Can a recruiter change its spots? What can we learn from the NFL?

Can a recruiter change its spots?

In recent years I have become an avid follower of the NFL (American Football to the uninitiated NFL.com). One thing I find fascinating about the NFL is the forensic detail that goes into every aspect of running a franchise, in particular player recruitment. Vast scouting networks, physical testing, interviews at player’s homes, the process of drafting a college player is beyond comprehensive.  Teams have been known to interview university janitors to see how they were treated on campus by star name players. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers interviewed 75 people to cross reference the character of their first round pick Jameis Winston.

Making the right decision on a 1st round pick can make or break a general manager’s career. Draft correctly and you could have someone to build a franchise around for 10 years, get it wrong and face another stretch of mediocrity.  Despite this level of vetting the chances of failure are still high. There are 6 rounds in the NFL draft, when reach the bottom of the 2nd round your percentage chance of success is 50%, get to the 6th round and this drops to 30%. Pretty shocking. This led me to thinking about internal recruitment in our own industry.

While the stakes of a recruitment consultant failing to work out are not quite as catastrophic as the NFL the losses are still sizable. If you crudely took ￡6000 per month as the cost of a graduate recruitment consultant then quick math would tell you if they leave after 6 months the cost of failure sits at ￡36k. Add in the opportunity cost and investment to get someone new into that seat and ￡36k has quickly become ￡72k. Factor in relationships they may have formed and the subsequent fallout from this and you quickly get an idea of the true cost. Yet if we are honest with ourselves as an industry very few can put their hand up and say they vet potential hires in significant depth. If you think you do then I refer you to the 75 people interviewed by the Buccaneers and ask you to reconsider.

This got me thinking. Why is that with all their millions and detailed vetting do the NFL still make the same mistakes as we do and what can we learn? To save doing a PHD level study (no time & being incapable the main reasons) I sought to simplify it for my own pea brain and narrowed it down to one thing; human emotion.

The desire and pressures for immediate success lead us to ignore the most telling of indicators; past behavior predicts future performance. In the NFL they have all the information required to make a decision on player character and performance but still take risks on those with a history of arrests, drug problems, injuries etc. That is because human emotion kicks in and the thoughts of the upside start to override the negatives. Within the recruitment industry we make the same emotional decisions but with far less information at our fingertips.

How much stronger would our industry be as a whole if we spent more time vetting character and validating past performance? How much stronger again if we left emotion at the door and hired against these findings? It won’t happen of course but I will leave you with a couple of quotes. From legendary NFL coach Bill Parcells “Make one exception and before you know it you have a team full of exceptions.” and an old scouting adage “Dumb guys stay dumb”. Whilst the latter is a crude statement in 2016 the point is that whilst some traits can be coached others cannot. They are inherent to the individual and if you think you can change them then you can only blame yourself. A recruiter cannot change its spots.

Anyway I am off as just had a great CV drop into my inbox. They got dismissed for fraudulent timesheets but billed ￡500k in a year. Has to be worth a punt. Insert thumbs up emoji