Intro

Hey, HR Pros, sometimes the obvious is the reason.

Sounds ominous right? Well hiring is a “Full-Contact” sport. There’s no way around it. To do it right you need to get inside the head of your candidate. Nothing is more full-contact than that.  There are no helmets, no shoulder pads, no face guards. It can feel a lot like rugby on any given day.

And that’s just the candidate side.

It applies to the HR staff side too. And we are not talking about internal debates on which of the two remaining candidates is the right one to make an offer to. We’ve all had those testy conversations.

This 5 minutes is about the person you have full-contact with every day. You.

Remember why you are here

It’s easy to get lost it the piles of data. In the 15 interviews a day x 5 days x 4 weeks or 300 interviews a month. Then, after all that earnest effort, you recommend the wrong people simply because you misremembered. ATS or not, you know it happens.

HR work is the Front Line. The front line is Full-Contact.

You are either keeping productive employees happy by handling lots of their personal work, freeing them up to be more productive for the company, or, you’re are searching for the next productive employee.

Believe us, we get it. 

Short Cuts and Comfort Zones

On short cuts – We know of two kinds. Efficiency Makers and Loop Holes. You want the former, not the latter.

Then there are Comfort Zones – Systems we each make naturally to normalize our work day. To smooth out the frantic moments. To ease us through an otherwise chaotic, full-contact type of day.

Comfort Zones are Bad 

Yes we said it. Comfort Zones are bad. When you notice things are comfortable. When you feel like you have it under control, you have actually convinced yourself that your comfort is more important than the improvement of your company. 

An example we encounter all the time

Most HR Hiring Pros we speak to have a short list of go-to recruiters whose services they use as a primary source of candidates. Some have half a dozen. Some 10. Some have only one. Initially they may become more efficient. Their hiring success may improve. They may get a raise or a promotion for a job well done. Sounds great right?

Here is the thing you are forgetting. You have now become a consistent income source for your outside recruiter(s). And they have their own comfort zones. This type of behavior produces mediocre results faster than you will recognize. That’s why after months of higher hiring numbers, productivity of those hires goes down. So does the longevity of recent hire tenures.

To borrow a term, that’s what we call “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Trying to solve that problem brings HR teams to us, or to other recruiters, and a fresh perspective. But you, as an HR Hiring Pro enjoying a good run at your company are resistant. It’s natural. You have a collegial rapport with your favored recruiters. You have a relationship. You are a people person, that’s why you are in HR.

So, it’s not easy to break or even adjust that relationship. You need to remember that your job is to find people that will make your company’s performance better.  

Before you start hearing rumblings from higherup. Act.  

Suggestions

Engage more with managers of the employees you have sourced. Engage directly. Find out who is catching on fast OR, who needed more training than you expected. Whose skills were embellishments and whose were understated.

Get out of your comfort zone and shake up your process. See yourself and your team for what it is.

You are the front line of your company’s future.   

People grow companies. People improve results.  

People start with you.

The People business is full-contact. Mix it up. Get out of your comfort zone. This benefits you and your company. It’s a full-contact sport. Embrace it. If it becomes too comfortable chances are, you are doing something wrong.