News & Views
GLUT OF TALENT OUT THERE?
MAY 2009
With New Zealand’s current economic slowdown and
global forces rapidly changing market conditions here, the need to
combat cost pressures is paramount. But it’s certainly
not time to rush the recruitment process or cut corners.
Mistakes in hiring the wrong ‘fit’ in terms of skill or
culture will be more visible now that margins are tighter and wins
harder.
Here at OCG, our consulting team interviews around 240 job seekers and interacts with over 1,000 candidates on an average week. Although there is certainly a real bubble of people on the market right now, we are largely under-whelmed by the quality of candidates out there. It is hard to put a number on the retrenchments in New Zealand over the past two quarters and although there are many situations where great people have had their roles made redundant and companies have had to lay off genuinely good staff, it’s no secret that businesses try to shed under-performers first. Hence the problem - the hazards of a candidate-rich market. We are seeing applicant lists of 200+ people per advertised job, so our roles have moved from getting creative about how to get a great shortlist together, to spending vast amounts of time screening applicant lists and distilling things down to a great shortlist.
So how can you benefit from the current availability? (Availability is relative - we’re not talking about a glut of talent; more a slight increase.) Find the time to run a thorough recruitment process. If you have an HR team with capacity to take this volume, fantastic. If not, seriously consider outsourcing to a specialist who will efficiently manage the process and treat every applicant the way you would want to be treated yourself if you were an applicant. Running a thorough process and spending the time it takes to fully consider as many candidates as you can, pays dividends. If you are under pressure to fill the role, you may get to the point where “almost” is good enough (… and “almost” is easy to get). However the costs and impact of a bad hire in tight times like these are not even worth beginning to measure.
Although the cost involved in a well resourced HR team or an external recruitment supplier will have an obvious impact on your P&L, your own time may be worth even more. At present, this hidden cost can be well in excess of 40-50 hours of your own time if you run a recruitment process yourself. If you are spending time and resource advertising, screening CVs and interviewing what might be over one hundred applicants, what is the cost of you not doing aspects of your own job? And if you are trying to fit everything in, what is the cost of putting yourself under that sort of pressure? Something has got to give and in our experience, it’s the quality of selection which suffers and will ultimately bring in the “almosts”.
Reference Checking:
This part of the process is usually the ‘home straight’. The bit where the candidate has practically got the job and it is merely being formalised… rubber stamp ‘an all. With the amount of purging and cleansing in companies recently, we would highly recommend a big shift in behaviour towards reference checking. For example, when conducting a reference check for a sales person, push the line manager to offer some context around if it was a redundancy situation. Find out how many from the sales team were effected and specifically why this person’s role was one to be affected. Although you would be hard pressed to get their referee to say they were “pushed” (who would ever give a referee who wouldn’t say complimentary things!), you certainly should be able to get a read of the scenario at their last position.
Don’t be afraid to ask the candidate for customer references. Probe with questions that will reveal why the customer used that person’s services - or was it solely the company that they were trading with? Proper reference checking will greatly assist your recruitment process in getting through the ample “almosts” out there in candidate land.
By running a thorough recruitment process, internally or externally, you will certainly be able to take advantage of the current candidate supply, which for the first time in a while, is in your favour!
Here at OCG, our consulting team interviews around 240 job seekers and interacts with over 1,000 candidates on an average week. Although there is certainly a real bubble of people on the market right now, we are largely under-whelmed by the quality of candidates out there. It is hard to put a number on the retrenchments in New Zealand over the past two quarters and although there are many situations where great people have had their roles made redundant and companies have had to lay off genuinely good staff, it’s no secret that businesses try to shed under-performers first. Hence the problem - the hazards of a candidate-rich market. We are seeing applicant lists of 200+ people per advertised job, so our roles have moved from getting creative about how to get a great shortlist together, to spending vast amounts of time screening applicant lists and distilling things down to a great shortlist.
So how can you benefit from the current availability? (Availability is relative - we’re not talking about a glut of talent; more a slight increase.) Find the time to run a thorough recruitment process. If you have an HR team with capacity to take this volume, fantastic. If not, seriously consider outsourcing to a specialist who will efficiently manage the process and treat every applicant the way you would want to be treated yourself if you were an applicant. Running a thorough process and spending the time it takes to fully consider as many candidates as you can, pays dividends. If you are under pressure to fill the role, you may get to the point where “almost” is good enough (… and “almost” is easy to get). However the costs and impact of a bad hire in tight times like these are not even worth beginning to measure.
Although the cost involved in a well resourced HR team or an external recruitment supplier will have an obvious impact on your P&L, your own time may be worth even more. At present, this hidden cost can be well in excess of 40-50 hours of your own time if you run a recruitment process yourself. If you are spending time and resource advertising, screening CVs and interviewing what might be over one hundred applicants, what is the cost of you not doing aspects of your own job? And if you are trying to fit everything in, what is the cost of putting yourself under that sort of pressure? Something has got to give and in our experience, it’s the quality of selection which suffers and will ultimately bring in the “almosts”.
Reference Checking:
This part of the process is usually the ‘home straight’. The bit where the candidate has practically got the job and it is merely being formalised… rubber stamp ‘an all. With the amount of purging and cleansing in companies recently, we would highly recommend a big shift in behaviour towards reference checking. For example, when conducting a reference check for a sales person, push the line manager to offer some context around if it was a redundancy situation. Find out how many from the sales team were effected and specifically why this person’s role was one to be affected. Although you would be hard pressed to get their referee to say they were “pushed” (who would ever give a referee who wouldn’t say complimentary things!), you certainly should be able to get a read of the scenario at their last position.
Don’t be afraid to ask the candidate for customer references. Probe with questions that will reveal why the customer used that person’s services - or was it solely the company that they were trading with? Proper reference checking will greatly assist your recruitment process in getting through the ample “almosts” out there in candidate land.
By running a thorough recruitment process, internally or externally, you will certainly be able to take advantage of the current candidate supply, which for the first time in a while, is in your favour!