As I was driving into work this morning, I was listening to 98.5 The Sports Hub (by far the best sports radio station in Boston) and they were talking about last night’s All Star Game Home Run Derby.  However, instead of talking about the great performances of Adrian Gonzalez and Robinson Cano (who won), they focused on one topic: how could they make the event better!

To this one simple question, listeners and the on air personalities were able to come up with a bunch of great ways improve the event including:

• Introducing time limits
• Having two batters go at once
• Having batters switch every 5 outs

While no-one explicitly mentioned the problem that needed to be solved, the problem was clear: the Home Run Derby was too long and needed to be shorter.  With solving this problem as the goal, the collective group was able to provide several constructive ways to improve the event in a very short period of time.

While this exercise was for fun (and ratings), a similar process can be used to help you improve your recruitment marketing process.  Every time you meet with your recruiting team, you have an opportunity to analyze and assess how your recruitment strategy is performing and more importantly identify problem areas that need to be fixed.  Problem areas can be anything including:

• Losing too many candidates during the application process
• Not getting enough applicants into your ATS (similar to above but could be different reasons)
• Not getting enough qualified candidates
• Not getting enough candidates to accept offers
• Job Distribution channels (job boards, social networks, etc.) not providing enough ROI
• Not collecting necessary data or recruitment metrics in your recruiting process
• Not being able to identify potential issues in your process (big problem if that’s the case)

Create a list of problems that you would want to fix in your recruiting process and prioritize them.  Decide what your top 3 problems are in your recruiting and brainstorm potential solutions to these issues.

The only way that problems get solved is if you address them.  Make sure that your organization is in a place to be able to identify and address problems through metrics and honest feedback from your team.  Once you are able to do that, it’s just making sure you take a look at these issues at least once or twice a year to make sure your recruiting process is working at the best level that it can achieve.