Give me your B-players and I’ll give you mine
July 18, 2008 · Print This Article
Allison Ross reports in the Palm Beach Post that FPL and a few other area employers have decided to cast their lot with recruiting solution de jour AllianceQ. Oh, my.
Buying into the old “more cost-efficient way to recruit people for jobs” codswallop it seems the employers you’d expect to be the most savvy can still leave one scratching their head wondering, “What the hell are they thinking?” Of course, I could be missing something but the AllianceQ sales-gotcha that drawing from a pool of other employers’ rejects somehow delivers better quality candidates is hard to understand.
AllianceQ rationalize it like this:
Say Company A spends $2 million a year to advertise, and that brings in 500,000 job applicants. They can only hire about 2 percent of those people…Then they take the rest and put them in a pool. Now the companies can leverage each others advertising spends.”
I would have thought that if a company can only hire 2% of the people it attracts something is fundamentally wrong. It could be profiling, employer branding, sourcing strategy, screening, assessment and/or selection but whatever it is, I cannot imagine why anyone would want to compound the problem be adding more B-player fuel to the fire.
The Human Capitalist has an interesting follow-up post with some alternative points of view. As for me, I think someone in procurement needs a follow-up of their own, don’t you?
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Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
you got it wrong–way way wrong—I worked for a Fourtune 50 company for 8 yesrs in recruiting, and we got millions of resumes per year, and at most hired 50,000 people in one year during my tenor there….
I recruited for IT, Sales, and Senior Level Accounting/Finance and I can’t tell you how many times our hiring managers and recruiters came downto a handful of candidates–all who could do the job. Then it was a gut feeling, or a ‘pick ‘em’…and we certainly weren’t right on who we selected, even 50% of the time…
To think tha the 2.1 mm resumes we recieved in 2005 (hiring 21,000 of them) were ‘B’ players is absurd—
oh–I get it, AMG is a headhunting/staffing firm—now your comment makes sense (even if its innacurate)–no recruitment agencies can source AllianceQ Member candiates—
So, this means the companies who are collaborating are doing it to have exclusive access to this pool of caniddates—let me see, hire a sales person for free, or pay AMG $65,000–oh my!!
Doreen, to your first comment:
This was posted on my personal blog, referencing this post. It echoes what you are saying I think:
To which I replied, and now to you:
To your second point:
Being a headhunter does not preclude me from understanding the dynamics of corporate recruiting and talent acquisition. Far from from it. I spend as much time working with corporate recruiters as a coach, and with talent acquisition leaders as an advisor, that I think I can claim not have a TPR axe to grind when I point out:
a) The huge waste of the model you describe [although receiving a resume is not the same as a candidate in the funnel, is it?]; and
b) The flawed argument that suggests surplus A-player for employer X automatically is an A-player for employer Y. For example, surely you would agree that an excellent outside sales rep. rarely makes an equally good inside sales manager.
To your point:
>> Then it was a gut feeling, or a ‘pick ‘em’…and we certainly weren’t right on who we selected, even 50% of the time…
Did you view making bad hires with such frequency as a sourcing or a selection problem? Or was your position that with such high volume 50/50 success rate in hiring comes with the territory?
Thanks for the comments and adding your point of view.