Staffing Challenges

When business is in upswing, companies have to hire, both to meet the growth needs as well as to offset the loss due to attrition. Hence the staffing team has to meet this cumulative requirement. The line managers also want only candidates, who can hit the ground running and are seldom willing to invest time to train candidates. They cannot be blamed as they have their own business pressures and the world is no ideal place.

"Six Sigma", "Zero defect" and “Just in Time” are approaches practiced in the manufacturing sector. Even here, implementation of these concepts requires political will from the top management, as the benefits would be seen only after a sustained period of time. “Yield” or “Conversion” is another useful metric.

When we take staffing as a function and apply these metrics, it will be useful to measure the stage to stage conversion ratio, starting from sourcing for relevant profiles to the final offer. At every stage i.e identifying of relevant profiles to the initial shortlist, CV shortlist to interview and final interview to offer stage, the conversion is less than 50 %. After a herculean effort of producing the final shortlist with a conversion of close to just 20 %, there is a huge indeterminate factor, which is a challenge for employers. This unpredictable factor is that of “drop outs” after the interview stage. These dropouts are far more valuable for an employer, as he would have sunk all the time & effort to arrive at this stage. Let us examine possible improvements in the process, which can reduce the cycle time of hiring and also the costs.

At the first stage, increasing the so called “Yield” from the initial profiles to the numbers called for interview is possible only if the Hiring Manager is clear on what he/she is looking for. Many of the rejections at every stage happen from a “safe to err “on the side of ideal requirement. 80 % of the assessment happens to unearth, the unknown / weak areas of the incumbent rather than his attitude or potential or strength. The biggest bottle neck is here,( the hiring Manager's decision to reject a candidate as "unsuitable" ) which is neither dissected nor quantified. Normally the hiring manager has to take responsibility if the incumbent fails in the job, so it is safer for him to reject a potential candidate and err on the safer side rather than take the risk and hire. The above metric is used to measure the staffing team’s effectiveness rather than that of hiring manager. Imagine, if this is a measurement parameter for the hiring manager – he will spend more time in making his requirement clearer / or devote time to make the hire successful! Hiring Managers must be encouraged to read " The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less" by Barry Schwartz and "The Art of Choosing" by Sheena Iyengar .

Hiring Funnel

The second area of improvement is in the closing of offers, where the dropouts can be minimized. This can be achieved through close follow-ups, reliable background verification and use some services which can actually authenticate the offer acceptance process. (There is a service “iAccept” launched recently to address this gap, tapping on the job seeker giving his “Word of Honor”)

In the long run, companies who do not compromise on ethics and core values are the ones who will be able to tide over these vagaries, as there is a high degree of correlation between attrition % and the hiring effort. When growth is organic, it is healthy and inorganic growth, in a sense is cancerous!