Salespeople and Babysitters

Recruiters often feel like salespeople because of how their results are measured: how many people did they hire this quarter.  Have a dismal quarter, get a warning.  Have two, get the boot. 

   

HR Generalists often feel like babysitters:  Keep the children (employees and management) from fighting. And don’t let them break anything on your watch (like the law).

During the recession, many companies fired their expensive recruiters and gave their HR Generalists dual roles.  Even HR Directors were presented with an “opportunity they couldn’t refuse” to manage the recruiting organization.  Not really the career advancement they were hoping for.  With increased hiring demand this year, companies are trying to put humpy dumpy back together again.  Unfortunately, hiring manager satisfaction and confidence has eroded while HR/Staffing was playing musical chairs.

How does HR/Staffing regain the respect of their customers?  First, learn a new language, their language.  What are they being measured on this quarter and this year?  Revenue?  Earnings Per Employee? First to market? Number of  new customers? Market share? Earnings?  You can be damned sure that every executive in your company knows exactly what they are being measured on and that’s what you need to talk about.  Then they’ll listen.

The process:

Step 1) Identify top initiatives of key hiring groups.

Step 2) Find out from individual contributors what are the obstacles to meeting those initiatives.

Step 3) Decide what you could do to help.

Step 4) Speak in their language and be heard!

Example:

Step 1)  You find out that the VP of Engineering’s top initiative is to deliver the TurboBlast 9000 product by January 2006.

Step 2) You talk to the developers about obstacles to meeting the deadline.  They tell you: two key architects have recently resigned; they also have a shortage of UI designers; and the Quality Assurance needs three months lead time to test the product before production.   You also find out from Finance that a one month delay in product delivery will mean $2M of lost revenue.

Step 3) You figure out how you can help: replacing the key architects and hiring UI designers is number one priority.  Also working with HR to identify internal candidates to shift over to QA as needed.

Step 4)  You approach the VP explaining how you can help overcome these obstacles to meeting her delivery deadline.  You ask her for short-term sourcing dollars to help fill the urgent positions, and long-term support on getting better recruitment technology to source ahead-of-demand in the future.

You’ve just positioned yourself as a business partner that can impact the bottom line revenue of the company.  Congratulations!