Recruiting is Fucking Hard

My relationship with Recruiting & Sales

I'm now 12 months into my role leading a recruiting/talent acquisition team. I never thought I'd tell people I work in recruiting. Not because I didn't respect or admire that field, but mainly because I felt that although recruiting was a necessary function in an organization, it was also an undifferentiated function and simply amplified the G&A expense row in the balance sheet.?Also, saying you work in recruiting at a party doesn't spark nearly as much interest as saying you are a Fighter Pilot or Sports Agent.

Sometimes I think of recruiting the same way I think of the perception of managed services providers (MSPs) from a customer view point. When it's going well or seemingly easy, leaders ask:

"Why do we need support if everything is going well and we don't have issues?"

?Unfortunately, even when it's not going well, the conversation becomes:

"Why are we paying this much if we have all these issues?"

Here are my thoughts:

Recruiting is hard. Prior to this I spent 7 years as an individual sales contributor or sales leader. Similar to many sales organizations, recruiting departments often do everything from prospecting candidates, qualifying them, and closing them. The big difference is velocity. I don't know many sales orgs that look at 1,000+ interested prospects every month. If they are, they are probably wasting their time. For recruiting, there is only so much information to glean from a resume or LinkedIn profile but it justifies a call to learn more. But even if they are fit from skills perspective, culture trumps everything. We don't hire non-culture fits. If a candidate doesn't demonstrate an ability to uphold our values, hiring that candidate does more bad than good every time.

Here’s my advice that no one asked for. Internal recruiting teams should operate as if they are a customer service and sales organization. And recruiting isn't an HR function.

Internally we are Customer Service: Every department in which you hire for is a customer. They have needs, wants, and desires. Your job is to ensure you gain an immense understanding of their business needs and formulate a plan in which you can support them. This includes training your recruiting team, sourcing the proper candidates, and presenting qualified individuals that meet those business needs. When you miss, it's OK, but you need to learn from those misses. It's not about being perfect and you'll still see disqualified candidates. But the goal is to reduce the percentage of disqualified candidates at the department interview level and increase the percentage of disqualified candidates at the recruiter stage.?

For perspective, we receive over 1000+ candidates/month at Caylent. We hold a high bar for being a Caylien and we disqualify candidates for variety of reasons. But of all the disqualified candidates; 87% of them are DQ'd at the application level and 9% are DQ'd the recruiter level. This means only 4% of candidates that we pass through for interviews are disqualified by our department leaders. Customer service requires building trust with department leaders. Speak their language and be ready to influence a decision yes or no.?

Externally we are a Sales organization: I love sales. I love sales process. Important to our success is mimicking?our recruiting function similar to your typical sales team. We have Sourcers (e.g. BDRs, ISRs, SDRS, however you want to call it) that are responsible for funnel creation. They have expertise in outreach to qualified candidates and resume and application screening. Once qualified, our recruiters are responsible for deeper qualification both at a skills level as well as a culture level. Recruiters are our "Account Executives". They are responsible for end-to-end candidate experience, interview scheduling, and closing/negotiation.?

Our recruiters are not commission-based. To me, this is a very important aspect. Again, I love sales and loved earning a fat commission check for selling. But similar to my blog on services sales to software sales, the goal is to sell value. Incentivizing a hiring target influences the wrong behavior where your "customers" become prospects and the goal is to staff the people they need regardless of fit. Having been in this role, I am a firm believer that in-house talent recruiting should be the core hiring strategy.?

When joining the talent team at Caylent, we had 3 external recruiting agencies for hiring. Not only is this strategy costly, but it's difficult for hire the right people. By right people, I mean people who can almost feel the culture and have proper expectations of the role. I struggle with someone outside the organization being able to properly understand what it means to be a Caylien. Today we use 0 outside agencies and grew our Talent team from 4 to 10 in 2022 while hiring 180+ Cayliens at an average cost per hire of less than $4k/hire. I'm speaking generally. There are exceptions to using outside agencies and we plan to use at least one in 2023 that has a very specific niche.

HR and Talent aren't the same: Talent acquisition isn't an HR function. Yes, there are lots of collaboration including benefits, salaries, career progression, learning & development, and more. Talent is it's own thing.?Talent is more closely aligned with sales. Don't let HR people run Talent, let Sales people run Talent.?

Agree or disagree? Doesn't really matter.

I reserve the right to change my mind - Bill Parcells?(New England Patriots Head Coach 1993-1996)

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and not representative of anything else.