What Your CHRO Really Wants You To Know

The Unvarnished Truth About What The C-Suite Really Wants From Recruiting

Dear Talent Acquisition Leader,

You’ve been lied to. I’m sorry, but it’s true.

How? You were handed the reins of a talent system that doesn't quite work anymore and told to just “keep it going.” You’ve been told that doing things the way they’ve always been done was enough. You’ve been told keeping your budgets roughly flat was enough. You’ve been given “rules” from generations ago and told they still applied.

The rest of the business world has gone through evolution after revolution and recruiting has stayed effectively the same. You gather resumes, you filter and disposition candidates (with a form letter someone wrote before you were born) to find someone who will do the job, then negotiate a price. You own a combative system that treats all candidates like charlatans and thieves, but then you expect the “winner” to become part of your family. The world has changed and you keep things going the way it’s always worked, just like you were told.

And you’ve been told, in ways both explicit and implicit, that this was okay. It's not okay anymore.

This is why you don’t have a seat at the table. This is why hiring managers don’t return your emails and feedback immediately. This is why you are viewed as a cost center. This is why your own clients treat you like order takers.

It’s not okay. It hasn’t been okay for a very long time.

Consider this an open letter from every CHRO and Chief People Officer you’ve ever met. They want more. They need more. They are desperate for you to flip the table and reinvent hiring. They know that recruiting and talent acquisition is the beating heart of the entire company’s growth, but don’t have the heart to ask you to create real change.

So here is everything your CHRO wishes they could say to you.

Change your mindset.

No more 3% change. No more minor adjustments. Throw away optimization and embrace revolution. Don’t be limited by what used to be or what you used to be able to achieve. Think bigger. Think more. Focus on the intent and purpose of talent acquisition rather than the process. If you are making junk, greasing the wheel only makes junk faster. What do you really want talent acquisition to achieve? What do you want people to say about you?

Put it another way: what would you have to do in order to make other parts of the company say, “our talent acquisition team is why we’re growing so well?”

It’s okay not to know if you’re willing and ready to invent the answer.

When you reinvent, you are walking new territory. There is no map. You can’t follow the trail, because you have to create your own. That means there is no “right answer.” You can’t go to the teacher’s edition and find the answer. You have to create your own.

This means not relying on best practices (e.g. “things that worked somewhere else”) because they aren’t you. So design your own best practices. Not knowing the answer means you are in new territory.

When you blaze new trails, it’s not a straight line. There will be missteps (guaranteed!). You might have to double-back now and again. It’s fine, because you have your North Star and are moving towards it and you (and your boss and your boss’s boss) have faith in you to find a better place.

Hiring and recruiting are not the same.

If you see the world through recruiting’s eyes, you will only get recruiting results. But the company doesn’t care about recruiting so much as it cares about hiring (it’s like why the sales team is called “sales” and not “pitching”). So start with the end in mind: what would you change to make better hires? What do you need to do to find and sign better hires? Who else needs to be a part of that process? When do they need to be involved? How can they be leveraged to increase impact in less time?

You can’t change the house by changing the paint: you need to see the whole house and think about what you need each room to be.

You’re only a cost center if you can’t point to your value. So know your value.

Some teams are profit centers and some are cost centers. Both teams have costs, but only one makes profit. So if you want to be seen less as a cost center (you know, the teams who get squeezed, who never see budget increases, who never get strategic or capital spending) and more as a profit center, you have to show ROI: Every dollar put into you turns into $1.10 of obvious value to the company.

Speak your value in a language that the rest of the business understands.

Businesses only care about three things: Making money, saving money and extending the brand to new customers. Everything else is a means to one of those ends. So every time you try and take a victory lap about numbers of hires, about time to fill, about exit survey scores and Glassdoor scores, know that no one in the business cares, because you aren’t speaking their language.

Did a bigger talent pipeline allow your team to save $30k in one month on outreach and marketing costs? Yay! Talk about the $30k! Did your lower time to fill save the company $50k in lost productivity this quarter? Talk about the $50k! Did a new video become the talk of the nurses community? Talk about how many new nurses you reached.

When you speak business’s language, they will begin to see your value.

Budgets come to those who create ROI. With a clear positive ROI, you can have all the money you want.

No recruiter in the world thinks they have enough budget. That company you dream about, with all the resources in the world? They think the yare living on a shoestring budget. No one has enough.

If you wait for enough budget before you make change happen, nothing will ever change. So start where you are and make some impact. The magic is that as you make impact, you’ll be able to show value, which is another way of saying you are creating ROI. When you create ROI, you get more budget. Show the ROI on that budget and you get even more.

“No” is the start of a negotiation with HR, HRIS, Legal, hiring managers, leadership, and the business.

When you create change, people will tell you no. No, you can’t put that on a job posting. No, you can’t tell that story on the career site. No, you can’t tell second-place finishers why they didn’t get the job. No, you can’t just bring me one candidates, you need to bring me five. No, there’s no way to measure the quality of hire. No, we can’t change the ATS that fast.

And with that, you’re done, right? Wrong. “No” is a negotiating position. Ask them why. Ask what could be changed to make the no into a yes. Ask what you can do to bear the burden (and risk) of saying yes.

Nothing is sacred.

Why does TA live inside of HR? Would it make an impact to move it to the CEO or under the business? Why do we use job boards? How do we get employees to want to make referrals? How do we turn from a company begging people to apply to one begging people to stop? How do we get the stories that make people want to apply?

Not every idea is a winner, but you need to start slaughtering the sacred cows before you can discover a better way.

Stop hiding behind a “no” and legal advice from 30 years ago.

There’s a label on my jar of almonds that says, “caution: contains nuts.” Why? Because someone somewhere once sued someone for not stating clearly that there were nuts in their cracker or something and now everyone is terrified so they make crazy labels like that. Some days it feels like recruiting is nothing but labels and process from long ago, things we’ve inherited without asking why.

Why can’t you put a video in your job posting? Why can’t it link to the hiring manager’s LinkedIn? Why can’t you put your mobile phone number out into the world? Why do you need a resume? Why do they have to fill out an application at the beginning of the process?

Push until you understand why, then figure out a way to achieve the same result but with that why.

Embrace smart, calculated risk.

This isn’t to say you should try any crazy idea. Think about what you’re trying to achieve, who it should impact, why it should impact. Think through the ideas and be willing to take calculated risks. No one else is guaranteed success, so why should you be?

Ask better questions.

We ask safe questions. We ask candidates if they were treated fairly. We ask employees if they would be willing to refer candidates. Better questions are scarier questions.

• Ask staff if, knowing what they know about the company, would they want to apply for their job?
• Ask if they would be willing to ask their best friend to work here (and if not, why not)?
• Did candidates get enough from recruiters to fall in love with the employer brand?
• Would the hiring manager be willing to pay $3,000 for this hire? (or whatever the going rate for third-party hires is these days)
• Was the candidate excited to apply at the company or if it was just one of a million applications they submitted?
• If I had to hire 50% more people with the same budget, what would I change?
• If I had to hire the same people for 10% of my current budget, what would I change?

Getting real answers to questions like these is terrifying, but will force you to think bigger, deeper and better.

Demand more from your customers.

When your hiring managers don’t give you enough info at the strategy meeting (you’re not still calling it an intake meeting, are you?), when they flake on their feedback, when they drop the interview last minute and expect you to “figure it out,” this isn’t okay. They wouldn’t treat legal this way. They wouldn’t treat leadership this way. They wouldn’t treat their customers this way.

So instead of complaining, your recruiters need to know you have their back in demanding more from them. You need to be ready to stand your ground and establish service level agreements, baseline expectations on how hiring managers, as core elements in the hiring process, need to behave if they want your help.

This isn’t one-sided. When you demand more from your customers, they will demand more from you.

Demand more from yourselves (because you can do so much more).

Yes. You can do so much more. But step one is rejecting old expectations and processes. Start from a clean sheet and ask yourself, Marie Kondo-style, if this process brings joy or impact. If not, throw it out.

What you’ve got left is the basis you need to reinvent your hiring and show your company and your CHRO what real impact looks like.

The bar is set incredibly high for all the other departments and teams within the company. They are being asked (and expected) to change every single day to find new ways of driving value to the business.

Today, recruiting and talent acquisition is asked the same. So go make it happen.

Sincerely,

Your boss (who’s job you would like to have one day)

Get more like this from The Talent Cast podcast (available wherever you get podcasts).