Strategic Assessments (7)
Master Sun: “Discipline means organization, chain of command and logistics.”
Mei Yaochan writes: “Organization means that the troops must be grouped in a regulated manner. Chain of command means that there must be officers to keep the troops together and guide them. Logistics means overseeing supplies.”
Adaptation: Skillful Talent Strategists align the configuration of their recruitment organization to the needs of the enterprises they support. Deciding whether to centralize or decentralize the employment group should be a function of maximizing organizational effectiveness rather than an exercise in the power dynamics of corporate politics.
Establishing a centralized employment department to capture procedural efficiencies while leaving the recruiting budget decentralized and in the power of line management often makes a mockery of both efforts. Attempting to attain administrative control of a large corporate employment function without the corresponding financial control conferred through budgetary authority is usually a fool’s errand.
Nonetheless, Talent Strategists who have mastered adaptation can thrive in such an environment provided they are internally committed to managing change in their organizations through transformational leadership and unswerving devotion to the best interests of their organization expressed through assiduous discharge of fiduciary responsibility. This is likely to be a long and difficult road to travel.
Attempting to install quality controls (quality of hire initiatives) through the recruiting group while leaving purchasing authority in the hands of so called hiring managers (sometimes defined as those who somehow manage to hire someone) is more often than not a formula for a highly dysfunctional process.
Organization theory helps us to understand that the composition of the team in place can be used as a diagnostic tool for analyzing and interpreting its perceived value (or lack of value) to senior management and the enterprise at large. Thus we see recruiting departments that have few people actually doing recruiting (engaging with candidates), while many people are working in roles that are focused on administering procedures.
We often see employment groups that function on autopilot, coordinating schedules and robotically interacting with the applicant tracking system du jour, while leaving an admixture of technology and third parties to perform the sourcing, screening and assessment functions. In such cases recruiters are sometimes reduced to being the cog in the process wheel that makes sure all the required forms are properly filled out by the applicants and hiring managers.
Enterprises that operate like this clearly place little value on the core competencies that staffing professionals can bring to bear on recruiting campaigns. Talent Strategists either transform or abandon such enterprises.
The structure of the team and its organizational interfaces tells us how the stakeholders in the enterprise perceive the discipline or function. A weak team equals low perceived value. A strong team equals high perceived value and alignment with organizational objectives.
Chain of command is an assessment of order within the ranks, however they may be configured. Here we are encouraged to gauge the degree to which orders are efficiently transmitted throughout the hiring organization. We are also evaluating the degree to which timely information is received by the leadership.
Gauging reaction time is one way to measure the cohesiveness of the command and control structure of a recruiting team. Asking the people at the lowest level of an organization what a particular directive means and contrasting that with the understanding of the one who gave the order is a means of determining if the leadership has achieved congruity in communications and is therefore capable of responding to threats. Alternatively there may be dangerous gaps in understanding or training within the team that could result in failure during an important campaign.
Logistics is not simply a function of resource allocation. It embraces the full lifecycle of the resources from allocation to distribution and disbursement and accounting for their expenditure. The use or lose it approach to recruitment budgeting institutionalized in some companies has produced many unusual and informal approaches to stockpiling resources outside the parameters of generally accepted accounting principles and practices.
There are clients who may well despise their recruitment advertising agencies but depend on them to maintain slush funds of stockpiled cash that are used to meet the future recruiting needs of the company while remaining in apparent compliance with abstruse budget policies. It is difficult to fire someone who holds most of next years print media budget in his or her coffers. This devil’s bargain is only a component of what recruitment advertising agencies privately call client control when they talk shop.
Murky financial arrangements such as these can easily devolve into unjust enrichment by functionaries and engender genuinely corrupt practices that siphon resources from the enterprise. Therefore an important element of discipline is the establishment of clear guidelines for professional conduct. These guidelines should include detailed definitions of appropriate boundaries both within the recruiting organization and in the ecosystem that supports its operations.
Application: One way of looking at the question of how to assess the discipline of a recruiting organization is to examine the degree to which the form of the organization is related to its function. Compare the organization charts of your top three competitors with your own and see for yourself who is best configured for effective operations.
- What do your opponent’s tables of organization tell you about their strategy?
- What can be known about your adversaries tactical capabilities based on the formation disclosed through the structure and size of the recruiting team?
- Do any of the contenders you vie with have demonstrable superiority based on the scale of resources they are able to bring to bear?
- Are you vastly outnumbered?
- Has a competitor for talent achieved an advantage by deploying a field recruiting strategy while you recruit from an ivory tower at headquarters?
Another approach to the discipline question is to examine organizational behavior. Do the hiring managers work within policy and procedure or do they circumvent the approved process and resources in favor of third parties who cater to their political preferences or worse yet their personal prejudices?
Does the recruiting team have the trust and respect of senior management? Are all third party recruitment vendors under the control of the recruiting team?
Are there unwritten exceptions in the vendor relationship management process? Are contingency recruiting firms working on assignments below $100,000.00 per year in salary subject to different rules of engagement than retainer search firms working on executive appointments? Are contingency recruiters required to get their marching orders from members of the recruiting team while retainer search consultants work directly with your executives without oversight?
Who controls the pool of financial resources that agencies and search firms are paid from? If the recruiting team is accountable for staying within budget but the hiring managers are free to engage retainer search consultants at will, the internal friction resulting from the politicization of the process may make it impossible to deliver the required administrative, financial and quality controls that assure internal equity and compliance with government regulations.
Yet another way of examining the strengths or weaknesses in organization, chain of command and logistics is to determine who has the better, more enforceable set of employment policies, procedures, systems, practices and programs. If there are no gaps in these five dimensions of the staffing function one may safely say that the recruiting organization is disciplined.
To complete ones assessment of the discipline of the recruiting function in a given organization it is helpful to correspond the dimension of organization with strategy. Ideally the form of organization assumed by the group flows from the recruiting strategy. Chain of command naturally flows from the tactical requirements of the recruiting programs to be undertaken. The logistical component flows from the staffing operations that are envisioned by the leadership and executed by the recruiting team.
When Talent Strategists attain this level of congruity in command and control one may conclude that discipline has been inculcated throughout the organization. From Senior Management’s vantage point this might look like a synergistic interdependence of Vision, Communications, and Execution.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under The Art of War for Talent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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