Recruiting: a management issue

Peter Drucker noted in a 1985 Harvard Business Review article that only one third of new hires are successful, one third are so-so and one third are outright failures. Twenty years later, nothing much has changed.

Managers’ lack of personal investment in recruiting has been observed to be one of the main problems. For many years, recruiting was considered to be HR’s job. Today, however, the fully-delegated model has reached its limits. Due to greater job complexity, the importance of personal rapport in attracting and retaining candidates and the increasingly diverse range of experience available in the labor market, managers and HR must redefine the way they cooperate in order to optimize selection and hiring.

Recruiting is complex. The stakes are high, and resources are increasingly tight. The huge number of sometimes contradictory criteria makes recruiting hazardous. Even after making a decision, managers never know for sure whether they did the right thing! The analyzed publications provide valuable insights on this issue to help managers take fuller responsibility for a key driver of their own performance:

– Define needs carefully, but avoid targeting a specific profile.

– Look beyond traditional recruiting sources to expand the potential candidate pool.

– Get a better grasp of less typical profiles.