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Best Recruitment Practices For 2008 PDF
Best Recruitment Practices For 2008 PDF
Best Recruitment Practices For 2008 PDF
Award Winners
Another year of profession-altering innovations and strategic
contributions
Monday, April 07, 2008 | by Dr. John Sullivan
One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with
the latest evolutions in best practices at the best firms. Fortunately, it's a little easier to
learn about the emerging benchmark best practices as a result of ERE Media's Recruiting
Excellence Awards, which honor the most strategic and innovative global recruiting
practices developed throughout the year.
The awards banquet, which usually kicks off the Spring Expo, was an excellent start to
the event that has become the pinnacle meeting point for the best and brightest in the
profession. This year, more than 1,100 recruiting professionals and vendors descended
upon San Diego, California to learn about organizations that are breaking new ground by
becoming more businesslike and analytical.
This year's Expo added even more opportunities to learn from those organizations
honored, as the agenda included a new panel discussion featuring selected honorees
discussing their organizations' award-winnings efforts. In addition, previous award
winners, such as Michael McNeal, Dan Hilbert, Michael Homula, and Expo chair Trudy
Knoepke-Campbell (all of whom have since become icons in the recruiting profession),
were on-hand to chat with attendees.
As someone who tracks HR best practices (as well as serves as a judge in the awards
process), I am privileged to be able to share my assessment of their innovative
approaches and groundbreaking results.
A leading provider of food and facilities management services, Sodexo has worked hard
over the past few years to excel in all areas of recruiting and talent management, and its
work with regards to attracting, developing, and retaining diverse talent is the best I've
ever seen anywhere in the world. Whatever you are doing to promote diversity pales in
comparison to the Sodexo approach, which combines extensive metrics with significant
rewards for managers and executives in order to produce results.
Some highlights that led Sodexo to win the diversity award this year include:
The results include a 38% increase in qualified ethnically/racially diverse candidates and
a 32% increase in qualified female candidates.
The work done by the recruiting team at AIMCO can only be described as breathtaking.
Its "dollarization" of HR results, forward-looking predictive metrics, and general
businesslike approach make even the iconic Google look like a has-been. I have
researched AIMCO's approach to HR, and I find it to be the one that everyone should
emulate.
Some elements of its approach to retention that demonstrate its advanced thinking are:
Clearly AmTrust Bank has demonstrated that a relatively small financial institution
headquartered in Ohio can do some world-class work. Up to 78% of its hires come from
employee referrals, which has allowed the bank to both reduce agency fees from 21% of
budgeted recruiting expense down to about 3% and to avoid spending money on
newspaper ads. The bank has found that these referral hires have no negative impact on
diversity while excelling in on-the-job performance and retention.
AmTrust Bank created the LINX referral program in 2006, which deputizes all
employees to play key roles in recruiting.
Its service level agreements guarantee response to all referrals within three
business days. (I have found that responsiveness is the number one factor in
successful employer referral programs.)
It correlated turnover by department to staffing concentration by source. When
ERP was revealed to produce lower turnover, it focused the sourcing strategy on
referrals, which not only saved money, but drove company-wide turnover down
by 18%. (It's also important to correlate hiring sources with on-the-job
performance in order to make your workforce more productive.)
Once again, Michael McNeal has put together an outstanding team that continues to
innovate, especially in the areas of workforce planning and statistical modeling.
The results are reflected in its recent employee survey, which shows that overall
employee satisfaction at Intuit is 4% higher than Sirota's best-in-class rankings. For the
seventh consecutive year, Intuit has ranked on Fortune magazine's list of "100 Best
Companies to Work For" in the U.S. Since 2005, its revenue per employee has increased.
It is also spending less money to fill vacancies from voluntary and involuntary attrition.
Ernst & Young (E&Y) once again demonstrates its leadership within its industry by
updating one of the largest college recruiting programs (over 5,000 hires per year). By
treating campuses like business clients, it has produced significant results.
Its program now touches over 300 business-school campuses in North America.
It leverages former interns in their senior year as campus ambassadors. (This is a
best practice that everyone should copy.)
Ernst & Young used an online video development contest to get current students
to write and produce videos starring themselves and talking about what was
important to them in a career in professional services. The winning video team
won a trip with E&Y's CEO.
The company leverages a campus-centric team approach to ensure strong
relationship standards are fostered and maintained. Each campus team is
comprised of:
o A campus coordinating partner, campus recruiter, campus champion
(senior manager), and a diversity champion.
o Each team is also supported by additional professionals representing lines
of service, geographies, etc.
o On average, large schools have teams ranging between 15-20 core
members.
E&Y chairman, executive board, and all vice chairs lead campus recruiting efforts
by attending faculty conferences and speaking to student groups on site.
Each business unit has five strategic goals related to campus recruiting in their
balanced scorecards; many business units have now added campus recruiting
goals into managers' personal development plans.
It established a recruiting strategy that embeds brand building into all student
touchpoints throughout the academic lifecycle.
E&Y is the most thorough corporate user of Facebook to enable delivery of
targeted messaging to students and student groups using a channel/forum that
students prefer. Its policy requires that all posts made by students on Facebook are
responded to within 5 business days.
It holds numerous conferences aimed at attracting diverse college students.
Intern to full-time hire conversion rate is more than 90%.
E&Y also won the award for the best employer brand, demonstrating once again that
organizations with a strong heritage and conservative business standards can excel at
innovation when the business demands it.
Around the globe, Wipro is cementing its position as one of the largest and most
successful IT service and business process outsourcing companies. Once again this year,
Wipro demonstrated that when it comes to building world-class business processes, its
own HR organization is not exempt. This past year, the Bangalore, India-headquartered
company:
The design of this company's process demonstrates deep insight into the future of
recruiting, in which statistics and modeling will help firms predict business problems and
opportunities utilizing people-related data. When it comes to organizations demonstrating
Final Thoughts
The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I would like to
thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR. It should be obvious from both
the record attendance and the tone of this year's Expo that the war for talent is still going
strong.
Everyone should also take note that the rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing and
that the one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more businesslike. More and
more recruiting functions are leveraging statistical modeling and heuristics to anticipate
and manage future events. This trend means that more and more decisions in recruiting
will be made based on data and facts, rather than on intuition and tradition. If you're
behind in developing advanced metrics, you will soon be non-competitive.