When I speak to companies regarding recruiting practices, it is very easy to tell the difference between those who have a well-defined recruiting strategy and those who don’t.  Frankly, I love when executives say, “Here’s our strategy, here’s how we’re implementing it, and here are our problems.”  We can then have a fairly quick conversation regarding whether we can help. 

More often than not, I hear a poorly defined strategy, no systematic steps to carrying out the fuzzy strategy, and thus no buy in from the given company.

In the words of one of my favorite recruiting gurus, Dr. John Sullivan (a fellow Psychologist termed the “Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company magazine), most companies:

“1. Can’t even define the term ‘strategy’
2. Don’t know the available strategies in recruiting
3. Don’t have a name for their own recruiting strategy
4. Don’t know the steps involved in preparing a recruiting strategy
5. Have never written down their strategy so that others can follow it
6. Have never compared their strategy in recruiting to their competitors’ recruiting strategies in order to ensure that theirs is superior
7. Have never integrated their strategy with their recruiter selection, budgeting, and time allocation processes
8. Make no attempt to measure the effectiveness of their recruiting strategy”

I’ll add one more that I see more often than not:

9. Have a great strategy (to recruit high-caliber new agents), but utilize gimmicky tactics that only attract desperate and naive people.

If your company’s strategy is to hire enough high-caliber people every year so you can politely dismiss 10% of your lowest performers (and still net a significant growth in agents), then you must have a system that can accomplish that!  The system must be scalable and demand consistent steps for each manager for it to work.  Once a strategy is established, you can better assess what interferes with the execution of the defined steps, and redirect managers to get back to agreed upon priorities.

This recruiting scenario is just one example that identifies strategic weakness.  If you have managers reporting to you, and you don’t insist on figuring out if everyone is in agreement regarding recruiting strategy (and then hold them accountable to their agreement), then who really is the lazy one?