Patience Is Waning Senior leaders thoroughly understand that building an organization or changing one takes vision, planning, patience, and flawless execution. To that point, they have given HR five years. All indicators are that HR has yet to change or plan to change anything, and that the patience of senior …

Readers responding to Part 1 raised some very valid points: R. Bistrick noted that many in HR have no associated industry work experience, which limits their understanding of the business and its issues to one of keywords, often without the benefit of context. (This is certainly true for many corporate …

Employees Are Not Owned by the Corporation Poaching employees is not stealing, because employees are never owned. I literally laugh out loud when I hear individuals say that it is illegal or unethical to poach or steal employees from another company. Let me be crystal clear on this: Employees are …

The relative poor performance of most programs can be attributed to one or both of the following reasons: Poor program design Poor program execution From an outside advisor's perspective, recruiting managers underutilize, under-appreciate, and under-fund most ERPs — despite the fact that in many organizations referral programs produce at least 30% …

A Recognized Leader In addition to the assessment that went into preparing this case study, the world-class efforts of the Valero recruiting team were recognized in 2005 by a panel of recruiting industry thought leaders that awarded them a prestigious ERE Recruiting Excellence Award. The ERE Excellence Award to a …

I have found over the years that the reasons the recruiting function fails to become more disciplined, repeatable, and data driven include: Salespeople thrive in non-data based environments. Salespeople selling things that barely work can be successful because they claim that 1) most aspects of recruiting can’t be measured or …

Recruiting Department Structure: Best Practices The recruiting team at Valero applied the management science principles of agility, “mass customization,” and customer relationship management when it designed the organizational structure of its recruiting department. Unlike most recruiting departments, which typically have a single strategy and a consistent approach that is applied …

Valero’s Metrics and Measurement Systems Valero’s business of recruiting approach is revolutionary because it is almost 100% metrics driven. Valero utilizes the widest variety of recruiting-related metrics of any corporation I have encountered. The importance of metrics to Valero’s recruiting approach can be seen in the following quotation from its …

Dan Hilbert, Manager of Recruiting When you meet Dan Hilbert, manager of recruiting at Valero, you see right away that he is someone who thinks differently from the typical recruiting professional. Among the many things that prepared him for his current role were four years of Jesuit training, an all-male …

From Minneapolis-St. Paul to Wall Street On October 3, 2005, The Wall Street Journal profiled Ms. Knoepke Campbell in its Theory and Practice column, which appears in the Managing section of the paper (click here to read the column). The column is dedicated to looking at the people and ideas …