For leaders aiming to make organizations perform better on the whole, an under-appreciated area that holds great promise is recruitment. People generally look to training or performance management. But the right recruiting gives you an opportunity to set everything right. Why?
The simple reason is it all begins with recruitment. When you decide to make your recruiting effective, you focus on what are the right things to do (the things that matter)
1) In order to arrive at which people are ‘right’ for your organization, you are compelled to articulate the essence of why you exist & what you have set out to do. You can hope to recruit the right people only if you have clarity of purpose. Knowing what exactly you want in terms of mission & results helps you identify the right actions, the right tasks, the right skillsets & the required people capability.
2) With right recruiting, your training needs will qualitatively change. The more you recruit the right people, the less would there be mass skill-deficiency. Right recruiting can help save your training budget or better still, you move from training to fix problems to training that exploits opportunities.
3) With right recruiting, people’s strengths match the task-requirements & more importantly, they perform within the given culture. This makes for engaged & productive employees. An organization has to exert itself less when it comes to pure-play employee engagement activities. Right recruiting can pitch employee engagement at a qualitatively higher level.
4) Right recruiting is both the cause & consequence of effective reward & recognition structures. They reinforce the right performance measures & enable many high-performers to shine through. This pushes you to set the bar higher for everybody involved. In other words, achievement fuels higher ambition that sets the stage for positive retention – of ever improving performers.
So, what is right recruiting? Here are two teasers to indicate the bold & creative art that recruiting really is. First, a bold company will not simply want a flexible recruit who adapts to its culture. It will actively seek a non-conformist rebel achiever, someone who demands & initiates change. This is how it infuses new vitality into the spirit of an organization. Second, if you are getting a 100% fit for an organizational position, all it indicates is that you are helping recreate the organization of the present and not ushering in the organization of the future. Job-profiles are snapshots frozen in time. They do not capture the fluidity of changing demands & expectations. A perfect candidate may not be the best candidate.
Right recruiting provides people-skills for creating the organization of the future. To that extent, it must create a space for discontinuities in an organizational system. A point rarely grasped and acted upon in the scramble to meet present manpower needs.