Why This Recession Has Been So Tough on Recruiters

Why This Recession Has Been So Tough on Recruiters?

by: Kevin Wheeler

This recession has been merciless to recruiters. I don’t have any statistics, but anecdotal evidence indicates that thousands of recruiters have been laid off and that hundreds of recruiting agencies have closed their doors.

Sometimes the recruiters who been laid off have just been unlucky enough to have worked for an organization that is failing or in an industry that has been strongly affected by the recession. Yet, others have been laid off partly because of performance or attitude. Many recruiters remain tactical, and fail to grasp how strategic their function is to a firm. Many have remained working for leaders and organizations that do not appreciate how much they could contribute to the success of the business. And even fewer have become leaders who take command of the recruiting process and forge a function that competes effectively against other organizations and consistently supplies their organization with quality talent without relying on the use of extraordinary measures.

In my many years in the profession I have only known a handful of these people. Most corporate recruiters become recruiters by accident and leave the profession for some other HR or related field after a short stay. Their stay is a roller coaster of half-completed technology implementations, high staff turnover, muddled objectives, and often leaves a legacy of unhappy hiring managers. To achieve even the simplest objectives, they have to use outside resources, employ a large number of recruiters, or seek to outsource the function.

Unfortunately HR has not positioned the recruitment function as strategic, nor has HR realized that the role of talent manager, aka recruiting and development leader, is emerging as one of the most potentially needed (and influential) professions within the organization.

Generally, those recruiters who lead the effort to supply scarce talent are filled with bad habits and uncertainty that create a revolving door of leadership and produce lackluster results.

To change this and move toward a position of respect and strategic leverage, recruiting leaders should examine their own behaviors and thoughts and see if they reflect any of the habits I list below. If so, now is the time to change.

Bad habit 1: Arrogance about yesterday’s tools and techniques

Yesterday’s successes probably will not be repeated by using the same techniques or technologies. Over-reliance on techniques like cold calling, telephone screening, and resume reviewing are examples of methods that have seen their heyday but are still widely championed and loved. I frequently talk with recruiters who swear that the old ways are the only ways — the best ways — and insist that everything from interactive websites to LinkedIn are just fads.

Tomorrow belongs to recruiters who embrace such emerging practices as social networking, video interviewing, online assessment, and candidate relationship management. Recruiters experimenting with virtual communities and with building online relationships already have a advantage over the recruiter who is tied to geography and to face-to-face meetings. Labor markets are not confined to single countries, work can increasingly be done anywhere, and recruiting is a virtual, global game.

Bad habit 2: Filling requisitions instead of meeting business objectives

Most recruiters are obsessed with filling slots. That is what they have been taught to do without regard to need or effectiveness. They have a hard time discussing the value of positions with hiring managers who often regard the recruiter as little more than a clerk trusted to filter piles of resumes that are supposed to magically be arriving each day because of the organization’s prominence or brand. They are given requisition to fill and they dutifully go forth and do so — even if it is a poorly defined job or one that might be done by someone with a different skill set.

Recruiters who have the respect of the organization’s leadership have to be brave enough and well-enough informed about current issues and business needs to engage in meaningful conversation with a hiring manager. They have to be equipped with knowledge about the organization’s strategic business objectives, the needs of the hiring manager, and the state of the talent marketplace. They need to present numbers and data and make a case for hiring the competencies and skills that will be most effective in meeting the business needs of the organization.

In short, they need to act as a resource and consultant to hiring authorities and show a deep knowledge and understanding of the needs of the business. And, on top of this, they then need to be able to fill the position from a talent community they have built in anticipation of the need.

Bad habit 3: Failing to build new competencies

The emerging competencies for recruiters include the ability to engage people in conversation using virtual tools, the ability to collaborate virtually on projects, to influence hiring managers, and build targeted marketing strategies. These are totally different skills from those that dominated the profession a decade ago. In fact, over 80% of the skills that made a recruiter successful in 1997 are of little value today. For example, interviewing skills, cold calling, and reviewing and screening resumes are not critical skills. Even less understandable are the recruiters who are competent at interviewing and who then focus on getting even better at it instead of on developing skills that might be more useful. It is very easy to rely on the competencies that made us successful and not notice that times change as do the skills we need. Far more important are the ability to write a blog, influence a candidate, and identify the value proposition of an offer.

Bad habit 4: Functional Shortsightedness

More and more of the most strategic recruiters I run into have a background in disciplines such as marketing, sales, and operations. Fewer are coming out of traditional HR disciplines. And an elite handful is morphing into talent managers — people who can understand and integrate recruiting with employee development, competency analysis, performance management, and succession planning. These recruiters are not afraid to try out new approaches, nor are they afraid to experiment and leverage technology. The most innovative websites and process improvements are emerging from recruiting leaders who have no training as recruiters and who have recently entered the field. They are writing exciting blogs, using search engine optimization techniques, and experimenting with interactive websites and tools.

The recession may be tough on recruiters, but it is also forging a new breed of talent expert. Recruiting inside organizations is evolving into talent management and the focus will be on ensuring that the organization has the critical talent it needs to achieve business goals. The talent manager will need to be able to run scenarios, produce numbers, and show where the best talent comes from whether it is developed internally, hired from inside or brought in from outside.

Out of every recession have come new ideas, new functions, and exciting change. Recruiting is at the forefront of many of the changes and for a small number of you it will be an invigorating time of learning new skills and adopting new techniques, habits, and technologies.

About the Author:

Kevin Wheeler,the President and Founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc., is a globally-known speaker, author, columnist, and consultant in human capital acquisition and development. His extensive career, global client base, and research affiliations make GLR a leading provider of both strategy and process. GLR focuses on assisting firms architect human capital strategies. GLR guides firms thorough comprehensive talent acquisition processes and procedures as well as the development of talent within organizations of all sizes.

Suggested HR Strategies to Reduce Effects of the Crisis.

Suggested HR Strategies to Reduce Effects of the Crisis.

Communication.

Dedicate time to positive reasoning. Hold town hall meetings involving staff and management on ways to tackle the challenges of the downturn. Hear the staff out. Take time to listen to the employees for confidence building. During such engagement, declare immunity to cover all staff, in which any staff that offers to critique the organization is insulated from witch-hunting sanctions and victimization. This gives room for sincere invectives and inputs, which may turn the organization around for good. Staff should be encouraged to objectively give their assessment of where the organization was, where it is and where they believe the organization should be and what should be done to survive the recession. After listening to the staff, thank them for valued contributions and promise to work with their inputs. Reiterate the vision and mission statements of the organization. Appeal to staff to do everything possible to actualize the goals and objectives of the organization. They should show more personal and collective commitment, loyalty and dedication to the organization for improved productivity. Seek their support for the strategic action plans. At the same time, strengthen the two ways communication process and dedicate time to feed backs.

Positive team culture.

Stress shared vision, strategies and belief in team culture, improved symbiotic team spirit because of the positive value addition of synergy. HR Managers should at this time radiate and give hope and lift their staff from negativity to positivity. A positive team culture stresses collectivism, and symbiosis. Do well to stress the importance of every team member.

Learning.

Learning is the key that opens the individual employee to knowledge beyond his/her immediate reach. It helps to bring a strong barrier against failures and landmines that may bomb the organization out of existence. It assists the worker to open up to new initiatives, ideas and best practices. Design programmes that put the organization on top of the pack and enable the organization have a competitive edge. Staff may not necessarily be moved from their places of work because of the innovations in as e-learning and intranet services are becoming a way of life. Encourage staff to participate in workshops and conferences to enable them compare notes on experiences and learn from others. Where only a few staff can attend, those who attended should be given an opportunity to share their learning experiences with their colleagues at a forum.

Leadership focus during the downturn.

1. Transparency.
2. Accountability.
3. Courage to effect necessary changes.
4. Training.
5. Proactive strategy.
6. Sacrifice.
7. Incremental changes.
8. Address issues of insecurity.
9. Credible leadership.
10. Mentoring.
11. Coaching.
12. Nurturing.
13. Sifting down process between the effective staff.
14. Walk-the-talk.

Performance incentives.

. General Motivation techniques: Positive and negative sanctions
. Performance Incentive Bonus (PIB)

Review of organizational structure and procedures.


1. Reduce complex structure to a simple structure.
2. Increased autonomy to improve decision making process.
3. Concentration on core areas.
4. Elimination of tribal, political and racial considerations in the appointments of chief executives and recruitment processes.
5. Review of recruitment policies. It is a well known fact that in most parastatals of government in Nigeria, there are periods of employment freeze, unfreeze, refreeze and retrenchment at the fiat of the executive arm of government.
6. Review financial management procedures to optimize profitability.
7. Improve cost culture and asset utilization.

Redefinition of business value system.

This is a moment to re-examine the organization’s business value system, goals, roadmaps, strategies and practices to align with the anatomy and physiology of the organization. The vision of the organization should be cascaded down the ladder so that there will be a total buy-in; into the new ways of achieving the vision even at these difficult times. A shared vision sets the tone for the conscious will power to achieve the impossible.

Succession planning.

The chief executives of many parastatals of government are removed and replaced at will. The high turnover of the top management is the bane of poor performance of some organizations. It makes planning difficult, truncates strategic plans processes and kills any organization’s initiatives to achieve a well tailored succession plan, which is a Sequa-non for organizational success. There should be a reversal of this unwholesome process.

Attitudinal change.


. Paradigm shift in work culture and values.
. Stop the attitudes of being busy doing the wrong things. The aim is to change from busyness to effectiveness as being busy does not connote effectiveness. Being busy and working hard without focus does not translate to results the organization needs to be effective.

Job rotation.


Temporary postings to areas of unsaturated staff.
Equal opportunities.
Redeployment.

Pre-retirement seminars.

Pre retirement workshop.
Incentives for early retirement (discourages swearing affidavits to cheat on age).

Personal income management.

Almost all staff are now very heavily indebted to the banks with slimmer income. It is often said that the “take home pay of workers no longer take them home”. Staff of various organizations have found themselves in this conundrum in Abuja because of the need to purchase personal houses in other to avoid the cut throat high rents in the FCT.

Engage external consultants to talk to staff on personal income management and the need to prepare for retirement. HR managers should help enforce the one-third rule of loans over which a staff cannot approach the organization for loans so that staff will be able to maintain and cater for their immediate families at this critical time.

Proactive HRM.


1. Application of emotional intelligence strategies.
2. Fair HR practice in the use of the carrot and stick approach.
3. Assessment of the competencies of employees and productivity level. Do not wait for the end of year.
4. In-plant knowledge sharing forum should be enthroned to encourage staff to share their knowledge in an in plant workshop. This will assist the organization to source for and maintain a knowledge pool in the organization.
5. Change management. Change will be effected in bits and not radically so as not to further stress the staff.
6. Review the organization’s customer management processes.
7. Enthrone an integrated research and development processes.

Performance evaluation.Enthrone an effective performance management system.

Performance evaluation should focus on:

1. The organization.
2. Departments.
3. Customer service.
4. Teams’ performance.
5. Processes.
6. Individuals.

. Solutions to challenges rather than sanctions, condemnation and the blame trade.
. Seek to be understood before seeking others’ understanding.
. Expectations should be mutually agreed using basic standard benchmarks.
. Consider individual strengths, experience, priorities, inner motivation (is he a loner, extrovert) and confidence in assigning tasks.
. Acquire the skills to align the staff skills and competency to align with the organizational objectives.
. Monitor performance (don’t wait until the end of the year).
. Reward top performers and ascertain collateral damage if any.
. Investigate and sanction poor performance.
. Watch out for the aftershocks of performance evaluation.

Any of the following models could be used to address the performance challenges that organizations may face during the periods of financial crisis:

. The Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton provides the theoretical framework for the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with four perspectives - financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth. The BSC helps the organization to strike a balance between short, medium and long-term objectives. The BSC is a tested tool change processes.
. Ulrich model.


Ref: http://louisbrownogbeifun.com/?p=55

3 steps to positive HR with a recession looming

Demand for HR increases with a recession looming


I’ve just done a quick search on Google Trends of what we, the citizens, are saying. Pop a few terms in yourself. What patterns do you see?

Talk of recession rose sharply in January 2008 and has leveled off.

There has been a lot of talk about lay offs but less about job losses. Semantics possibly, but also talk about what management does to us rather than what we experience?

Increasing searches for HR and a steady decline in interest in leadership.

It makes sense that people are more interested in HR when job losses are in the offing. This pattern seems to be more pronounced in India and it is not possible to tell whether India is creating the global trend by force of numbers, or creating the trend by the direction of its attention, or simply the place with the most pronounced pattern.

The role of HR during a recession

Though it is an important concern, I am not particularly interested in whether there is a recession or not. What concerns me is that we cannot create a good future until we can imagine it.

And I am concerned about the role we in HR play in helping people imagine a positive future. People come to us when they are in trouble and feeling negative. People come to us when they cannot see a way forward. The graphs on recession, leadership, HR, hope and strategy show that people are not even looking for hope, strategy and leadership when they are looking for us!

Our key task

The challenge, for us, is that emotion is highly contagious. Natural empathy will allow us to be infected by our clients’ gloom.

But they don’t want us to share their gloomy predictions. They want positive action from us. They want us to advise them and to act effectively on their behalf. This is what concerns them.

1. What are their options and what can the firm do to help them?
2. What could we do with our skill base that we haven’t thought of?

Practical steps to positive HR in gloomy times
So if we are likely to reflect and perpetuate the gloominess of our clients, how can halt this process and restore a positive, forward looking, strategic atmosphere?

Here are three practical suggestions.

1. Make emotional R&R mandatory for the HR team.
Budget part of the day, part of the week, and part of the month for them to recover from toxic emotions and to restore their sense of what is “good and true, better and possible”. Allow frequent “walks in the woods”.

2. Increase your budget for strategic thinking (not tactical response) and engage the organization in thinking through positive futures for all its staff.
After all, a firm that is healthy and thriving should be able to imagine positive futures for all the skill sets used in their industry.

3. Increase your budget for calming down line managers.
Stress causes defensiveness. We try to control what we have and imagination flies out the window. Stressed managers will quickly create a downward spiral.

And because supporting stressed people is extremely hard work, look after yourself.

Why I am positive
The positive news is that people are generally active and focused rather than passive and reactive. People are less interested in abstract concepts like “recession” and much more interested in “what they are going to do”.

For young people, recession is not a bad memory. They weren’t here during the last one. A minor economic downturn is simply an adventure: something to be explored, something to be understood, something to be conquered and something to be enjoyed in the company of fellow travelers.

My call to action
My call to action: Add an explicit positive agenda to your HR now.

1. Give your staff resources to recover from negativity.
2. Up the time spent on strategic HR and don’t stop until you have a positive vision for everyone in the company.
3. Work with senior managers. When they are glum, they make everyone else glum, who then make them even more moody!
And make sure you have your quote of “walks in the woods”, positive mentors, simple pleasures and good home life.

Are you looking for a mentor or are you available to mentor an HR Manager trying to implement positive HR?


Ref: http://flowingmotion.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/3-steps-to-positive-hr-with-a-recession-looming/