GPS for Staffing

Nick Burkholder

We remain fascinated by craigslist, partially because they remind us of a staffing department: A very small group of people accomplishing a great deal with limited resources. Craigslist attributes its success to customer feedback and we all know that one of the primary drivers of sustained performance for any business is listening to customers. That's always been easier said than done for those of us in staffing as we have so many customers and they are divided into two very different groups, hiring managers and candidates.

Consulting skills and simple recruiting tools immediately enhance hiring manager feedback, relations and satisfaction, but what about candidates? A new organization from an old player in staffing has developed a solution. OnEmployers, a Staffing Institute underwriter, is a web based application of a program that Nick Burkholder first implemented in 1999. It was created for a pharmaceutical company at which over 60% of M.D./Ph.D. candidates turned down second interviews and 38% turned down offers.

All candidates were sent a form to critique the entire recruiting process before their first interview. The form was to be completed as the candidate progressed through the recruiting process and confidentially returned in a postage paid envelope whenever the process ended for the candidate, whether it was after the first interview or accepting an offer or anywhere in between.

The results were surprising. The negatives at the root of the candidate attrition were based on candidate experiences on the campus and with hiring managers. The campus experiences were immediately and easily addressed and although it took coaching and resources to completely address the hiring manager issues, just knowing of them quickly improved all the metrics including cost, satisfaction and particularly time.

OnEmployers has automated the entire process and includes a dashboard to spot critical issues yet costs less than the manual program did ten years ago. Just leaving the beta now, OnEmployers is improving all staffing metrics, including cost by an average of 9%. The candidate response to is also positive but the most notable comment was "It made me be a better candidate too."

As with GPS's, there are many feedback options. And without feedback, a staffing function is lost.