Over the last 10 years there have been a lot of changes in the way recruitment has been carried out by HR departments. But now, according to Mitch Sullivan, more radical change is needed by HR to get the best results from their recruitment campaigns.

In most companies there is little or no interaction between the sales and marketing function and the HR/recruitment function. Recruitment is, at its most critical end, a function of sales and performs best under a well-defined brand and when underpinned by a strong marketing strategy.
This is an ethic that is embraced in the agency sector (and in many cases is taken way too far) yet isn’t in the corporate sector.

I’ve heard a lot of people speak in business about corporate hiring down the years and much of it misses the point. They seem to see the most important element in employment as the selection process, but this is just the ‘buying’ part of the recruitment life-cycle and important as it is, it’s only actually possible if enough qualified candidates are found.

To find enough qualified candidates, the company’s employment brand needs to be strong, its employment propositions attractive and compelling and its various candidate sourcing channels should be well-defined. This is just as relevant if that company only use agencies to source candidates.

The view that recruitment is more about buying than selling belies a kind of institutional arrogance that makes many companies believe that if they have vacancies, good people will come – that somehow they are doing the wider community a favour by actually inviting people to come and work for them.

It is this misplaced arrogance that has enabled the third party recruitment agency sector to gain so much traction over the past fifteen years – recruitment is not some ‘dark art’ but he does need to be done by people who understand how to sell.

However, many internal company recruiters come from HR and administration backgrounds and not sales. HR requires knowledge of laws, policies and managing people resources, which are all extremely important functions – but they are not sales and as a result too many people who handle recruitment within corporate HR just become an administrative cushion between their hiring managers and the agency PSL.

The basic stages of the sales cycle are to find, to qualify, to sell to and to close and these broadly cover the key stages of the recruitment cycle – namely to source enough decent candidates, to screen and short-list the best qualified and to convince them the job and the company are right for them.

So, how can the sales and marketing function help re-invigorate a company’s recruiting effort?

• They know the company, its ethics and its strengths and weaknesses.
• They know how to help build brands
• They’re good at developing routes to market, managing distributors/suppliers/resellers
• They are used to getting the best out of CRMs
• Building dialogue with prospects is second nature to them
• They know how to sell and how to close.

In recruitment terms, this means;

• Being able to inform and articulate all of their recruitment materials
• Building and disseminating a powerful employer brand
• Optimising the use of an ATS (applicant tracking system) and using it to build talent-pools
• Communicating with these talent-pools to enable ‘just in time’ hiring for business-critical vacancies
• Attracting more higher quality candidates and converting more of them to attending interviews and accepting job offers.

An ongoing working collaboration between HR and their sales and marketing colleagues could work with recruitment reporting directly to the head of sales and marketing with a dotted line reporting to HR as well. HR would still retain some ownership of recruitment – something they would need to do given their offer-management and onboarding responsibilities – but most of the commercial activity that recruitment entails would be driven by people who have some intimacy with the ethos and practices involved.

The recruitment function of any company needs to think and act more like a sales and marketing function if that company is to win its unfair share of the best available talent and to build a ‘I want to work there’ employment reputation. Specialist recruitment organisations (not the run-of-the-mill recruitment agencies which can range from the indifferent to the unscrupulous) can then be used to provide strategic direction, management and advice and save you a lot of money – in our experience, 40% is not an uncommon saving on cost per hire, which can represent a significant saving in most organsations. Some forward thinking companies are already taking this approach – will the rest follow?

Mitch Sullivan – www.rpozone.com