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Opinion: Recruitment – breaking the churn cycle

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“The current recruitment model not only perpetuates a wasteful attitude to human resources, but also risks overlooking, and therefore not securing, the highest quality candidates.”


In the second of a three part series, Kevin Kerrigan, managing director, SHL (UK) discusses how businesses can build a more effective supply chain based on agreed competencies.

The first part of our series identified the time for change – how recruitment consultants and HR industry suppliers need to work together to revolutionise the recruitment supply chain.

It is an obvious, but perhaps frequently overlooked point, that recruitment consultants need vacancies in order to drive their business.

As we discussed in the previous article, the current reward structure is focused on recruitment consultants’ ability to fill vacancies. This, however, provides the agencies with no incentive to work with HR teams or find ways of reducing churn.

This current model not only perpetuates a wasteful attitude to human resources, but also risks overlooking, and therefore not securing, the highest quality candidates.

Businesses are becoming more concerned with taking the right approach and making sound investments when recruiting. HR teams are becoming less transactional and more focused on adding value to the business.

What if this paradigm was applied to the recruitment consultant? If they were included as true partners, but at the same time required to consider the long-term value of a candidate to the business, how would the process be improved? It is easy to see how this would reduce staff turnover and have a positive effect on the future of the business.

This is fine in principle, but how can you build a process that links in-house with outsourced resources and maintains clear and consistent recruitment standards?

The answer lies in making competency-based objective assessment the backbone of the process.

Currently, the ‘acid test’ of a candidate is, for many recruitment consultants, the interview. Whilst this may be a good method of getting to know a person it provides little objectivity and is difficult to manage as a repeatable and measurable exercise.

Structured, competency-based interviews, on the other hand, which ask set questions designed to test specific competencies required for a role, are much easier to regulate.

These interviews should draw on results of objective assessments that add further data on the potential of candidates.

Implementing pre-interview assessment allows businesses to assess the numerical and verbal skills of candidates before deciding whether to progress to the next step.

Furthermore, personality tests allow the employer to determine how an individual’s personality will influence on-the-job behaviour and motivation.

Once this is completed, businesses have an objective assurance that the candidate that they have employed will, fit in with the company culture, have the necessary abilities and demonstrate the behaviours required for success.

Recruiting organisations should work with their supply chain partners to closely define roles and required competencies and then instruct recruitment consultants to use these as the basis for recruitment. Remuneration should be based on the accuracy of the candidates fit as the initial measure – and perhaps should be triggered even before offers have been made.

If a consultant can bring several candidates to the table that fit the profile then they should be rewarded. This encourages them to conduct diligent searches, and provides the potential employer with a pool of talent for future roles. Further rewards should be tied to performance of the selected candidate in the role – not just retention beyond a certain length of time.

Building a successful partnership on this backbone of clear and fair competency-based assessment should be a win-win for all parties. Organisations can be more confident of the performance of new recruits, and know that they are right for the role and not just a ‘bum-on-a-seat.’

Recruitment consultants can tap into the use of psychometric assessment as a source to overcome the negative perceptions and secure a more active participation in the process, and candidates are exposed to a more professional, fair and transparent process.

This will ensure that the reputation of recruitment firm generally is maintained, if not improved, and that all businesses are gaining the highest quality of candidates that will have a lasting influence on their organisation.

In the next article we’ll look at what organisations can do once new recruits are in the business, and how the competency-based approach creates further efficiencies and opportunities at this stage.

Other articles in this series


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One Response

  1. You need to fix the “churn cycle” before you outsource it
    It would seem to be a quick fix would be to pay an agency something in advance for the work they do and then allow them to look internally as well as externally for candidates – as the author says rewarding for quality shortlists not just bums on seats. But then isn’t this something that a successful HR department can do? After all, recruitment and succession are two big, important chunks of the talent lifecycle? Should you outsource something that’s broken or fix it first?

    HR departments talk a great deal about “providing strategic advice” but in practice this is at best patchy. When it comes to managing or actively supporting succession and recruitment many HR professionals are not well equipped to carry out these tasks.

    My theory is that this is largely because HR as a profession has grown from “Personnel Administration”. Few staff are promoted into HR from commercial roles (something CIPD exams hinder rather than help). So HR staff tend to be drawn towards those tasks that best suit them – reward, redundancy, contracts, employee disputes etc. These tasks tend to require great attention to detail and a very phlegmatic, balanced but slower approach to decision making. In my experience many HR professionals dislike recruitment and succession, perhaps as these are very commercial, often require quick and commercial decisions and big dollops of influencing the business. At best they like “going into the field” as advanced admin help with a bit of corporate police function thrown in.

    Perhaps companies should look to select those HR staff that will run Selection and Succession from places other than HR Admin – maybe staff that currently work in other departments like Operations or Sales? They would clearly need technical training, but could bring the right “values”, “behaviours” and “motivations”. Or maybe these tasks should be given to Organisational Development type of staff, as these usually have more experience of running projects, being commercial and being in the face of the business.

    I would be very keen to hear and learn from any individuals that feel that they have got the right individuals in their business running their selection and succession. I would also be keen to hear and swap ideas with any individuals that feel this is sub-optimal but are willing to try and “think out of the box” to get it right! Maybe we can redraw the profile of what a good “Talent Manager” looks like – and maybe it is very different from what a good “Generalist HR Manager” looks like? Any thoughts?

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Annie Hayes

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