period of one year.

Sell:

Selling is not difficult because you are dealing with human beings with minds and hearts, but because they have smart phones and they have linkedin, Facebook accounts:

Gone are those days where you pick up the phone and keep talking to candidates boasting about your organization and the job, with one click on internet your sales pitch goes for a toss if you lied. So throw away the idea of selling an ice cream to an eskymo, your sales is no more one to one. Every recruitment team  should have a social media strategy, the sum of what is there on the internet is your brand name and that is what exactly your candidate believe, so buckle up create a Facebook page, twitter, have nice reviews on mouth shut glass door, keep posting the achievements of your organization. Go for a Youtube video might costs a 3-4 lakhs but it is worth enough , to be practical 4 lakhs is equal to fee paid to consultants to recruit 4 people.

Know what your selling: Few like bikes, few like cars other few like supersonic, few are non-vegetarians others hate non-veg. So don’t try to speak the same with every candidate, it might result in offer decline later because he is not impressed. Never hesitate to provoke or intimidate a tough candidate I remember few cases where I called a candidate and said: you are wasting your time in your current organization I think you deserve better” Selling is not talking more; it is forcing the candidate to believe you. This will help you to negotiate offer better too.