Talent Makers

4Structured Hiring

Four words are at the heart of everything we discuss in this book. Two of those words—Talent Makers—are the subject of Chapter 9. The other two words are Structured Hiring. These simple ideas, when implemented consistently, can transform your organization. Although this chapter is short, it introduces the concept of structured hiring, which permeates the rest of this book.

When leaders have a financial problem, they know it. Their bank balance is low. When an organization has a customer problem, they know it—customers shout at them and leave for the competition.

But when organizations have a hiring problem, often the symptoms are misplaced and the leaders misdiagnose it. They don't really have a vision of what could be better; they just think it's always been bad and that it's unlikely to change.

The first problem is that they look at HR as a back-office function—a cost center. As we saw in the last chapter, if HR does not speak the language of known costs and known returns, then it will be easily marginalized.

We have a situation where the businesspeople misdiagnose hiring issues as “Why can't HR get its act together?” instead of the true diagnosis: “We used to think our job was making [bolts, software, policy papers, whatever]. But our first job is to become excellent at hiring people.” That's the surest route to delivering those outputs.

The misdiagnosis continues: HR catches heat and then thinks the solution to its people problems could be a better ATS, ...