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It is better
to not be on
the web than
to be on and
not know why
John Sumser

Reality
is more
complex
than
it seems.
John Gall

OUR HOME

Led by an incredible market push from Icarian, companies began to understand that Recruiting is fundamentally an inventory problem. Workforce Analytics, a term used by Icarian's charismatic leader, Doug Merritt, is a system of measurements for reviewing workforce optimization, labor deployment, skills penetration and out year employment requirements. Although Icarian itself has floundered somewhat, the important trend is the introduction of longer term, lifecycle thinking into the disciplines of Recruiting.

In earlier days, Recruiting was practiced as a reactive art. The employment requisition, itself a highly politicized instrument, is issued following the agreed upon determination that a need for a new or replacement employee exists. Given typical organizational functioning, the "req" was traditionally released between 6 days and 6 months after the requirement became clear. As a result, a professional recruiter was on the receiving end of the organizations slowness to respond to market conditions. This created an environment that was failure prone and layered with "ass covering".

In Icarian's approach, managing current and future requirements simultaneously allows the organization to spot its own hiring, attrition and retention trends while maximizing the output of each individual in the company. Training and assignment rotation get folded into the Recruiting process. Icarian's contribution has been to expand the language of Recruiting.

In the immediate future, all Recruiting Operations will be required (by market forces) to view their efforts on a five-year horizon line. The operational question has become: What are your employment requirements over the next five years?. In order to guarantee the availability of an adequate (and adequately trained) workforce, Recruiting Organizations will increasingly build broad talent pools that can be drawn from over time.

In more physical settings, the American inventory system has undergone radical changes over the past 20 years. From balance sheets that were drowning in excessive inventory, industry has tamed the beast with Just-In-Time practices that require tight communication between departments within a firm and their vendors. Built using Enterprise Software systems from Peoplesoft, SAP, Oracle, Lawson, Baan and others, these 21st Century inventory practices have streamlined capital structures while making firms more productive and able to adapt to changing market conditions. The central component of inventory practice is a firm's capacity to adequately describe production requirements over both long and very short terms.

As HR Departments (or their successors) move towards more fully grappling with the Labor Shortage, they discover that some of the answers can be found in these approaches. Knowing which human assets are required when and where allows the cultivation of value based relationships. It also fosters a climate of feasibility in the HR Departments that take a longer view.

During 2001, the language of HR Departments will evolve to include Human Capital Management, Human Inventory Management and Minus 30 Recruiting (the idea that a candidate can be in an orientation program in advance of the physical requirement). The realities may catch up with the language in 2002 or 2003. The Peoplesoft Recruiting Village is a significant step in the right direction.

- John Sumser © TwoColorHat. All Rights Reserved.

It's a slog, to put it mildly. Simply maintaining morale, in the face of such overwhelming odds, is an enormous accomplishment. From the trench level, it certainly must seem like the harder you work, the faster the pile grows.

From the perspective of these high volume shops, it seems like the current spate of offerings in all aspects of Recruitment advertising are bandaids on an arterial wound. We've begun to conclude that a part of the problem lies in its definition.

Everywhere we look, we see solutions that propose to reduce the recruiting cycle towards zero. Every system we review (except, possibly, Icarian) is reactive and administrative which means that the best possible performance is to thin the timeline to a week or so. Given the marketplace pace, this means that huge numbers of potential employees will continue to fall through the net.

Our conclusion? The objectives are wrong. Like a Just In Time Inventory system, the design of Recruiting solutions should focus on an objective of having candidates available 30 days in advance of the requirement, not a week to 60 days afterwards.

This notion, which we're fondly calling "Minus 30", demands a fundamental rethinking of the problem. In order to discover candidates in advance of requirements, the first move is an understanding of the evolution of hiring requirements within the organization. At the same time, data mining techniques need to be used to uncover indications of the likelihood of a shift.

For instance, at the entry level, the first indication of pending availability is college selection or the declaration of a major. Interestingly, much of this behavior is observable since many universities organize student web pages by department.

Alternatively, the death of a parent, the purchase of a home or car, the acquisition of a new computer, the birth of child, a 40th birthday, rapidly increasing real estate values in a particular zip code, sales of certain books by zip code (available from Amazon!) and other major and minor life events are all indications of pending availability and the statistical likelihood that candidates will emerge in a particular region.

The tools required to produce candidates in advance of formal availability also include the mining of existing resume databases. We recently heard the story of a highly successful staffing operation who improved their inventory production in a significant way by assigning all recruiters the task of scoring historical resumes. Once the database was complete (and it took a while to evaluate all 200,000), the company was able to predict the availability of candidates who had applied three or four years ago.

The combination of advance planning and availability surveillance, both made possible by currently available online data, should produce systems that drive the recruiting cycle time below zero days. While more difficult to achieve in small organizations, the repetitive nature of big company recruiting problems makes the task extremely similar to good inventory and distribution management. Once "Minus 30" is achieved, figuring out who bears the inventory carrying costs will be the next frontier.