The trust is broken, now what? What happens when your recruiting team stops trusting your hiring managers? Yes, this is real, it happens at many companies and goes ignored because we forget this is a two-way street.
Classic Recruiting Challenge
It is no secret that recruiting teams are burned out, but what is seldom talked about is how trust plays into this equation. Part of the burnout equation is because they have been chasing the impossible in a very small candidate pool for a long time, but the cause of burnout is what happens after they find that unicorn. The candidate goes no further in the hiring process due to a slow internal process, a slow government customer, or a competitor swooping them up. Yes, this is part of the business, but it does not have to be.
I have heard many hiring managers say, “if you just find me X candidate with X skillset, I can get them hired on multiple programs” only to see that candidate fall through the cracks and go nowhere. So being the smart enterprising young recruiter that I am, I start to see a pattern and start not to trust.
“Hey, I did my part… Now you do yours!” – This is the internal dialogue many recruiters have and with competition extremely high for recruiters with experience in the DOD/IC, this should concern your company. At the heart of every great recruiter is really wanting to hire candidates into great careers that have impact, not chase unicorns that get scared away or let go.
Not Everything Can Be a Priority
I hate to use the terms trust and honesty, but I really don’t know how else to describe it. This line is frequently fudged in recruiting… “Yes the program is funded”, “the prime told me the position is ours to fill”, “if we find someone we can hire immediately”.. I am sure any recruiter out there can add to this list of reasons why now, the position is not moving forward. All of this has an impact on your team and their ability to continually attack your positions. I guarantee your internal recruiting team knows which hiring managers jobs will go somewhere and which are not worth working. This is a problem.
I am a huge fan of workload prioritization in recruiting because it allows your company to align on what is important to the company, fillable, and what is potentially a waste of resources. The first step to this is understanding that you do not have unlimited resources in recruiting. There is a bandwidth limit, and once exceeded, your team is maxed out and you will start getting diminishing returns.
How to Prioritize workload?
There are many factors you may want to consider, but best practices are to keep this simple and agreed on. For example, a position on a prime contract that is a backfill should get more attention than a best athlete sub-contract position. That is an easy one, but it is important to look at additional factors that are not as obvious when looking across multiple subcontract positions. For example, a position on a sub-contract that would gain past performance in an area that is strategically relevant for growth might get a higher priority than a position on a prime contract that is in its last year of performance on a firm-fixed-price contract. It’s important to have a clear ranking that is managed from the top of your organization, and then there is no question what should be worked. The key here is this is managed from the top, not something for recruiting to implement.
An additional benefit of this is it ties the recruiting function into the strategic vision of the company. When a recruiter is working something that is strategically relevant to the growth of the team and they are successful, that is an amazing feeling. This ties your hiring organization into the success and vision of the company and adds purpose to their job function.
Most importantly, this aligns recruiting with operations and focuses your effort where it is best spent for the company, not an individual program. 2022 is going to be a very challenging year in the security cleared space and even if you are not seeing these “trust” issues on your team, an alignment of workload prioritization will still provide great benefit in sharpening focus of your hiring efforts. Competition is going to be incredible this year and alignment is critical to be successful in hiring.
