I nominate the calculating of “cost per hire” as the single most pointless and damaging exercise in recruiting. Even though the cost per hire metric is widely used, that certainly doesn’t mean that it adds value, and it may in fact actually hurt the recruiting function. Years ago when I …

What could be simpler than assessing "the fit" of a candidate?

  Recruiting Dirty Little Secrets Here are a dozen areas where corporate recruiting could improve. The corporate black hole — because of recruiter overload, the volume of applicants, and technology problems, a resume submitted to a corporate career site may actually have a zero probability of being reviewed. In the …

Talent acquisition functions spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars designing processes to hire top performers, innovators, and game changers. Unfortunately few of those dollars or hours are spent fixing the biggest roadblock in recruiting A-level talent: weak hiring managers. Everyone seems to intuitively know that managers are the …

There are two fundamental types of hiring strategies: high volume and high impact. Most corporate directors of recruiting think that the most common, high-volume recruiting, has the highest overall impact because, after all, it is used to fill a large number of openings. However, senior executives in sports, entertainment, the …

(Incidentally, the same arguments can also be applied to existing weak employees in cases where layoffs or terminations are being considered.) The Top 30 Arguments against Hiring … “Butts in Chairs” a.k.a. Warm Bodies, “C” Players and Homer Simpson Business Impacts of Butts in Chairs Lost productivity — a new …

STOP COUNTING ONLY HALF OF THE REAL COSTS When times are tight, everyone is encouraged to reduce their budget, and budget cutting is not necessarily a bad thing.  Unfortunately, it can cause serious damage to an organization if the cuts reduce spending too far in one area and not enough …

As we saw in Part 1 of this two-part article series, many HR professionals in general ó and recruiters in particular ó act as though they are isolated from the competitive battlefield of business. All too often they act like socialists instead of capitalists. But fierce competitors hire away a competitor’s talent: …

I consider the single biggest fault with corporate and external recruiting functions to be their almost universal failure to measure the quality (or performance) of the people they hire. Nearly every other “overhead” function, from supply chain to package delivery, has jumped on the ISO or six-sigma bandwagon, but recruiting …

If your company has a turnover of 20% per year and all of your new hires are mediocre, it will only take 5 years for all of your entire workforce to be mediocre. The cost of a “bad hire” for a software engineer can exceed a million dollars, for a …