As Published in Business 2 Business, March 2008

HR is Not A Fixed Cost

By Ira S Wolfe

For most employees, management announcing that fifty new hires will join the organization in the next six months is sign of job security.  That brings a sigh of relief especially when all the economic news cries recession, economic downturn, and layoffs.  There is one exception however:  the HR manager. 

Management in many ways still doesn’t get it.   If Wal-Mart said yes to your proposal for one million widget but you didn’t have the capacity to manufacture what you just sold nor the capital to purchase the raw materials, you’d be in big doo-doo.  But that is exactly what happens in many organizations when business growth sets off a chain reaction resulting in the recruitment, hiring and on-boarding of new employees but……the staffing and budget for HR remains the same.   

For several reasons, hiring even a single key employee is many times more complex these days than ever before.  You’ve heard me rant and rave for nearly ten years about the Perfect Labor Storm coming.  Well, just ask your buddies around dinner, on the golf course, or at the next Chamber of Commerce breakfast how easy it is to hire skilled workers and you’ll likely set off a round of one-upmanship stories about hiring mistakes and how difficult it is to recruit for open positions.  While finding the right employee is a huge problem, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

A second problem is less obvious but just as deadly to a company’s ability to deliver what they sell.

For any individual even thinking about looking for a new job or career, it is as easy as Copy, Paste, and Submit. Job opportunities abound for skilled workers.  Applying for a job has progressed from dropping off a resume or filling out an application in the “personnel” office to simply e-mailing a resume or even submitting podcasts. As is the case with many technologies, its convenience often drags complexity along with it.

Like the neighbor attending an open house just to get a peek at how the people on the other side of the street live, an increasing number of job candidates are just "shopping". Add those to the serious candidates looking for better opportunities and hiring managers are receiving a massive influx of resumes - an HR administrative nightmare I call the "resu-mess".

No longer do managers receive a dozen or so resumes mailed or faxed from a single ad in the Sunday classifieds. When they post to the online job boards, they are greeted daily with dozens if not hundreds of emails clogging inbox. After years of cutting back on the size of human resource departments or just adding more and more responsibilities on the shoulders of the HR generalists and recruiters, it is fair to say that reviewing and processing these inboard resumes becomes a bottleneck at the hiring tollgate. It’s like having eight lanes of traffic being processed through two tool booths.   Traffic slows to a crawl and impatience grows.  When recruiting, the good candidates will simply get out of line and leave.

This bottleneck leads to two devastating business mistakes. First is the natural urge to cut back on advertising in order to avoid getting too many resumes. The second is not responding fast enough to the top candidates.

In a misguided attempt to manage the recruitment process, hiring managers reduce the number of job postings and cut back on other media outlets in order to make their jobs more manageable.. This strategy is tantamount to HR suicide. Considering today's challenge of finding the right candidate in a shrinking talent pool, throwing out the widest net possible and advertising in more media, not less, is in the best interest of employers who are recruiting.

But more resumes isn’t necessarily better without automating parts of the process. Few hiring managers, human resource professionals and assistants have the time to screen the applications, call the candidates, do the voice mail dance, complete phone interviews, schedule face-to-face interviews, check references, complete background checks and so on. This leads to the second mistake.

While managers and HR staff are attempting to weed out the unqualified or disinterested applicants, high-demand qualified candidates are being overlooked and turned off by slow response times, cumbersome hiring hurdles, and inexperienced interviewers.

If it’s true that first impressions skew a top candidate's opinion of a business, then the reputation of many organizations is abysmal. Administrative overload is creating backlogs and feeding the chief complaint of job seekers - poor communication and follow-up. Based on the 2007 Staffing.org survey of nearly 500,000 job seekers, ratings for communication and follow-up after applying for a job was a pitiful "1" (poor) out of a 5-point scale.

Managers are at a crossroads. Business didn’t used to be as complex as it is today. But many organizations still insist on using the techniques of yester-year to solve today's problems. Candidates hire professional resume writers. They search the Internet for information about your company. They download dozens and dozens of answers to the most common interview questions. Yet managers are still doing interviews on the fly, relying on gut instinct and using over-hyped and partially fabricated resumes to make final hiring decisions. What can an organization do to attract more candidates but simplify the complex process of recruiting and hiring?

Simplify the application process.

To first attract and then actually hire the best talent, making the entire application process as convenient as possible is critical. Prospective employees should be able to fill out an application online 24/7. Immediately upon submitting their resumes, these candidates should be asked to complete an automated online interview.  This screening interview includes job specific filter questions (from as basic as "Are you available to work weekends including Saturdays and Sundays?” or “Have you completed a two-year or four year degree?” to “Describe why you feel you are an effective leader and provide an example”).  You can also pre-qualify by asking skill and competency based questions (“Indicate your proficiency using Microsoft Excel”), allowing candidates to self-qualify or disqualify themselves.  For the hiring manager, this means fewer phone calls to unqualified, unmotivated and uninterested candidates and faster access to the qualified candidates.

A case in point: A client of ours, a computer support business, recently received over 100 applicants to a job ad for VP of Operations. . Of those 100 plus applications, fewer than 20 were qualified based on their customized criteria. Had this organization not utilized an applicant processing system, the partners would have had to sift through these 100 resumes manually. By automating the process, our client was able to begin contacting the most qualified candidates within hours of their submission and direct their attention and resources to find the best candidate with the least amount of disruption in their schedule.

A well-designed applicant processing system is like the EZ-Pass of human resources. It can help organizations filter and process résumés quickly and provide a central repository for potential candidates. When the system aligns with business processes, it's possible to identify talent more quickly and reduce hiring time. The net result is that you can snatch talented individuals before your competitors do.

Ira S Wolfe is the president of Success Performance Solutions and the author of The Perfect Labot Storm™2.0.