collection of badri ravi’s blogs on talent management
TRANSCRIPT
Collection Of
Badri Ravi’s Blogs
On
Talent Management
Badri Ravi
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Contents
RECRUITMENT 2020 .................................................................................. 2
ZMOT, KEY TO SUCCESSFUL TALENT ACQUISITION .................................. 7
IF STEVE JOBS WERE TO RUN A RECRUITMENT FIRM! ............................. 9
THREE QUESTIONS THAT EMPLOYERS NEED TO ASK THEMSELVES TO
WIN WAR FOR TALENT ............................................................................ 14
SUCCESSFUL RPO PARTNERSHIP BY ORGANIZATIONAL GOAL
ALIGNMENT............................................................................................. 15
REWARDS WITHOUT KILLING INTRINSIC MOTIVATION .......................... 18
WHAT IS YOUR OFFICE WALL SAYING? ................................................... 20
LEADERSHIP: ALIGNING INTENTIONS...................................................... 23
IS YOUR RECRUITMENT STRATEGY ASSUMING TALENT IS IN
ABUNDANCE? .......................................................................................... 24
CHALLENGES OF TODAY’S RPOS ............................................................. 25
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RECRUITMENT 2020
Imagine, you are a recruiter and its April 2020. Your company decided to shut
down the city office and decided to equip your home instead with
infrastructure for you to work. Your new infrastructure consists of a Google
glass and a hand motion sensor that you fixed to your wall. You are excited
about the new gadgets and you put them on. The glasses greet you, “Hello
Good Morning! Today we have a new assignment to recruit a technology
analyst for Amazon. You will be
awarded 30 points for selecting this
work”. You think for a moment and
say to yourself, I am game for
something more niche! You reject
the assignment and scan for more
open positions. You suddenly spot
another interesting, Data Scientist
for Adobee Gamification analytics
division; it has 75 points on it! You
immediately block the position and
the system says “Congratulations, the position is blocked for you for the next
120 minutes” You see a video icon at the Job description, you click on it and
you see a message from the hiring manager. The video explains the success
parameters for the opportunity and you feel good about finding the right
person.
You remember the old days when you had to map talent landscape and
source for people on job boards, social media and database; today everyone
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on the planet is in the company
database that directly is linked to all
social media platforms that has not only
work data but also personal
preferences, demonstrated skills and
details of personality traits. Although
these details are available the only hitch is that the government regulations
don’t allow you to contact someone directly unless you have approval from
them.
You order your computer through your hand motion to show you the talent
landscape for the opportunity. The glasses suddenly glow up and in 3D show
you people arranged in shape of a sphere representing people with desired
skill sets and experience. Adobee wishes to find people within 75 miles of
Bangalore so that a weekly visit to office would be possible. You throw this
constraint on the sphere of people and the sphere shrinks to show only right
people. Based on the video you watched from the hiring manager, you
identify two personal preferences and throw both preferences on the
sphere. The sphere shrinks quite dramatically but is still quite large.
You wonder how to sequence the list in order of preference; You suddenly
remember what Ashok, your information manager, told you about the social
analytics feature that the company has invested in. You order the computer
to run the analytics. The computer turns the sphere into a pyramid! The top
section of the pyramid has people with 90% suitability and subsequent tiers
have 80%, 70%, 60% and 50% respectively. Curious to know how the system
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figured this out, you hit the help section and look for answers. You learn that
the computer considers the following:
Match digital preferences of Current top 30 percentile employees in
the Gamification analytics division of Adobee and that of talent pool
Testimonials written in LinkedIn and a few other media sites by
people who the adobee system recognizes as top performers.
People who have performed well in companies and colleges where
adobee top employees have done theirs
Digital content such as technical blogs, response in stack overflow
etc. by people that is shared or cited or highlighted by Adobee top
employees
And many such criteria that the HR data scientists have proven to be
effective in determining top talent. The system is still in its beta stage and
reads the caution note. You love the concept and tap the 90 percentage
probably fit candidates.
The system suddenly beeps. It awards you 10 points for selecting the new
technology in your recruitment process. Happy about the bonus, you
proceed with reading selected people’s consolidated report that the system
generated from all social media sources. You understand how these people
work and what motivates them, what demotivates them and what benefits
offered by the employer would strike a chord with them. You find that a few
in the list have self-selected themselves to be contacted for jobs and you also
see their current assignment and the date on which their current contract
ends. You order the computer to record your video message to these
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candidates and you also ask specific questions. The computer finds that the
questions you have asked isn’t available in question bank and offers you
bonus 3 points.
These active job seekers get a ping on their Google glass. One of them, Joe,
is working and decides to put the message to his reminder stating play the
video after finishing work. The Google glass noticing that Joe is shutting down
his laptop, informs that the bus he wanted to take to his house is arriving and
that if he starts now then he could take the bus without any waiting. Joe
takes the suggestion and starts walking towards the bus. Upon boarding he
finds a seat at the end and grabs it. Immediately the glass glows and opens
the message from you. The video plays and you suggest how the position fits
Joe’s preferences and career aspirations. Joe thinks about it and decides to
find a little more about the company. He decides to look for friends who work
in the firms. The Google glass finds that Peter, Joe’s school friend works here
but also suggests that Peter is playing tennis now and that he should better
be contacted in 20 minutes, about the time when Joe gets back home. Joe
decides to wait and in the meantime checks reviews about culture, work
styles, company strategy, financials, salary surveys and other details about
the company. He checks his reporting manager’s profiles and check common
connections. Upon reaching home, Joe calls Peter for inquiring. Peter gives a
good feedback and thus Joe decides to apply. He opens your message again
and looks for further steps. He responds to your questions and the Google
glass records the video and sends it back to you!
Meanwhile you received a bunch of other responses and you screen each
one of them and finally decide to just submit Joe’s video and resume in a
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report that has various scores the computer computed to determine fit and
your thoughts on how Joe’s aspirations match the opportunity. You forward
the report to the hiring manager and the hiring manager is impressed with
your find. He decided to give you a Badge, Quick Feet!
This is cool! You say, and ring your best friend and colleague Nick! Nick too
is excited and congratulates you. Nick says, the government has further
introduced more regulations to ensure better privacy for candidates and
companies are investing on technology to manage these regulations. You
start thinking about the cost of implementing it. But then you suddenly
remember that you need to get back to recruiting and you say bye to Nick.
At the pace the world is transforming itself, it’s very hard to predict the
future. However here are my pick:
In technology era, it’s fair to assume that major changes would come
from Information Technology and today’s nascent technology; Social
Technology, Mobility, and Analytics would be the stables in future.
Interface gadgets such as Google glass is shaping the way we
interact with computers. These will take centre stage in order to
improve productivity while interacting with computers.
By 2020, Regulations and penalty on compliance miss in Human
Resources would become as stringent as they are for banks today.
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ZMOT, KEY TO SUCCESSFUL TALENT ACQUISITION
Talent acquisition has become synonymous with selling. Corporate and
product brands have been paralleled with employer brand and decision
journey of both a job seeker and a purchaser has been paralleled. This blog
intends to bring the concept of ZMOT to Talent Acquisition and enumerate
the benefits of adopting the new science to ensure companies with war for
talent.
What is ZMOT?
A decade ago, marketers advertised their brands in mass media and
instigated the people to check out their brand and products in the stores.
The first experience of the product at store was called the first moment of
truth. At this point the buyer tries to check if the product lives up to the
promise made in the advertisement. Once the buyer purchases the product,
while using it, he again scrutinises the product to check if the product lives
up to the promise made in the advertisement. This is called the second
moment of truth.
Drawing parallels, in talent acquisition, when a candidate gets the offer
letter, it’s the first moment of truth. Candidate at this point will try to check
if the work offered will live up to the promise made by the recruiter and the
hiring manager. Once he joins the company, he experiences the company
first hand and will again scrutinize the company to check if the company lives
up to the promise. This would become the second moment of truth.
ZMOT stands for Zero Moment of Truth and Google introduced this term to
explain the phenomenon in this decade where people before they go to
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stores, check the product out in digital platforms. And having experienced
the product online (ZMOT) then they go to store and experience the first
moment of truth.
This phenomenon is true with candidates as well where they check the
company and the job opportunity online before they get offer. ZMOT study
conducted on job seekers revealed that on an average, a candidate will check
with 14.5 sources before deciding on First Moment of Truth, an offer.
Therefore we could say that companies lose their candidates even before
they identify right candidate, resulting in loosing of War for Talent.
In order to prevent this from happening, companies need to ensure they
communicate positive aspects of working for the company, the company
EVP, proactively on channels that talent trust; Facebook, LinkedIn, Career
Page. But this isn’t sufficient. People trust people and thus companies need
to create platform where their employees could connect with target talent
and communicate good things about the company and it’s EVP.
In conclusion, companies need to recognise the presence of ZMOT and take
positive steps to build communication channel and content to ensure its
target talent pool hears good things about the company and its accurate EVP
from all sources. Doing so would allow it to build good employer brand and
win war for talent.
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IF STEVE JOBS WERE TO RUN A RECRUITMENT FIRM!
The above chart shows book value of Apple, Manpower, Korn / Ferry
International, Heidrick & Struggles, Spencer Stuart. The difference in 2002-
2005 was comparable but from 2005 Apple took a trajectory that none other
can dream of. From the graph it’s clear that staffing industry has been
struggling to maintain its growth and a major overhaul should happen for the
industry to survive.
In this blog, I would apply principles of Steve Jobs to simulate how Steve
would have turned around the staffing industry if he were running a Staffing
company. This perhaps would give a clue how companies could plan their
overhaul. The below photo best summarizes the principles of Steve:
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Point 1: GO FOR PERFECT: Staffing companies are clearly struggling to
maintain the quality of hire metrics. In a survey conducted by Jobvite,
companies ranked 3rd party recruiters and search firms as 6 out of 9 in order
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of quality of hire. Clearly, staffing firms must focus on improving quality of
hire rather than just focusing on submission and leaving the ounce of
selecting the best person among several submitted profiles on the client.
Point 2: TAP THE EXPERTS: Staffing firms have always struggled to hire the
best talent at all levels. Firms should mitigate this risk by providing high
quality internal training, which is sorely missed because for obvious reasons
such firms are inclined towards hiring trained people from market rather
than training themselves which causes a vicious cycle where everyone is
hoping the other would train and everyone ends up with a wrong hire! Steve
Jobs would have created an organisation which would command high loyalty
and therefore without fear of many loosing trained resources the company
could have invested heavily on training. Also Steve would have attracted best
talent at the top management who could have attracted better middle
management.
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Point 3: BE RUTHLESS: With increasing channels of hiring for corporate such
as social media and other online efficiency boosting tools, competition for
filling a position is becoming intense. Under such business scenario, only the
expert survives. Therefore companies would be forced to look at their
market and their core strengths and choose to focus on their strengths. Not
being ruthless would mean that certain verticals of the company continue to
bleed revenue rendering the whole company inefficient. Steve Jobs would
have first focused on a particular talent cluster and established clear
leadership and then moved to different segments rather than broadly
focusing on any industry.
Point 4: SHUN FOCUS GROUP: Staffing firms must build strong R&D and
business consulting arm that is able to foresee challenges that companies
would experience in their talent supply chain and help mitigating such risks.
Several India staffing firms completely depend on clients for direction
instead of being the beacon.
Point 5: NEVER STOP STUDYING: Corporate are quick to adopt social media
to strengthen their talent supply chain. Freelance recruiters too were quick
to adopt, at least the LinkedIn. However staffing firms in India have not
implemented processes and methods to leverage on their size to effectively
use social media. Here are websites of top firms which DON’T even have link
to Facebook on their webpage!
a. Adecco India
b. Manpower India
c. Head Hunters
d. Mafoi (present but poor implementation)
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e. ABS Consultants (Great scope of improvement)
Point 6: SIMPLIFY: Two decades ago, job sites brought in dramatic shift in
how companies found talent and how people found jobs. However since
then, no significant improvement has occurred in terms of recruitment
methods, TAT from submission to hire, experience of candidate from first
contact to on-boarding or any other parameter. There has been little bit of
improvement here and there but no significant step. Perhaps a great
candidate experience management could be the way forward. GTM-People
matters Talent friendliness Award is one good step in the right direction.
Steve, while reducing TAT between a candidate thinking of a change to
getting hired, would have also focused on providing delightful experience
thus ensuring candidates cherish their time. Perhaps this would have left
Jobs to focus on companies willing to pay that much, but that still would be
a big enough market.
Point 7 (Keep your secrets), 8 (Keep teams Small), 9 (Use more carrot than
stick), 10(Prototype to the extreme): I feel these are not as relevant in
service industry as in high technology driven product companies. If you
believe they do, then please share your thoughts.
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THREE QUESTIONS THAT EMPLOYERS NEED TO ASK
THEMSELVES TO WIN WAR FOR TALENT
1. Are companies engaging with these quasi active job seekers?
Talent today is no more split between Active job seeker and passive job
seeker. A large population of talent is in the grey area in between.
In my experience “NO”. Although LinkedIn has allowed companies to do this
to some extent, companies have by and large not identified this trend and
not done much to engage with quasi job seekers. Job descriptions today still
assume that the reader will apply if he finds himself suitable. How old!
2. Are companies creating platforms for co-creating enough content
online for talent?
Companies have completely missed out on the importance of it
Today target talent is researching companies online. Creating
content consistently that will be looked up by this target talent is a
very important step in talent attraction
Companies cannot do this all alone. They need employees, target
talent, analyst and every stakeholder to create content for the
company. Companies are not focusing on this ecosystem. They
should create systems to co-create.
3. Are companies creating an ecosystem where employees are able to
create positive buzz on Social Media?
A few companies have done well on this parameter, creating social media
policy and encouraging employees to spread positive buzz. Companies have
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adopted technology to allow their employees to share news about jobs and
happenings with their friends. Adoption of these technologies and methods
is still not widespread and there is more that companies could do.
SUCCESSFUL RPO PARTNERSHIP BY ORGANIZATIONAL
GOAL ALIGNMENT
RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) engagements often fail because
they fail to synchronize with business goals. While the whole organization
aligns its strategy to changing business goals, RPO partners are often
dwelling in transactions and seldom attempt to understand impact of
changing business goals on their engagement leading to them being seem as
a disengaged partner who needs constant direction and hand holding. For a
RPO partner to engage on strategic level, it’s imperative to have in-depth
understanding of its process and set their process levers aligned to business
needs. This is only possible when RPO delivery metrics are aligned to
business metrics which in turn are aligned to business goals and a manager
constantly engages with all stakeholders to ensure everyone complies to
changes needs. This effort will have in coupling recruitment performance to
business performance. This blog deals with how we reached a seamless
integration of goals to achieve a highly strategic engagement with our client.
Understand Parameters You Control: Often RPO partners work on number
of resume that needs to be pushed on top of recruitment funnel to ensure
open positions close. But companies often have much more leverage than
the number of resumes sourced. On a broad level, these could be your
recruiter quality, Recruiter numbers, Screening capabilities, Scheduling
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capacities, Sourcing methodologies, Partners and so on! On a more work
level there are several leverage points such as number of work days in a
week.
Calibrate Parameters to Business Outcomes: One must monitor each of
these parameters and measure their impact on recruitment performance
such as recruitment cost, TAT, quality of hire, early attrition etc. Effect of the
recruitment performance should be calibrated against business performance
parameters. These business parameters may be business attrition, Training
performance, performance ratings. The business parameters are extremely
company dependent and should be discovered for every company.
The company may already have understanding on how business parameters
affect business strategy and thus the business goals.
Constant Management of Alignment: Some RPO partners do the above
points however they fail to systematize the constant attempt of aligning RPO
activities to changing business goals. Consistent communication and regular
meetings with business leaders allow understanding of changing business
needs and goals and these should be backed by actionable that are measured
and demonstrated to leaders as a feedback. This constant tweaking rationale
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should be communicated to the team in order to ensure the changes are
seen as a requirement to ensure client observes the RPO engagement as a
competitive advantage.
Top Three Benefits of Strategic Alignments:
1. The company as a whole becomes more agile and stays competitive
which is need of the market in today’s rapidly changing business
environment
2. The RPO partners often are directed by several client SPOCs. This
sometimes results in changing actions that are not aligned. Goal
level alignment results in actions in right direction.
3. Often continues improvement hits road blocks when it comes to
changing process at client end. However when changes have
definite positive results on client objectives, change is better
accepted.
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REWARDS WITHOUT KILLING INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
A group of kids were given paint and brush to make paintings and the Kids
expressed their creativity with full enthusiasm. Later the same group was
told that they would be given rewards for painting. This time kids painted as
they did last time… this time with more vigour but slightly better results. The
same group of kids were on another day given paint and brush and were
asked to paint with NO Rewards. Guess what happened this time? Several
children decided not to paint! They found it just NOT worth the effort
anymore! {Ref: Book Drive by author Pink; Watch his video:
http://bit.ly/TARqG5 }
What caused the kids to paint the first time? It was the inner joy of doing the
activity which the psychologists call as “Intrinsic Motivation”. When external
rewards were stacked, the intrinsic motivation died and kids chose to do it
for external motivation, the reward!
An old joke captures this phenomenon as well as any study could. It is the
story of an elderly man who endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds
each day as they passed his house on their way home from school. One
afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and
ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on
his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back
the next day and yelled rude comments about him would receive a dollar.
Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering
epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out
and paid everyone. “Do the same tomorrow,” he told them, “and you’ll get
twenty-five cents for your trouble.” The kids thought it was still pretty good
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and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he
walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid his hecklers. “From now
on,” he announced, “I can give you only a penny for doing this.” The kids
looked at each other in disbelief. “A penny?” they repeated scornfully.
“Forget it!” And they never came back again! (Story Courtesy Vyas Umesh)
This man on the left was working very hard to fix traffic light post that has
been hit by a truck and got
damaged. I asked him why he
was doing this and he said his
owner took contract from
government to fix these light
posts. Given he was taking all the
trouble of standing in middle of
that traffic and pollution at night
and yet doing a very precise work
with great quality I asked him why he was taking so much care to do it so
well? He could just finish it quickly and get going! Government would still pay
him! For that he said this is his work and he likes doing it right! What is it if
not INTRINSIC MOTIVATION!
How do you get most people to take such great personal care in doing work
RIGHT? Rewarding for each great work would ensure the owner would not
make profits! Not providing rewards would ensure only those few
intrinsically motivated people do a great work. Stick or punishments could
be implemented to ensure people achieve minimum expectation but not
excellence.
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Is there any way to get people to do their best? Of course YES!
Reward is not always CASH: Recognition has always played a role in
improving intrinsic motivation and deriving compliance. The British awarded
“sir” in order to capitalize on this human behaviour, didn’t they!
Random Awards: Cash award need not be given for every great work.
Random work of excellence could be given high award creating an
expectation for great work once in a while. This anticipation alone could
motivate people for long.
Flexibility: providing a little flexibility to person who has demonstrated great
work allows holding person more accountable to achieve excellence. No
flexibility breeds mediocre doesn’t it?
Sweepstakes: Allowing people to participate in sweepstakes only on
achieving certain level of quality consistently allows in creating a motivation
to achieve excellence and avoids flip side of pressurizing people.
End of reward? No, for achieving minimum expected quality, one must
device some sort of award. But reward have limitation beyond this point!
In such ways, one could device rewards in that does not kill intrinsic
motivation and at the same time garners more compliance and desired
behaviour.
WHAT IS YOUR OFFICE WALL SAYING?
What do you see when you look at the walls in your office? Plain white paint?
A few posters of founders? Or perhaps some notice boards and white
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boards? These represents wasted opportunity to boost productivity of your
employees.
In an experiment conducted by two Dutch researchers, a bunch of students
of a college were divided into two groups. Both groups were given a test in
separate rooms. However one group was asked to talk about “what it would
mean to be a professor” before taking the test while the other was asked to
talk about “football hooliganism“. Could you guess which team average
marks was higher? Well, the team that spoke about ”what it would mean to
be a professor“! Wondering why two teams of similar intellect scored
differently on the same test? It’s because the first team was PRIMED to be
SMART, since it is this word that is associated with professors. Since the first
group students were primed positive feeling they did better than they would
otherwise have and the second group was negatively primed, the first scored
55.6 whereas the second scored 42.6 (Malcolm Gladwell’s book blink Pg 56)
Power poses are powerful. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard
Business School, explains that when we are happy and confident, we express
these power poses automatically and when we are unhappy and scared we
tumble on our own body language. If we could train ourselves to express
power pose when we start to feel sad and down, we could actually reverse
our feelings! Simply put, when we are sad we cry and when we are elated we
dance. So when you begin to feel sad, if you could make yourself put music
on and start dancing, you would soon start feeling better. Initial few minutes
of dance could feel phony since it’s out of sync with the feelings but soon our
action dominates our brain chemicals called feelings. Watch this video:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ks-
_Mh1QhMc
So what could be done to office walls based on these two points that are well
researched and proven?
Simple, Load the wall with POSITIVE WORDS AND POWER POSES!
Suddenly the employees would start exhibiting similar characteristics! And
the HR team may have to continually put new ones to ensure people read,
or use Gamification techniques to get employees to pay attention to new
wall items but all this WILL result in positive employees delivering better
value to company.
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LEADERSHIP: ALIGNING INTENTIONS
There are many articles and quotes that elaborates difference between a
manager and a leader. The most concise and accurate in my view are
presented by Dwight Eisenhower and Peter F. Drucker.
Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want
done because he wants to do it – Dwight Eisenhower
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things –
Peter F. Drucker
Fusing both these ideas and finding something core to human could bring
out who a leader is and who a manager is. Concisely put, leader is he, who
aligns intentions of his team to achieve a purpose. Managers essentially
helps aligned teams achieve desired result by providing input required by the
team. However if the team has different intentions then the manager would
either fail or become a situational leader, thus aligning intention of the team.
Having zeroed in on the core fundamental activity of a leader, the next
question is how could one align intention of a bunch a people, creating teams
out of them? Well these simple practices could help:
State your intentions from start and communicate it continually
Hold your intentions with high integrity (walk your talk) and
demonstrate it whenever possible
Inspire the team with content that justifies your intentions
Get clear commitment from the team on their alignment
Be prepared to remove people who do not align even after several
effort
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IS YOUR RECRUITMENT STRATEGY ASSUMING TALENT
IS IN ABUNDANCE?
Recruitment strategy of several companies can be summed up as “Get loads
of people to apply for jobs and start rejecting the worst and select the rest”
This strategy worked in the past when talent was in abundance and economy
was just inching towards knowledge economy that it is today. Even retention
strategies were mostly “My way or highway”!
However today we are in full-fledged knowledge economy and top talent is
a source of competitive advantage. Advent of social media and Glassdoor
have ensured that talent has access to all kinds of information that they
never had in the past. These developments are resulting in several
companies settle for the second rung of talent, leaving them less
competitive!
So what is the option? Companies don’t have to completely do away with
this strategy. All they need to do is identify talent pool that is most scarce;
R&D or any other more specific skill that is very difficult to find and design a
separate recruitment strategy for them. As Mali Mahalingam said during his
speech in People Matters Social Recruitment Summit “recruitment funnel
needs to be replaced by recruitment tunnel”. Social media ought to be
leveraged by recruiters to connect from one employee to one target
candidate to another to ensure scarce talent can be attracted by way of
connections. Retention strategy should be defined differently too for such
group to ensure there is only limited replacement recruitment. To achieve
this end, companies need to do a lot of homework such as building EVP,
communicating and living it. But it is essential to stay competitive.
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CHALLENGES OF TODAY’S RPOS
Having served as Marketing Manager in RPO companies, I have always been
closely listening to my clients. Some appreciated our work and others didn’t.
But top three challenges they all would fret about are these:
1. Pumping in resumes: Recruiters at RPO companies are under
pressure to fill positions. This pressure is directly felt by the
recruiters and sometimes they pump resumes to hiring managers
without scrutinizing them strictly. This results in hiring managers
wasting their precious time rejecting resumes that shouldn’t have
come to them in the first place. This frustration builds over time and
creates a general feeling among hiring managers that the RPO team
isn’t capable. Creating such an impression can only lead to the RPO
team losing their contract over time because of noise in the
business.
2. SLAs that don’t align to Business Success: I find this happen so often
that RPOs have grown to ignore any concerns raised in this direction.
RPOs today continue to sign on simple straightforward SLAs and
grading their performance top class by benchmarking themselves
with competitor RPO companies. Clients generally stay puzzled why
they are still reeling under the pressure of War for Talent. Slowing
hiring manager start feeling that their RPO partners are not truly
their partners in success and the partnerships begins on its journey
downwards until the SLAs show the result.
3. Being Strategic Partner: Companies typically rely on their
recruitment teams to provide them intelligence on talent. When
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recruitment is outsources, this intelligence stops to flow and this
over time bothers the hiring managers. Recruiters who were earlier
working as talent advisor, are no more available for advice and RPO
partner is more focused on their process, SLA and filling jobs rather
than helping hiring managers in manpower planning etc
How Do We Fix These?
Although the problem seems complicated, the solution is quite simple, Go
above and beyond.
Going above and beyond in submission quality would mean ensuring
recruiters get face time with business to truly understand the unsaid in job
description. Training recruiters on importance of ensuring tight scrutiny of
profile before submission, holding recruiters accountable by strict audits and
management truly demonstrating their concern on the parameter…when
management truly cares about something, it percolates down.
Going above and beyond in SLAs would mean holding meetings with client’s
training departments to ensure they are happy with the incoming talent,
ensuring hiring manager satisfaction is measured and hiring manager is
involved in challenges faced in talent acquisition, ensuring there are
quarterly meetings with finance to check cost and productivity targets are
being met. Repercussion of RPO’s work is measured by various departments
and expectations should be managed across.
Going above and beyond in being a talent advisor is to join the hiring
managers in their annual planning meets, providing them market
intelligence, benchmarks, showing them positive impact of the SLAs on
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business output and being available for a quick chat whenever required. To
achieve this end, RPOs need to go beyond SLAs, beyond contracts, beyond
what’s said… to the place where client feels the RPO and its effort and its
contribution in business success.