My friends in the HR profession are always telling me that recruiting is the toughest part of their job. HR executives catch heat from their executive team for a good many things, but recruiting is typically the lightning rod issue that generates the most visible pain. Why?
I like to think about it this way - what aspect of the company does HR own that truly impacts every other executive’s business operations on a day-to-day basis? Employee benefits management is critical, but the VP of HR’s executive colleagues aren’t thinking about employee health care benefits when they wake up in the morning. Conflict resolution is high-impact, but it’s a less-frequently needed contribution. Succession planning is a big one, but it’s a multi-year process. Performance reviews are once, maybe twice a year. But when the VP of Sales has five open sales positions, and HR can’t seem to deliver great candidates, and search firm spend is breaking the budget, and sales numbers are being missed due to inadequate staffing levels, and the VP of Sales has just attributed her lack of sales results on a lack of sales people, insinuating that HR needs to do more….well, let’s just say that HR can’t wait to unload recruiting onto someone else.
Now, before I get a mountain of hate mail from my readers in the HR field, I have to say one thing. Human Resources executives face a nearly impossible task. We CEOs tell them to train all of our new employees, pay them, make them happy and healthy, rate everyone’s performance, retain the best ones, plan for their retirement, and then give us a roadmap to staff our company for the next five years. Oh, and by the way, we need them to hire 90 people next year with a budget of under $200,000.
The HR function is typically great at maintaining the people systems at companies. Benefits, payroll, training…all in good shape. But recruiting is almost always a sore spot, lagging behind expectations. The root of the issue lies in the fact that HR, as a general rule, is an overseer of administrative functions. Maintaining programs. Keeping things running. Ensuring that processes are in place. Managing people. Recruiting, however, is a sales function. When you have an outward-facing, go-get-em operation like recruiting run by an administrative function like HR, then you have, well, a poor-performing sales operation.
To see how darn similar recruiting is to sales, let’s look at how recruiters do what they do. The recruiter first mines their databases for people who may be a good fit for their open position, just like sales and marketing folks mine the CRM system looking for leads. Recruiters then cold-call or email candidates with a job proposition, just like a salesperson cold-calls a prospect. In either case, it’s work that requires one to check their ego at the door, because you get 9 “no’s” for every one “yes.” Recruiters then pitch the company to a candidate, just like a salesperson has their first phone meeting with a prospect. If the candidate (prospect) likes what they hear, then they come in for another meeting. At the final stage, the recruiter makes an offer to their candidate, who either accepts or rejects it based on their other options.
How many HR staffers do you know who like to bang out 100 cold calls a day? How many administrators have you worked with who enjoy the rough-and-tumble of convincing someone to change their decision and instead by from your company? If you’re going to run a world-class recruiting operation, you need to call it what it is - a sales team.
Would you, as the head of your company, allow HR to run the sales operation? Of course not. Why, then, do you have HR managing the selling of your company to new prospective employees?
Recruiting is a sales function. The companies that understand that fact will win the war for talent. Those that don’t will overspend on recruiting and still come up short.
