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(April 15, 2004) - Recruiting is the gateway to organizational membership. Unlike many other functions, the responsibility for recruiting success is always distributed around the organization to some degree. At the "atomic level", the definition of Recruiting Quality is simple.

Get us the best person available for the job within some price and some time constraints.

There's lots of wiggle room in that approach.

• "Us": The recruiting process works across traditional organizational boundaries. The very definition of "us" changes in each recruiting assignment. Relative strategic importance of the position is the single largest factor in determining the active composition of "us". Other factors include regulatory requirements (expanding the definition of "us" to include the government), urgency (which tends to relax requirements), nepotism (common in small to medium sized firms), organizational structure (relative importance to mission), pecking order (relative importance to political structure), competitive circumstances (including the industry or the customer in the definition of us), and so on.
   
• "Best Person": Thankfully, there is little agreement on a quality ranking order for persons. The combination of skills, personality, life circumstances and experience. The greatest strength and greatest weakness of the Recruiter-Hiring manager team is its ability to make prudent judgments about the quality of a particular individual. There seems to be a "scale" that allows more refined definitions of the relative fit between a person and a job. A combination of two factors, the relative repeatability of the job and the number of people hired by the organization to perform the job, allows the standardization of criteria and evaluation processes at one end of the scale. Inversely, the less repeatable a function is and the fewer people hired to perform a job, the harder the judgment becomes.
   
• "Available": What a bugaboo. The real principle in availability has more to do with price and time constraints than anything else. Although the market is flooded with indicators of availability (from job boards, Resume databases and other electronic data sources), availability is always a function of patience and willingness to pay. "Availability of Talent" is always a compromise between internal demands and market conditions. It is the single weakest link in the actual acquisition of the "best". Recent innovations in candidate pool community development (not data mining but real relationship development) show promise for measurably improving the quality levels of "available" talent.
   
• "The Job": The more completely a job can be defined, the more likely a fit can be established. Unfortunately, job design and requirements specification is a painful and expensive time consumer. It's a task that rarely gets done well (How many Recruiting Departments employ Industrial Psychologists who adequately define job requirements?). While there is a payoff for job descriptions for high volume repeatable positions, the highly flexible and strategically important information worker "dances to the current tune" rather than meeting specific requirements.
   
• "Some Price": You get what you are willing to pay for. Compensation guidelines establish the relative level of quality an organization is willing to acquire. Interestingly, solid employment branding, relative freedom within the organization and other non-traditional compensation elements add purchasing power to the raw cash and benefits structure. Nonetheless, price is the determining factor in the level of quality a company can acquire. Decisions about relative compensation levels are a critical element of the organization's strategic position. The essence of converting Human Capital into real capital (and sustained advantage) is using lower quality staff (from a pure market perspective) to deliver higher quality goods and services.
   
• "Some Time Constraints": The labor market is fickle and geographically driven. Acquiring creative talent simply takes longer in DC than it does in LA. Administrative hang-ups aside, there is a relative correlation between "pickiness" (desire for higher quality) and time to hire. The schedule can be compressed through proactive planning, the use of qualifications driven processes online and the development of pools of qualified and available candidates. Time constraints can be relatively shortened with an investment in relationships.

John Sumser

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