Give me your B-players and I’ll give you mine

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?