I have recently read an interesting post of a blogger talking about the difference between a feature and a benefit, where he stated a feature is a shiny car and the benefit is the girls you can attract with the car (I apologize for this bloggers political incorrectness, he is what you call kind of an ass).
The blogger did inspire me to write this post. Whether you are speaking with peers, potential clients and/or employer or you are reading a blog, article or job description related to recruitment; you will typically notice that discussions are usually around issues like:
- We need to invest in our Employer Brand;
- We really need to build a Talent Pipeline;
- We need to adopt Qualitative & Quantitative recruitment Metrics;
- We should focus on making recruitment (cost) Effective;
- We need to make use of BIG Data recruitment;
- Gamification and Predictive Sourcing will help us get the best talents;
- etc.
Though none of the above mentioned are wrong by any means, if however each is employed without a clear strategy in mind of how/what each can help recruitment achieve its goal, then you simply have a nice feature (shiny car), which you hope can achieve the benefit you want (attracting girls). To maximize your chances to achieve the benefit you want, you have to know what type of shiny car you should invest in to begin with.
Let us focus on this benefit aspect of recruitment. Simply put, the benefit of recruitment is; to hire the best talents. To achieve this you will need a (world class) recruitment strategy (the shiny car with all the right features) that can achieve this benefit.
The next question is of course; how can we build this recruitment strategy? There is no one size fits all solution, as every company is different; are you a startup or a multinational?; are you just building a recruitment strategy or already have a mature recruitment team?; are you recruiting in the high tech industry or for the consumers products industry?; etc.
However, all different types of companies nowadays have one thing in common; they possess a lot of data.
BIG data and data driven recruitment have been buzzwords for quite some years now, but how to actually use this data for recruitment is not entirely clear yet to most of us.
This is why I have created a (generic) high level framework (see next page) that helps translate this raw data into actionable insights that should help you guide your recruitment improvement efforts.
There are 3 steps in this framework:
- Define the measures (qualitative & quantitative) that will provide maximum insights into your recruitment processes’ productivity;
- Identify what the results of each measure actually means in plain recruitment terms;
- Research what has been identified by providing a list of possible solutions to solve the issues.
Running through this framework every quarter, (half) year, should help your recruitment organization focus their limited resources on those improvement projects that will have the highest chances of providing the largest benefits to your company, which is: hiring the best talents consistently and systematically!
I am sure that many would argue that this framework does not provide the entire picture for building a world class recruitment strategy and that there are a multitude of “other” measures/KPIs/ ratios that should also be measured like, actual vacancies filled vs open vacancies, time to fill, total vacancies filled, cost per hire and many more. And I completely agree that these measures are also a must have for any recruitment organization.
However, I do believe in the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), which in this context would be to focus on identifying and solving those issues in your recruitment organization that will provide disproportionate benefits first, which is hiring talents. These “other” measures/KPIs/ratios are generally focused on making recruitment more efficient and not necessarily on hiring these talents.
I would love to hear your experiences on this topic as well, so feel free to share!
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