Recruiting According to Steve Jobs
In a recent Harvard Business Review blog I came across this quote
attributed to Steve Jobs: Screw the channel.
Manage the present for optimum performance.
Reinvent the future.
The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this:
Screw sourcing.
Maximize quality of hire.
Become a great recruiter.The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing; it’s about great recruiting. And if you continue to chase the next sourcing silver bullet you’ll wind upexactly where you are today in 5-10 years from now. In fact, those of you who have followed the “chase-the-sourcing-silver-bullet” strategy have not improved quality of hire in the past 5-10 years. The only companies who have shattered this fundamental truth in the war for talent have been those who have a great employer brand. For everyone else, improving quality of hire requires great recruiters.
In a nutshell, here’s my secret formula for hiring great talent:
Great Hires = Good Sourcing
plus Great Recruiting
If you follow this formula you’ll be seeing and hiring far better people.
Here are some ideas on how to reinvent the future of recruiting:- Don’t post job descriptions. These only work for
those who have an economic need to apply. A great ad that leads with the
EVP and emphasizes the impact of the actual work involved will increase
your response rate at least 5X. There is no law, even the OFCCP’s that
says your postings have to be boring. Here’s an article for more on this important
topic, but the key is to attract as many good people at the top of your
sourcing funnel and then making sure you keep the best ones engaged from
beginning to end.
- Bridge the gap. The criteria top
people initially use to engage with a recruiter is not the same as that
used for deciding to accept an offer. Most people, especially if they’re
fully employed, always ask about the compensation, the company, the job,
and location when first contacted by a recruiter. These are very short-term
tactical issues. When these same people decide to accept an offer, they
consider different things, typically the growth opportunity; the impact
the job can make; what they can learn, do, and become; the compensation
and work-life balance issues; and the company and the mission. These are
long-term and career strategy issues. Good recruiters know how to finesse
the conversation to shift the discussion away from the short-term to the
long-term in the first five minutes. As a result, they increase their
opt-in rate on every call and contact. If you don’t know how to bridge
this gap, you’re then forced to find more candidates. That’s why
recruiters who can’t pull this off look for more new sourcing techniques
to find more candidates rather than recruit the ones they already have.
- Follow the 80/20 rule for passive
candidate sourcing. Passive candidate sourcing is all about networking,
not name generation. You need to get 1-2 pre-qualified referrals on every
call to anyone on LinkedIn, then spend 80% of your time calling the best
of these people. The payoff: they’ll call you back and they’ve been
prequalified. That’s why bridging the gap is such a critical technique.
Developing a relationship with a top person takes about 10 minutes, at
least. If the person is not appropriate for the job then the process of
networking can begin. As a minimum this consists of connecting with the
person and then asking about their first-degree connections by cherry
picking the best of them.
- PERP your ERP. The new big thing in
sourcing is auto-connecting your company’s open jobs with your employees’
LinkedIn and Facebook connections. LinkedIn, Jobvite, and Jobs2Web (among
others) are now offering this important capability. This auto-connecting
ability is getting smarter day by day and will represent a huge
opportunity for those who know how to take advantage of this and target
passive candidates. One way is to proactively seek out your employees’
best connections using the cherry picking mentioned above. This is the P
in PERP: proactive. To turbo-charge your PERP and to lead the effort for
reinventing the future, get your employees to connect with the best people
they’ve worked with in the past. Then, sometime in the future, when you
open a new requisition, the best people will be immediately identified
through your employees’ LinkedIn network.
- Minimize your opt-out ratio: aka, plug the leaks in
your sourcing bucket. Top people don’t look for new jobs the same way
average people do. They have different needs, they use different criteria
for applying and accepting, and they move at a far different pace.
Designing your sourcing processes around the needs of top active and
passive candidates, rather than average candidates, will maximize the
percent of top performers who ultimately apply. To get started on this,
conduct a complete process review of your entire sourcing, interviewing,
and hiring process. At each step, ask yourself if this is the best way to
engage with a top-person who is not looking. After about an hour, you’ll
have figured out the 4-5 things you need to do immediately to increase
your end-to-end yield.
- Defend your candidate from dumb
decisions.
If you do all of the above well, you’ll have 2-3X as many top candidates
without having to do much else. Even better, you’ll have gotten out of the
trap of “chasing the next silver sourcing bullet” mentally. However, if
your hiring managers tend to overemphasize skills and/or aren’t very good
at assessing candidate ability and/or aren’t very good at recruiting the
best people to work for them, then you’ll need to coach them every step
along the way. One way to do this is become a better interviewer than your
hiring managers. You’ll never be able to out-yell a hiring manager, but
you can out-fact them. Providing specific in-depth details about the
candidate’s past performance can often override a biased or superficial
assessment. If you do this often enough, find stronger candidates whom
you’ve recruited and can close more top people without giving away the
farm, you’ll soon be recognized as a true co-equal partner in the process.
Screw sourcing.
Maximize quality of hire.
Become a great recruiter.
*Source:
Lou Adler
Sep 29, 2011, 5:01 am ET
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