Talentism

Attendance

My wife and I had a good laugh. She was reading the weekly bulletin from our children's school district. The lead piece was about attendance. Specifically, it talked about how the district was losing lots of money because kids weren't going to school. The article said that either we (as in the royal "we" of the community) either start sending our kids to school or money will be lost.

We laughed because its was the silliest threat we had ever had thrown at us as parents. We (as in the decrepit "we" of my wife and me) already spend lots of money and hours at our school because there is no music program, no art. In fact, everything except the state mandated basics have been cut out of the curriculum. So what could they threaten us with anyway?

What does this have to do with business, technology or recruiting? Any time any entity takes an entitlement mentality to their markets they end up with threats that aren't really threats to anybody except the "I'll bite my nose until you pay attention" crowd. And all too often recruiting (and the technologists that support the function) fall into that behavior.

If recruiting is not a business then it is an administrative function. Administrative functions are by definition inefficient: they are created because of inefficiency in human behavior or business practice. Why have payroll? Why not have people just call the bank and say "Give me $1,000 and get it from my company?" Because human beings have an integrity inefficiency when it comes to money. They believe (or rather, their survival biology instructs them) that getting a lot now and nothing later is better than getting a little for a long time. So companies develop systems, and governments create regulations to overcome that inefficiency.

Businesses seek to minimize inefficiencies because they cost money. They seek to get rid of any inefficiency that isn't mandated or that doesn’t provide more value than cost. Recruiting needs to either deliver more value than pain or it will be minimized.

So what does this have to do with hollow threats?

The average recruiting department, when confronted with this reality, will start issuing idle threats. "We can't do our jobs if you cut our financing," not "If you are only willing to pay X, then you will only get Y for service, and that is still a 10% better deal than anybody else in the market can get for you." If recruiting were a business instead of just a business function, it would learn to equate client’s willingness to pay for results with the expected return (and relative comparison to the market).

Recruiting is Business (Take One)

Recruiting is business. It is not a separate specialty unto itself; it is not a unique parallel universe where the rules of business physics don’t apply. Recruiting, staffing, talent acquisition (whatever you want to call it) must be measured as a P & L function wherever it exists. Recruiting must deliver sustainable competitive advantage to its customers. Period. Everything else is just icing or noise.

If a recruiting organization does not have a true P&L focus then it will either be outsourced to someone that does, or become an administrative function that everyone avoids. It will be like the hiring manager getting coffee or refilling the paper in the copy machine: just another administrative task that you can’t afford to hire anybody to take off your hands.

This doesn't force recruiting's square peg into capitalism's round hole. Recruiting has all the qualities of a P&L function. Its transactions are valued and unique, people are willing to pay for them, and there is ongoing competition for its market's dollars. In fact, recruiting provides competitive advantage to its customers, just like sales does. Recruiting is a sales function, and as such it delivers top-line (not bottom line) results.

This is not the “people are our number one asset” punch-phrase thrown around by companies to justify their government agency approach to the HR function. I am talking about having measurable impact on the customer, true value delivered, and competitive advantage against the other purveyors in the market (hiring manager’s themselves, RPO’s, agencies, etc.).

Sustainable competitive advantage is a function of the consistently scalable capability to maximize the market’s valuation of the creativity of your human assets. This is the business / financial method of saying “People are our number one asset.” Notice it doesn’t say “Because you can fog a mirror you have value.” It says “The business has an asset. It is all the possible ‘talents’ that it can legally connect to. If the business wants to make money to return value to shareholders (the purpose of the corporation), then it will maximize the ongoing value of that asset by figuring out a way to continuously extract value from it. That value is creativity applied towards one or more of three meta-tasks: continuously improving the efficiency of core processes, maximizing the effectiveness of the services / products delivered, and / or creating an emotional connection with the buying population.”