How Corporate Recruiting Budgets Are Wasted

A big chunk of corporate recruiting budgets are wasted … but not by HR.  It’s the hiring managers who lay flame to it with actions like starting the recruiting process without a clear job definition, stacks of resumes going un-reviewed, and indecision with scheduling interviews.  

But does HR get any credit for allowing hiring managers to be so reckless? Heck no.  The Corporate Executive Board is reporting that fully two thirds of hiring managers are dissatisfied with the influence recruiting has on their organizations.    

If you work as a recruiter in a large organization, you work at a massive disadvantage.  If your hiring managers are unresponsive, unrealistic, or indecisive, you still have a responsibility to fill their job openings.   Sure, over time, smart recruiters can build influence with hiring managers … but they rarely have the clout to say “Sorry Jim, your search is not workable until we resolve these issues.”

As the owner of a retained search firm, I have recruiting advantages that most corporate recruiters would kill for.  First I can improve a process, introduce a new productivity tool, or allocate more recruiting resources whenever I want to. But more importantly, I can choose what searches we accept.  Before a client engages us, and before we accept a search, we spend two hours with all the hiring stakeholders:

• We have time to discuss the year one performance expectations, challenges, and what a top performer would find attractive about the job.
• We can review ideal candidate profiles with the hiring manager, so we know how they will evaluate resumes.
• We can put time on everyone’s calendar for interviews, and everything else we need to move the hiring process along.    That’s right, we pre-schedule interview time, so we don’t have to beg for hiring manager time later in the search. 
• We can align salary expectations with market realities, and make the necessary trade-offs that happen in every hire – but we make them before we start recruiting.

We require the ability to make these critical trade-offs before we start recruiting because we know that faster hiring speed cuts the total cost of recruiting in half.