What has Created the Hiring Confusion Companies Experience, Part Two

When a job posting fails to attract the right candidate, the company may go to the next level of hiring. They employ several recruiters. The selection process and logic most companies use to choose recruiters, is an entirely separate subject I will address in another article. Typically, the results of most recruiting efforts are not too dissimilar to the results of the job positing. Sadly, recruiters typically provide their client with candidate information that is from previous searches and their hope is one will be close enough the client will want to see them and there is a much better way.

By the time the company has gone to recruiters they are typically willing to settle. If they interview a person(s) who might work out; they decide which candidate is the most likely to accept an offer.

The focus goes from solving a business problem to solving a hiring problem. They solve the hiring problem, but many times it did not solve the business problem, because they did not hire the type of person they really wanted.

For companies to solve this, they have to become recruiting companies. What is that? They do not just fill jobs but attract top talent. Understand the best are not hanging around job boards or looking at company websites. Companies have to stop using dated recruiting practices and change their hiring attitudes.

Instead, create attraction factors for your company. Use specific knowledge. Understand general knowledge generally fails. Do not use annual reports for recruiting. Do not use marketing materials and do not think the company’s reputation is enough. It is not. Having situational insight for a position is important. Knowing how to apply attraction factors in a selling scenario will start to attract those you might want.

The best qualified people are pensive side today. They ask very tough questions and you better be able to answer them. The best are able to perform excellent due diligence on you and your company. They will be quite knowledgeable, therefore be prepared.

Where does this leave you and your company? On the outside looking in if the traditional hiring practices continue to be followed. That can lead to very serious consequences. With the coming extreme shortage of qualified people:
· It will mean some companies may reach a point where they are no longer competitive and they go out of business
· They may be without the necessary talent and become targets for take over
· Some may feel forced to sell their company to others that have made a shift and are able to go get the talent they need
· They may not be able to pursue new product development to keep up with market demands

It could mean that this country falls behind further in the world as a leader in technology and other areas.

What is the answer? Companies have to learn to become real recruiting companies. It has to start at the top. These are skills that are very foreign to most companies and their leaders. It is foreign to the hiring managers and to the Human Resources department. The points made above illustrate why this situation exists.

We teach companies how to make that shift. We teach the necessary skills, so the key individuals involved in the process become a part of the recruiting process. The company can transform into a company that is attracting the top talent, not just job applicants.

For positions where we are asked to be engaged, we perform talent acquisition in a surgically precise manner. Typically, we are asked to help where the position is critical and no solution has been found.

Do not be caught is the situation many companies already find themselves. The current environment is not very forgiving and companies have to be prepared for the current talent shortage that is ever increasing.

For more information on our webinar that creates the needed transformation or our talent acquisition services, please contact me at kvn.sutton@gmail.com.

What has Created the Hiring Confusion Companies Experience, Part One

There is some understandable confusion within companies today when it comes to hiring new employees.

The confusion comes in a several different forms. On the one hand, there are a huge number of people unemployed. Most companies assume the large numbers of unemployed individuals are qualified individuals who can easily fill their specific requirements.

On the other hand, companies are finding that even with all those millions of unemployed, they fail to find the person they really want. Therefore, they either settle for the person they feel will work out, or they try again and often times with the same results. Neither solves their problem.

Where company results are affected by an individual’s skills, experience and ability to impact results, it is serious. In today’s economic environment and possibly more than ever, companies can ill-afford to have:
· Delays in sales
· Delays in product development
· Delays in cost improvement initiatives
· Delays in capital improvements
· Delays in operational improvements
These are only a few items. The list can get very long. The bottom line is the bottom line. Companies today are not willing to wait for any positive results they can create. To do so may be detrimental to the health of the company.

Why does this situation exist? There are a number of issues of which companies are not aware. There are a number of issues that haunt companies today, making it difficult for them to hire the right people.

The biggest issue that companies are unaware of today is, while unemployment is very high, the unemployment rate for individuals with a four-year degree or higher is very low. What that means is that companies are expect to have the ability to find the candidate of their choice when in reality, the pool for those candidates is small, especially compared with the total number of unemployed individuals. As a result, many times they cannot find a qualified candidate for a critical position.

Here is why this issue is going to continue to get worse. By 2011/2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be 6 to 8 million positions open in the US, without enough qualified people to fill them. We are already seeing the results of this effect.

One major reason for this is that Baby Boomers are retiring. There were 76 million Baby Boomers and the following generation only had 38 million. The Boomers are retiring at a rate of about 250,000 per month.

The other issue many companies face is that they are a hiring company, not a recruiting company. What’s the difference? A hiring company is one that simply sends out information about a position and then waits for a response. Once they receive the responses, they filter them to eliminate as many as possible. The methods and means vary, but the results are the same. They end up with what they hope are qualified candidates but under the circumstances today many times none are qualified. This leads to excessive wasted time and the problem for which the position was to solve still exists. They are a “fill the position” type company.

See Part Two Tomorrow.