Complementary Recruiting – The NFL Shows How To Maximize Collaboration

As the NFL season is about to begin, I wonder how many of those in recruiting have heard of the term “complementary football.” 

This is a sports productivity and results improvement process that also works in business. This complementary approach improves your results by making it more likely that one function (i.e., the defense) complements, collaborates with, adds to, or in any way contributes to the goals of another function (i.e., the offense).

For example, when the defense purposely stalls and takes up extra time, even when they don’t score, this planned delay supports the offense’s goal. This gives the function more time to rest and regroup. So, any time the work of one function “purposely complements” or supports the goals of another independent function, it is deemed to be complementary.

In business, the positive complementary approach is often called “boundaryless,” and the non-complementary approach is usually labeled negatively as “siloed.” In practice, the goal of encouraging complementary actions in recruiting is often to minimize delays and ensure that outside-of-recruiting services are delivered at the quality level that recruiting needs.

Outside-of-recruiting functions that must be complementary often include requisition approvals, new-hire training, security clearances, onboarding, and new-hire retention. The required complementary action is often speeding up the processing by other functions or the more timely delivery of service to the new hire. As a result, this article lists the most likely recruiting areas that would obviously benefit from complementary actions. It also lists the different methods for successfully getting independent functions to be more collaborative and complementary.

Examples Of How Other Functions Should Complement Recruiting

This section highlights some of the important areas where non-recruiting functions can complement the goals of the recruiting function. This includes support during the hiring process and after hire to get candidates up to speed and improve new-hire retention.

• Finance can speed up requisition approvals – when finance speeds up its requisition approvals, you can provide your sourcers with more time. Getting requisitions approved faster for newly opened jobs will also mean that hiring managers will be able to fill their vacated job weeks earlier. 
• Candidate reference checking can complement recruiting – in cases where candidate reference checking is done by an outside vendor, this vendor can complement the overall recruiting process by more effectively screening out problem candidates and can improve speed of hire by completing their assessment process in days.
• Compensation should complement hiring – compensation can help recruiting meet its goals by processing offers faster to prevent the loss of top candidates to “earlier offers.” Compensation can also help by not offering initial “lowball offers” that can embarrass and even scare away a top candidate. 
• Hiring managers can support recruiting – by devoting more time to it. That extra time could be spent immediately reviewing new resumes and rapidly deciding on their interview slates. Spending that extra time will likely help both parties meet their joint goals of higher-quality candidates and faster hiring. 
• Recruiting can be supported by timely training – after the candidate is hired, training can support getting the new hire quickly up to speed. This can be done by scheduling their required onboarding and new-hire training immediately after they start. Offering “right time” training will also lower new-hire turnover, which will prevent recruiting from having to repeat the hiring process.
• Equipment/office support can support recruiting and retention – when the onboarding processes of badging, security, equipment suppliers, and office allocation areas work fast. Not only will new hires reach their productivity faster. But they are much less frustrated with ineffective onboarding and become an early turnover statistic.
• Retention can improve recruiting by reporting new-hire turnover – a new-hire that quits within their first six months should be considered a hiring failure. But unfortunately, unless the retention or the exit interview function makes them aware. Most in recruiting will have no way of knowing when one of their hires became an early turnover statistic. So they won’t be able to prevent it from happening less often.
• Performance appraisal can improve recruiting – when those who design and operate the performance appraisal process do so in a collaborative way. The recruiting function will have the on-the-job performance data it needs in order to calculate quality of hire.

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Simple But Effective Ways To Encourage More Complementary Actions

After reading the last section, it should be easy for all parties to realize the many areas where outside functions can complement (or hurt) the goals of recruiting. Realization won’t be enough. You will still have to take proactive actions in order to get the leaders of these interrelated functions to act in a less self-centered and more collaborative way. So below you will find seven action steps that will help to encourage these functions to act more complementarily. The most impactful action steps are listed first.

1. Identify the interrelated functions that most impact recruiting – start by identifying all of the outside functions that have a direct impact on the work and the results of the recruiting function. Obviously, prioritize the areas that are most damaging but easiest to fix.
2. Educate team members at other functions on the damage that they are doing – unfortunately, it’s only natural for members of an independent function to act selfishly. At least until they have been educated about the impacts and the costs of their non-complementary actions. So, put together an educational package that makes them fully aware of how they can change their actions to support recruiting, and pretest it to ensure that it’s persuasive.
3. Make it easy for members of both teams to interact – it might seem like a minor thing, but it’s much harder to work against someone that you know. So purposely create opportunities for members of these independent functions to interact and even meet the relevant members of the recruiting team. One way to accomplish that is to hold a joint team meeting at least once a year. So all parties can meet and hopefully learn to understand each other better.
4. Encourage rotations between the employees of the complementary functions – rather than waiting for interactions between the two functions to occur naturally. Instead, require each of the interrelated functions to periodically rotate one or more of its employees to the other interdependent function. This increases long-term relationships, builds familiarity, and deepens understanding. In some cases, making the rotation a permanent transfer can help spur long-term cooperation. 
5. Require that their performance metrics overlap – both metrics and rewards are powerful ways to change entrenched behavior. Make the performance goals of the two interacting functions overlap in at least two areas to make sure that the overall goals of one function can’t be fully met unless the other function also meets its overlapping goals and metrics. For example, make the success metrics for both the recruiting and the retention functions include the retention rate of new hires. Sharing that new-hire retention goal will make both functions more collaborative.
6. Measure the actual impacts from your increased level of complementary actions – if you want to build credibility, you can’t assume that this strategy will automatically work. Instead, you need to survey all of the involved managers at least once a year. Ask them if they have seen any impact, experienced positive results, and if they still support the effort.
7. Ensure the appraisal process for all impacted team members assesses their complementary actions – where feasible, add one appraisal area to your employee performance appraisal process. That appraisal should cover how often the employee took complementary actions throughout the year. And be sure to take significant points off when the employee has acted territorially. Where possible, also make acting in a complementary manner one of the requirements for either a transfer, a raise, and/or a promotion.

Final Thoughts

Over the years, I have found that executives love football analogies. In direct contrast, most in HR literally hate them. It should be a standard part of your “parallel benchmarking” process to periodically identify and learn how other functions and industries manage.

So for those who don’t think that they can learn from the NFL, I instead point them to the business functions of supply chain and customer service.

Both of these critical business areas have been developing complementary processes for years, and they have the results to prove it.

So in my view, it’s long past time for HR and recruiting leaders to finally learn how often they are labeled as silo creators, and to take the proactive action necessary to ensure that the handoffs between interrelated functions are smooth and complementary.

Thanks for reading and reposting this article.

Notes for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and posting it on your favorite social media.
Dr John Sullivan is the author – it first appeared in the 8/18/26 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.