Quality of hire is incredibly subjective: Sue Campbell

Sue Campbell is the Managing Director Asia at Korn Ferry Futurestep and in her current role she is responsible for RPO, Projects & Talent Acquisition Consulting across the region. Prior to joining Futurestep, she was Client Services Director at AMS, based in London, and was responsible for a portfolio of RPO client solutions covering clients across a range of industry sectors including financial & professional services, technology and consumer. Sue has extensive international experience in resourcing and talent management and is an active Board Member of the Asia Pacific Chapter of the HROA.

It started as the measure of the hiring process – measuring and ranking the experience of the candidate and the hiring manager. I think that is valid as it is a part of candidate’s experience of joining the organization and is also a part of measuring the effectiveness of talent acquisition services. Real “quality of hire” is actually about the output and impact that the individual is able to deliver to the organization in terms of contributing towards their strategy. So the first evolution was measuring attrition, which does not necessarily measure quality of hire, but the outcome or effectiveness of the hiring process. The second evolution was measuring the ‘fit’ of the person. Their fit against their KPI’s or their speed of progression in the following years, and that’s like the Holy Grail of the quality of hire. I don’t think that many organizations integrate recruitment and HR data sufficiently to report on this – maybe because you need system integration, without which the data does not easily flow from one system to another. “Quality of hire” is also incredibly subjective and therefore, that makes it harder to measure. Some of the things that we are discussing with our clients includes developing a more objective measure of the high performing people and competency profile through a combination of cognitive and personality tests to build a high performance profile and use it to evaluate potential new hires.

Attrition is definitely one of the things that keeps most leaders awake at night. I have spoken to companies (in the retail sector) who say that they have over 100 percent staff attrition. That is a horrendous thing from a business perspective; it undermines culture and any training efforts. Other things are the pressure on salaries and workforce planning in order to meet business strategy. In the engineering sector, one of the common things that we hear about is the demographics of the workforce. Young people apparently aren’t interested in becoming aircraft engineers. The demographics of the workforce are changing to the point that the industry has too many people retiring and not enough apprentices or trainees coming through.

Technology and social media is influencing the way people recruit, the way candidates get engaged with potential employers. It should be influencing the way companies engage with their internal employees too. What I mean is that it is not common in Asia for talent acquisition to have the responsibility of both internal and external talent. This is not logical because if you think about the whole organization, you would typically say that the talent available is a mixture of both. One of the things that we are trying to introduce to our clients is using technology to drive internal mobility by understanding the skills and experience of their people, and empowering them to move within the organization rather than solely focusing effort on external talent. But this is still not a common practice. The second thing is around Social Media. Everyone uses Social Media and Asia has very high penetration, however, Social Media is still underutilized for the purpose of recruitment. India has been an early adopter of technology, yet I still think that Indian companies could do a better job of using Social Media for the purpose of talent acquisition. Most organizations are using social media for marketing purposes but are not extending this as effectively into recruitment or other HR practices.

Such organizations are projecting the personality of the organization through everything that they do. They are engaging with candidates from an experiential point of view. On their career websites, they have videos of people talking about their experiences. It is also culture specific; if you are an American company and you want to attract people in Asian countries, you need to have something that people can identify with. You should have your people in India, if you are in India, your people in China, if you are in China. It is more about the experience for the candidate and then it becomes something they can relate to.

To some extent. Most talent communities work where high volume of similar type of talent needs to be recruited. Some companies, because of their workforce, lend themselves to the effective use of talent communities more than others. We build talent communities for some of our large clients because they have planned hiring schedules. Then we project manage to the deadlines and drive the activities to create the volume of candidates in order to meet their requirements. We could start working on a hiring plan that is 6 to 9 months before the candidates are due to start. That is, building a community of interested candidates ahead of requirements. However, most companies do not have enough visibility of their future requirements. They might know that they have to recruit 300 people a year but they do not know when and where exactly. When data drives so many decisions in the modern organization, it is amazing that a company could not even know what kind of people they want to hire, it comes down to workforce planning.

Being targeted about what skills you actually want, what you have to sell in terms of opportunity - your proposition, why should somebody join your organization? – these are the ingredients for building a successful talent community. Also for having an ongoing engagement strategy, you need to keep the talent community interested for that particular period of time. You need to have content to do that. You need someone actively managing the communication and content, and sending organizational messages. It is about managing the infrastructure, making sure that you have things planned. It also depends on what the segment is and how you are best to communicate with them. It’s also about hiring managers working in collaboration with the talent community, because people do want to hear stories from the employees about what’s going on in the organization.

Digitization in India is accelerating at a very fast pace, and that creates opportunities for individuals; it also creates a lot of churn in the employment market. Large organizations, in the past, have created significant internal talent acquisition functions. This is both good and bad because if you have peaks and troughs of hiring, and it becomes difficult to manage your team with the right level of resourcing. More and more organizations in India have started considering outsourcing as it gives flexibility along with the ability to gain access to external best practices and greater adoption of technology in the recruitment process. More global companies are incorporating India into outsourced global talent acquisition solutions. 

The impact of Brexit will not be as much as it will be elsewhere. I have seen the effect on a couple of companies – recently I was talking to a Japanese company that has exposure to European infrastructure projects; they are also going through a significant business transformation & changing their whole business mix. However, as soon as Brexit happened, all of the plans that they had were put on hold because they were trying to understand the impact, some of their key infrastructure projects were postponed. This is the only client that I have spoken to who directly referred Brexit as the reason for them to hold on their plans. Everywhere else in Asia, life just goes on as usual since domestic demand is the main driver.

I think India can benefit from a slowdown in developed markets. Clients often come to us when they are setting up shared service and R&D centers in India. India has sophisticated IT development and BPO capability – increasingly complex tasks are being pushed, as global companies need to be more creative to maintain their profitability and competitive edge. Many large organizations have a significant proportion of their workforce in India and I don’t see that changing.

The focus is on international business and/or professional niche skills as opposed to high volume and lower paid roles. With respect to this, we need to be really conscious of where we position ourselves in the marketplace; high value professional specialists, typically, high skill professional outsourcing is the focus. India is somewhat like other larger economies with three groups of competitors: the International Recruitment Outsourcing companies, Domestic Recruitment Outsourcing companies, and then you have Contingent Recruiters. My personal view is that the contingent recruitment business model will continue to diminish with respect to the limited value that they can provide to customers. Our competitors primarily are international outsourcing companies and increasingly so domestic outsourcing companies are at the lower paid end of the spectrum. Where we can work effectively is in providing a consolidated and consistent service globally, and there is demand for that.