What Price for Recruiting Superstars?

Recruiting superstars are fairly common, though to be on a team with one can feel like a unique experience. These internal recruiters are great at filling open requisitions, but have a bad habit of neglecting every other area of the recruiting process. Management, fellow recruiters and hiring managers tend to have a love-hate relationship with these folks; they love the numbers, love the time-to-fill and celebrate the placements but loathe the unavoidable clean up of everything left in each placement's wake. Unfortunately, when we look at how much time is spent cleaning up after recruiting superstars and managing the fallout from their loose tactics, we find that they often cost more than the value of their placements.

I refer to such recruiters as being "rogue" because they foremost lack a commitment to processes that serve the department and ultimately, the business. The areas that are neglected by rogue recruiters include entering data into the system (ATS/CTS), following up with candidates who were not placed, sharing and otherwise communicating important information with their team and/or hiring managers and respecting their support staff's time and workload.

Neglecting to enter data into the system is the most heinous of recruiting offenses, as the information belongs to the company who employs the recruiter, period. There should be no phone call, phone screen or interview that does not get noted somehow, as failing to do so is the equivalent of stealing from a company. How many times have we heard recruiters on our teams ask one another "Hey, do you remember that guy? The one who interviewed with so-and-so? What happened with that?" because there are no notes in the database. The scenarios go on and on with recruiters reaching out to people only to find themselves in conversations with candidates that are difficult to navigate, waste an extraordinary amount of time and ultimately make the company look unorganized and inefficient. And what happens if the superstar quits or becomes incapacitated in some way? The information should not be lost with the recruiter; information is the commodity of the department. We would never expect or allow a bank teller to neglect to enter a transaction and accept excuses to the likes of "I'll enter it all in the computer tomorrow".

Following up with candidates who do not get placed is another area where our department dollars go running out through the cracks. Candidates who are engaged to any degree need to be followed up with so that the company can maintain a good reputation in the candidate marketplace and keep themselves open for referrals which are rocket fuel for recruiting ROI (return on investment). Candidates who are left to wonder what happened will likely develop a negative impression of the company and will share their story with their family, friends, co-workers, other recruiters and the online community through social media and blogs. The fallout from this negligence is a guarantee that there are great professionals out there who will never apply for a position with your company because of what they heard about the process.

Rogue recruiters tend to have great focus and large egos. This unique combination in a recruiting team creates a vacuum of information with the rogue recruiter who does not feel it necessary to share information with the team, management or hiring managers. For instance, if there are two recruiters reaching out to one candidate, the rogue recruiter will not only neglect to enter it in the system, but even knowing about the other recruiter's efforts, will not let that recruiter know about an upcoming interview. Another example is when the recruiter does not inform a hiring manager that their new hire will not be starting, has delayed their start or has come upon an obstacle to starting. This is not out of malice or ill intent; it's just a by-product of someone who is very focused on their own efforts and objectives. Such behavior causes discord between the recruiting department and the business units they support, creates problematic scenarios for the recruiting team itself and ultimately costs the department money in both time and effort spent attending to the toes that have been stepped on.

The support staff in a recruiting department may include sourcers and administrative assistants who are often caught in the whirlwind of activity initiated by the rogue recruiter without regard to process and procedures. The rogue recruiter will often times neglect to enter key information into the system which then sends the support staff scrambling to get everything done in time to coordinate an interview or prepare to onboard a new hire. These instances are very disruptive to the support staff who are generally carrying a heavy workload to begin with. The fallout from such chaos is that every other process in the works for other recruiters gets delayed, task items get overlooked and the support staff becomes agitated and possibly disgruntled - and who can blame them? The costs associated with constant chaos are innumerable and fall under the categories of wasted time, turnover and reputation.

It's so important that recruiting departments hold their recruiters accountable for following processes and procedures. No one recruiter should make or break a department and a recruiting department should never be at the mercy of any one recruiter. With the right processes in place, the department should be able to operate successfully through any number of circumstantial changes. Time is money and at the end of the day, businesses exist to do one thing: make money. Attending to the bottom line from every perspective is the key to improving and increasing the ROI for any department, including recruitment. It will never be a profit center, but it can be an efficiently run operation that not only supports the business, but propels it forward through consistent best practices. Rogue recruiters appear to do a great job for the business, but when we add up all of the time spent dealing with the chaos they cause, we often find that they do not serve the business in a cost effective manner and that having a different recruiter who is capable and efficient will take the organization a lot further as they naturally attend to increasing and improving the department's ROI.