Yesterday, I shared how I recently became a guilt-free coffee drinker due to the research that recently surfaced regarding the health benefits of my addictive obsession.
As I read more of the article yesterday, something caught eye - The article explains why coffee got a bad rap in the first place:
“Many people take their coffee with a small dose of guilt, worried that it isn’t good for the body. That’s a holdover from studies done in the 1950s and 1960s showing that coffee drinkers were prone to pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and other woes. These studies failed to account for cigarette smoking, which once went hand in cup with coffee drinking. Since then, the medical community has done a gradual about-face on the health effects of coffee.”
I think there is a principle here worth considering when it comes to recruiting.
Part of the service offering we provide our clients is the design and implementation of recruiting systems. From an end-to-end system perspective, recruiting can look very different than it does if you just examine each component on its own.
For example, we often hear comments such as:
“We’ve tried job boards, and they don’t work for our company.”
or...
“I took an assessment in the past that indicated I would be a poor salesperson, but I’m a great salesperson!”
or...
“I’ve called and left voice mails for the candidates on my sourcing list, and they don’t call back. We must be calling the wrong candidates because these people aren’t interested.”
Just as the coffee researchers discovered, the overall system matters most when it comes to results. Just because your Uncle Joe drank a lot of coffee and died of a heart attack, doesn’t mean the coffee killed him...It was more likely his overall lifestyle that led to his demise, from which coffee drinking was a mere part. Likewise, it is not likely the pieces of the recruiting process that cause recruiting failures, it is the system itself that is faulty.
As humans, it is much easier for us to focus our attention on part of an overall process, rather than to look at things holistically. Why? Because whatever is causing the pain is what gets our attention. If you’re responsible for recruiting, that’s a mistake.
You’ll get much better results by identifying as many parts in the recruiting process as possible and then testing to see how changing each component affects the end result. This takes time, attention, and focus...but it works!
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