Introduction

I once took my recruiting team on a journey through a dangerous obstacle course…blindfolded. To ensure that we stayed connected, I lined everyone up single-file and joined them together at the waist with a rope. When all the knots were secured, I walked to the front of the line, tied the rope around my waist, and started walking forward. But I didn’t tell them where we were going or what we were doing.

The location of the obstacle course was a local park. We were gathered in a flat, open field, standing in knee-high grass on the edge of a thick forest. Without warning, I started jogging at a slow pace across the field, heading toward the tree line. One by one, everyone stumbled forward as their section of the rope snapped tight and jerked them into motion. At first, it was fun. There was excitement, intrigue, and lots of laughter. As we got closer to the trees, however, I picked up the pace, and the excitement turned to anxiety because, remember, they were blindfolded, but I wasn’t.

As we entered the forest, the team went silent. All I could hear was the sound of crunching leaves and twigs snapping beneath their feet as they tried to navigate the terrain in total darkness. Some of them tripped over logs. Some slammed into trees. I could tell by the amount of tension in the rope that they were struggling to keep up, but I continued to power through the course, dragging them with me at all costs.

As the journey intensified, team members started to show their true colors. Some of them emerged as leaders, shouting out instructions as they encountered obstacles. Others simply complained and wanted to stop. As I continued to sprint forward, weaving in and out of trees, I noticed that the tension in the rope gradually went slack, and their voices went silent once again. I thought to myself, Yes! We’re finally in sync! But the opposite was true. When I stopped and turned around, I saw my team leaning against trees and sitting on logs, trying to catch their breath. They had removed the rope, taken their blindfolds off, and called it quits.

Before you report me to the local authorities for abusing my employees, I have to tell you that this story is not entirely real. But there is some metaphorical truth to it. This story is about me. Early in my career, an executive coach told me this story when I was making a transition from an individual contributor to a people manager. It was also at a time when the war for talent was in full swing, and an explosion of technology and innovation was disrupting the talent acquisition landscape.

The actual time frame was March 2013, and my coach from the Center for Creative Leadership in San Diego had just finished reviewing my 360-degree feedback. What he saw was encouraging but at the same time concerning. The encouraging part was that my colleagues felt like I was innovative and forward-thinking. They said I was always pushing the envelope and looking for new ways to transform our talent acquisition function. But the concerning part was that I moved too fast and enacted change without communicating the purpose or destination to my team very well. I wanted to fix everything. And I wanted to fix it now! As a result, they felt blindfolded, unable to keep up and unwilling to follow me down a difficult, unknown path in the dark.

I was stunned. But with one vivid metaphor and some additional guidance, my coach made two points very clear to me that day. He said, “Don’t ever lose your forward-leaning approach to talent acquisition, but…

Set the stage for transformation by creating a clear vision for your team.

Create a system that drives ongoing transformation at a pace that your team and the organization can handle.

From that moment forward, this feedback set me on a journey to create clarity and find a continuous improvement practice for talent acquisition that would help me fix many of the biggest recruiting challenges I was facing. That search would lead me straight into the arms of a practice called RecOps.

A Forward-Leaning Approach

If you’re like most recruiting professionals, you probably want to make your talent acquisition function better. The problem is, recruiting is hard. It’s complex. It’s full of stakeholders who have needs, biases, and opinions. Over the years, managing a recruiting function has been getting progressively harder to do. With the onslaught of software solutions flooding the market and the emergence of verticals for compliance, sourcing, branding, candidate experience, diversity, and more—recruiting leaders are simply overwhelmed. If you’re one of them, on most days, you’re just trying to keep your head above water. You live meeting to meeting, project to project, request to request, just trying to stay afloat. Every once in a while, you pull off a random process-improvement project. But then it’s back to more urgent matters like opening new jobs, sourcing more candidates, and conducting more interviews.

It just never stops.

As the days and weeks fly by, you eventually lift your head and realize you’re falling behind. Your employment brand needs a refresh. Your career site isn’t mobile optimized. Your applicant tracking system (ATS) is out of date. Your boss wants a campus recruiting program. Your stakeholders want better reports. And then—BOOM!—you’re so far behind that your chief executive officer (CEO) calls for a company-wide “reinvent recruiting” initiative. If you’re lucky, you get to keep your job and spearhead the project.

This cycle of random, isolated improvements and big one-time optimizations is very much like dieting. It doesn’t work over the long term. Like dieting, if you don’t put systems in place to support a healthier lifestyle, you’ll gain all the weight back (and then some). Talent acquisition is no different. It works better when you have a continuous approach to optimization. Ideally, your approach is forward-leaning. A forward-leaning recruiting function is one that doesn’t accept the status quo. It doesn’t wait to adopt new technologies. It brings solutions to the business before the business asks for them. It makes ongoing improvements based on a multiyear plan, not on a spur-of-the-moment pain point. And most of all, it’s deliberate and centered on a clear vision.

In the absence of a forward-leaning mindset and practice, a recruiting leader will fall behind, lose control of their function, and live in a constant state of treading water. This book will help you prevent that from happening or dig you out of that mess if you’re already in it.

The Impact of a Suboptimal Function

When a recruiting function is not optimized, an entire ecosystem of people suffers.

Your recruiting team suffers when inefficient processes and technologies require them to work longer hours and trudge through administrative tasks. Your hiring managers suffer because they go weeks, or sometimes months, without the talent they need to achieve their business objectives. Candidates suffer through overly complex online applications, a disjointed interview experience, and a general lack of transparency throughout the hiring process. Sometimes their families suffer, too, when a breadwinner gets screened out of your process for all the wrong reasons. It doesn’t just hurt their career. It’s hurting their ability to provide for their family.

And let’s not forget about you. You suffer too. Because, at the end of the day, you’re the one who shoulders the stress and overwhelm that comes from trying to make a talent acquisition function work. It’s your career and your reputation on the line every time you get up in the morning to face another day.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that as recruiting professionals, we all know which aspects of our function need to be transformed. It’s not a mystery. No matter what the size of your company is or where you’re located in the world, we all want the same outcomes. We want better candidates, acquired faster, at a reasonable cost. And we want to deliver a good candidate and hiring manager experience in the process. But doing so has gotten increasingly more complex over the years. To achieve this universal promised land, it’s critical that we have a system to fix what is broken and drive transformation in a more deliberate way.

The Search for a Practice

Since the executive coaching session I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I’ve been on a mission to find a practice that would help me set a clear vision for my recruiting team and help us achieve our most ambitious goals. On this path, I’ve talked to many talent acquisition leaders, practitioners, consultants, and vendors. The best ones are always on this mission too. What I’ve learned over the years, however, is everyone has a different approach. We, as recruiting professionals, have a variety of tactics, tools, processes, and programs that we use. Many of them are very useful. But as an industry, we lack a unified practice that rolls up all of these proven...