Make Your Metrics Useful Making metrics useful seems to be where most people get off track. A metric should be telling, regardless of whether it is intended to report performance or diagnose the performance of a process. Unfortunately, many metrics in use today simply don’t tell you anything of value. …

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 …

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 …

“Disruptive Technology” and Strategic “Disruptive Recruiting” Google, through its branding, PR, and recruiting efforts, has made itself so well known and attractive to professionals from every industry and university that they have essentially changed the game of recruiting forever. If you know anything about technology, you know that people in …

Google has plans to nearly double its workforce, growing from approximately 5,000 employees to 10,000 employees in the near future. The recruiting structure that they have designed to enable such growth is, like most successful recruiting organizations, primarily a centralized operations model.

Same situation but different results – An example Let’s start with a basketball analogy. First compare two teams that play in the same league and the same city, the L.A. Lakers and the L.A. Clippers.  If you compare the two teams you will find that both are exactly the same …

Focusing on Cost Containment is Less Strategic than Driving Revenue Growth For the past decade, the human resource function has operated under the myopic focus that process efficiency was the most critical deliverable in the enterprise.  While this misguided focus can be partially attributed to external pressure from the finance …

Most Recruiting Activities Are Not Strategic in Scope Almost everything that an individual recruiter does is intended to resolve an immediate need and is therefore operational or tactical in nature. Because the scope of the outcome is so limited, it is nearly impossible for any single instance to rise to …