by John Wentworth
PROBLEM: Jobs need to be filled on specific dates. Early and late are both bad.
SOLUTION: Know how long each type of search takes for each organization in your company. Back-time from the target fill date to when you should start. Start on time. Manage each search to the timeline so they end when they are supposed to end.
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It was hard getting through the door into the lobby, so many people had arrived at the same time. They were all looking a little lost and a little expectant. They were all new hires.
Bob, the recruiter, looked at all the fresh faces with pride, as if they were his children. In a way, they were. He had recruited all of them.
He remembered the day he got the requisition: 15 customer service representatives. He wasn’t that sure how he was going to do it or where they were going to sit. He didn’t count that many empty desks in the customer service area. But he went to work to get all 15 hired as quickly as possible. It seemed like a miracle to him, and he was nothing if not proud of himself. All 15 were starting today.
He had to pull teeth to get it done. Finding candidates was hard enough. Screening them was harder. In fact, he had cut the interview time in half for many of them because they were so backed up the receptionist had complained that visitors could not make their way through the crowd to get to her.
“And the hiring managers!” Bob thought to himself in the course of his self-congratulatory reverie. He had lots of trouble getting his candidates interviewed. Hiring managers were unwilling to see six in a day. “How do they expect me to fill these jobs if they don’t make themselves available?” he had thought at the time. “I’m pulling off a hiring miracle and they are crabbing about having to miss a meeting.”
But here they were, all hired. Having greeted each by name and welcomed them to his company, Bob went back to work.
By lunch, he was fired.
There were only eight desks available. The others were to be delivered, along with the space built out and the wires run, in about three weeks. But the new desks were not there today, so new people had milled around, resenting those who had the presence of mind to sit down first. The customer service management was not happy. Two of the new people thought the situation was so unprofessional that they quit. Five more quit over the next several months, the victims of Bob’s short, and incomplete, screening interviews.
Bob went out and got drunk. He got so drunk that he got lost going home and spent the night in his car. He woke up to the sound of a group of school children wondering loudly who the man was in the car who looked half dead.
Bob had committed one of the cardinal sins of recruiting: he had failed talk to his client. Had he, he would have learned about when they could accept the new hires and he’d still be employed.
Most recruiting is too slow, not too fast, so the metrics-mavens have insinuated “time-to-fill” into recruiting as a significant benchmark for good recruiting. The implication is that quick is good.
Quick is not good. Slow is not good.
On-time is good.
Recruiting is a service that needs to be tailored to the needs of the “client”, the hiring managers. If they need someone on May 12, they need them on May 12, not the 11th or the 13th, and the 12th is when that person should show up to start work.
The trick to that kind of recruiting is to keep good records about how long similar hires take for each organization and to use that information to know when to start a search. If it takes six weeks, start six weeks before the target fill date. Then manage the search against a timeline so it ends on time and the new employees are there they day their boss wants them.
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