LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy

Sourcing 1.0 vs. Agent Orange: "Be Prepared to Re-Examine Your Reasoning"

In a riveting excerpt from "The Fog of War", the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, offers the following advice:

"Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning."

I often say the same to organizations looking to re-architect their recruiting model/function . . . or to those who have attempted to shift their model and have little to no results to show for it.

Agent Orange was deployed to remove foilage from trees in an effort to better identify the NVA and Viet Cong - in essence, however, they weren't hiding in or under the trees . . . they were hiding under the ground.

The corollary is that recruitment models have shifted to accomodate Sourcing 1.0 (Sourcing as Name-Generation Assembly-Lines), however the coinciding effect has been greater fallouts, no increase in QOH or decrease in QOH, in addition to less relationship-building (i.e. "candidate development").

Sourcing 1.0 is, in my best estimation, the following in military terms:

"Good initiative.  Bad judgment."

Talent Acquisition Professionals: Operational Innovation and Process Improvement Are 2 Different Things

Today's HBR Brief, "Deep Change: How Operational Innovation Can Transform Your Company" offers some extremely relevant tips for the Talent Acquisition function today.  The important thing to take away here is that Operational Innovation is NOT Process Improvement.  For some reason, practitioners in our industry shun process innovation in lieu of applying Six Sigma and/or LEAN methodologies to already broken processes!  Here are some tips that make great brainstorming food for progressive Recruiting Leaders out there:

Make the Special Case the Norm

Companies often achieve extraordinary levels of performance under extraordinary conditions. The trick is to turn your do-or-die mode into everyday practice.

Example: A packaged-goods maker had relied on sales forecasts for production scheduling. When demand for a new product wildly exceeded predictions, it created an ad hoc process to give real-time demand information to manufacturing, which made production planning and distribution more efficient. After the crisis passed, the company made its emergency mode standard. Customers were delighted, and overall costs dropped dramatically.

Talent Acquisition Take: There are a number of TA applications here, so I'll keep this short and throw only 1 out there -- Leading Indicators throughout the recruiting process.  Is it possible?  You bet.

Rethink Critical Dimensions of Work

Experiment with changing one or more of these elements in your own operations:

What results are to be produced, who should perform the necessary activities, where should they be performed, in what sequence, and how thoroughly each activity must be performed.

In 2002, Shell Lubricants reconsidered who needed to participate in its order fulfillment process. By replacing a group of seven people who each handled different parts of the order with one person who does it all, Shell cut cycle time by 75%, reduced operating expenses by 45%, and boosted customer satisfaction by 105%.

Talent Acquisition Take: Here's a perfect example of today's notion of Sourcing 1.0 not working.  What happened?  Well, the company cut the process down from an assembly line to a more streamlined fashion.  Can this happen in TA?  Sure it can.  Am I saying to revert back to just 1 person handling the whole process (the 'Full Lifecycle Recruiter')?  No . . . but having 5 different people handling the recruiting process like an assembly line (Sourcing 1.0) isn't the answer either.  The balance is likely in the middle, swinging to the left or right depending on your own organization.

Talent Acquisition Professionals: Are You Blindly Worshiping at the Altar of Best Practices?

In an interesting article from Scott Anthony today, "When Are "Best Practices" Not Best Practices?", he touches upon an issue we so often see in the Talent Aquisition universe:

Blindly Worshipping At The Altar of Best Practices

Sound familiar?  As Scott puts it, "The theory is that the manager should find a successful company, find out what practices have made them successful, mimic those practices, and expect success."  But does that work in our space?  Do the same principles that make one recruitment function effective work as well in another environment?

Well, if you think the answer is yes . . . you're mistaken.  I still hear companies asking for better ways to find more names, when the actual desired outcome is increased organizational performance.  Scott concludes with some great advice that should be well-heeded in our space:

"Before blindly copying a competitor’s best practice, or assuming a historic best practice will continue to provide positive results, ask three questions:

• Are market circumstances similar?
• Are corporate contexts similar?
• Is the practice “modular,” with few interactions with other corporate systems?

If the answers to these questions are yes, then mimicking best practice can succeed. If the answer to any of these questions are no, think twice. Following so-called best practice might lead to disappointing results."

Candidate Segment Knowledge - Are You 'Synthesizing' It?

Working in the Talent Acquisition arena, I remain in awe about how we march on with circa-1930s marketing processes despite the fact that if there is any business function that knows so much about their given 'customers', it's us.

I often ask the following question of Recruiters, Recruiting Managers, and even Directors of Talent Acquisition:

"What kind of information do you observe and store on the attitudes and behaviors of your Pivotal Talent Pools?"  OR . . . "What do you know about how this particular Pivotal Talent Pool thinks and feels?"

Upon asking the above question(s), I'm often informed of how "Our Recruiting Department doesn't store that kind of information because our careers site and ATS doesn't have that kind of component built in."

So let's think about this for a moment -- There is no other business function that gets as deep into 1-on-1 conversations with customers (in this case, candidates) as us . . . not even Marketing (and this includes their heavy investments in primary and secondary research).  Yet we don't store any of this information and use it to refine our ability to hire more great people in less time for less cost than our competitors?

Remember: There is significant economic gain to be realized (in addition to many others) when you implement a Strategic Sourcing Framework, but we're not going to be ready for tomorrow's challenges if we continue to move forward with yesterday's thinking.

Talentship and John Boudreau: The Future of HR and Talent Decision Frameworks

John Boudreau is a true thought-leader in the HR space from a full employee lifecycle standpoint (meaning talent acquisition to engagement to organizational development to retention, etc.).

I won't take the time to over-elaborate on his concept of Talentship, but I would recommend watching the embedded video interview with him below.  There are some serious insights to be gleamed.

LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy is proud to help companies become their sector's first mover in the way of Talentship from a Talent Acquisition perspective . . .

Don't just focus on playing the existing game better . . . Change the game instead.

Sourcing 1.0 (Sourcing As Name Generation) Has Begun To Show Its Cracks

Sourcing 1.0 (Sourcing as Name Generation) has begun to show its cracks . . . much like the notion of CRM ("the right message to the right customer at the right time") did in the early 2000s. Frankly, most organizations we speak with that are using a Sourcing 1.0 process are just not seeing desired results. Yeah, they may be a very marginal improvement in COH numbers, but there is a coinciding cost as well. Because of the process shift, the number of fallouts has increased and overall accountability has simply gone down. (You know the picture - a candidate falls out and the Sourcer points a finger at the Recruiter, who points a finger at the Appt Setting Rec Admin, who points a finger at the Hiring Manager . . . and on and on we go as we've made it easy to skirt responsibility). In addition, I've even personally seen Finance Departments getting involved in offering financial analysis training to Recruiting Leaders that continue to attempt to justify sustained funding in light of only marginal results at best.

Sure, Recruiting Departments have plenty more names with the current Sourcing 1.0 model . . . but what that has resulted in is an overload of unqualified candidates and a near worthless data warehouse. A good analogy is the early-stage tech company that is sales-driven instead of being segment-driven. Sure, you wind up with some sales here and there . . . but Word of Mouth (WOM) never expands and resonates. Instead of "putting their eggs in one basket" (the right basket is the real challenge here) and working dilligently to acquire 10 customers within the same niche . . . the typical firm focus on sales-for-sales-sake, winding up with 10 customers in 10 different niches. The result? Well, it's simple - the 10 customers never meet and don't know one another, so there is no opportunity for WOM to spread virally.

Here's another real-world analogy: Let's say a telecom company (we'll call this fictitious company "Nprint-Sextel") begins a heavy marketing push aimed simply at increasing overall sales. They wind up with 10 new customers . . . the first 2 are highly profitable, the next 3 are moderately profitable, the next 3 are break-even propositions, and the final two are 'demon customer segments' that cost more to serve than the revenue we see in return. Sure, the marketing campaign 'worked' - it resulted in 10 new customers. But were they the right customers? Were they angel customers? (Correlary: . . . Were they 5-star QOHs at our company???) This is a big reason a decision science emerged within the Marketing Function.

There is more than one application to the analogy here - I'm sure you know a few if you're in the current Sourcing game. I'm not the only one pushing a decision science in our space; so is John Boudreau, Research Director at the USC Marshall Center for Effective Organizations. Look him up and check him out - his contributions are more valuable than any I've ever seen in our industry.

Joshua Letourneau
Mg Director, SSF (Strategic Sourcing Framework) Implementation
LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy

Josh And The Animal Telephonically Connect . . . And Here's The Result!

Cucumbers, Dingos, Talent Acquisition, and Shaving a Candidate's Head as a means to establishing candidate control . . . were just a few of the topics touched on:

Where Talent Acquisition, General Patraeus, Sourcing, and "The Surge" Intersect . . .

Talent Acquisition departments, particularly those that have a segmented Soucing function (parent-child relationship), may stand to benefit from the briefing of General Petraeus to Congress today regarding progress in Iraq, notably the "Surge".  Why?  Because an underlying issue that confounds Talent Acquisition is the same elephant in the room that all Statisticians (and at this point, Congress members on Capitol Hill) must consider:  Correlation vs. Causation.

If you don't know what that means, and/or don't have time to click the link above to see what Wikidpedia has to say, here's the skinny in a nutshell: It's pretty easy to find 'positive correlations' between different things, but that doesn't mean one causes the other.  For example, you could probably positively correlate the average temperatue in the Northern Hemisphere to how many times the Recruiting Animal screams on his show each Wednesday . . . but that doesn't mean one causes the other.  Here's a better example: Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophic event due to its heavy winds and rain . . . but did the hurricane itself cause the levees to break, which led to the flooding? . . . better stated, did Hurricane Katrina cause what the Insurance Risk Mgmt Firm, RMS, listed as "The 2005 Great New Orleans Flood"?  (Sidenote: If you have a couple minutes to burn, check out how RMS's press release calling the flooding "The 2005 Great New Orleans Flood" on 9/2/2005 was a pre-emptive strike against homeowners' who planned to battle the 'flood exclusion' provision in their homeowners insurance policy . . . )

Getting back on point, this is why I bring this up -- Much like how the media and politicians view the "Surge" as simply 'working or not working' in Iraq, Talent Acquisition functions are too quick to say that "Sourcing is working" or "Sourcing is not working".  Instead of focusing on desired outcomes and asking the key question, "Why?", I all too often hear a blanket statement of broken-out Sourcing working or not working.  For example, instead of simply saying that "Sourcing is not working", ask the tough question that so many business people so often forget: "Why?"  Here's a hint that ties into LG & Associate's value proposition: If you're implementing Sourcing 1.0 (Sourcing as Name Generation), then you're bound to fail before you even start . . . but I'll leave that alone for the time being.

To the contrary, if "Sourcing is working", still ask "Why?" !!! Again, let me repeat that: If Sourcing is working, ask yourself "Why?", and then ask every member on your team to answer the same question.  As we work to help clients implement our SSF (Strategic Sourcing Framework), I'll be the first to tell you: You just might be surprised.  To take a page from an early mentor of mine and one of the best marketing minds in the game today, Sergio Zyman (involuntarily, I might add), business people often see something working and then attribute it to their own stroke of brilliance, "Yeah, I knew that would work", at which point they pop their collar and look in the nearest mirror to fix their eyebrows.  But here's the real deal: Sometimes things work for unexpected reasons -- reasons that don't always meet the eye.  Going back to square one, look beyond correlation and push to find causation.

Consider asking "Why?" . . . Ask your team members the same . . . Don't forget the concept of Correlation vs. Causation . . . And watch the performance of your Sourcing function soar! :)

Joshua Letourneau
Mg Director, SSF (Strategic Sourcing Framework) Implementation
LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy
BLOG: http://www.lgexec.typepad.com/

"If You Were An Animal, What Kind Would You Be?" - When You Hear This Question, Get Up And Leave The Room Immediately!

So the interview is going well - You're in top management and have led behavioral interviews in the past. All indications are that you're knocking it dead . . . and then the person on the other end of the line (or across the table) drops a bomb:

"If you were an animal, what kind would you be?"
OR
"If you came back to life as an animal, which would you come back as?"
OR
"If you were to by chance, be reincarnated, would there be an animal you'd like to come back as?"

If you are ever posed that interview question, hang up and/or leave the room immediately. You're dealing with someone whose IQ rivals that of a Prarie Dog.

Joshua Letourneau
Mg Director, SSF (Strategic Sourcing Framework) Implementation
LG & Associates Search / Talent Strategy
BLOG: www.lgexec.typepad.com