Before the holidays, we had an enormous interest in our recent whitepapers on Just In Time and "The Seven Deadly Sins of Waste" in Recruiting. Based on the interest, we've decided to not only publish our thoughts on these topics in upcoming blogs, but also to host a webinar to discuss these topics.

If you'd like to attend the webinar on Wednesday, January 20th at 2:00pm EST, please register here.

One of the seven deadly sins of Waste is Overproduction. In recruiting and staffing - we've not only tolerated overproduction over the years, but we've actually rewarded recruiters for it!

For as long as I have been recruiting, I have found most recruitment organization manage by (and reward) the "How Many" philosophy:

• How many calls did you make?
• How many applicants responded to the posting?
• How many people showed up at the open house/job fair?
• How many people did you interview?
• How many candidates did you route to the hiring manager for consideration?
• How many resumes are in our database? How many resumes do you have access to?

Most have lived by the "more is better" philosophy.

Having read The Goal by Eli Goldratt, early in my recruiting career, I never understood this mentality

I always understood my goal to be:

• To generate the most amount of quality hires/month for my organization (Mr. Goldratt calls this 'Throughput').

and that:

• I had a fixed amount of time, money and resources (he calls 'Constraints').

I could not understand why:

• I was measured by how many calls, interviews, or candidates routed??

Isn't that counter-productive to the goal?

In reality - shouldn't I have been rewarded for the following?

"Talking to the least amount of people that allowed me to hand pick a select few that I interview that nets me the perfect candidate I route to the hiring manager that gets selected and hired and becomes a top producer within the organization for the next decade!"

When you start to look at the staffing supply chain with this lens you start to ask yourself some different questions:

• Why do we track how many calls, interviews, etc. a recruiter makes? Shouldn't we track how efficient we are with the candidate activity we put into the staffing supply chain "funnel"?
• Why would we post every position on a large job board when it causes a tremendous amount of overproduction/waste of unqualified candidates? Especially if these positions most often get filled by internal candidates or other sources and rarely, or NEVER get filled by Internet postings?
• Why does a manager need to see 3-4 candidates before making a decision if we have identified the top candidate through sourcing/selection?

Don't have time to get everything done during the course of the day? A root cause to your problem just might be the time associated with managing the waste caused by overproduction.

The fact of the matter is that overproduction causes waste. It also takes time, money and resources (that we have a limited amount of) to remove waste from the process.

And to think that most of us not only tolerate overproduction, but in some cases reward our recruiters, vendors, job boards, etc. for it!

A great way to save time and cut costs is to analyze each step of your staffing process for overproduction and look for ways to eliminate it BEFORE it gets into the process.

For more information on the seven deadly sins of waste in recruiting, join us for our free webinar on January 20th at 1pm EST.