Recently, we had the chance to sit down and chat with Brian Brown, Executive Vice President of SkillStorm, about hiring trends and mistakes companies tend to make in the recruiting business. He offered some great insight and advice.

Interviewer:
You have been counseling recruiters and customers about hiring trends and mistakes for over 12 years now. What are some of most valuable things you have learned over the course of this time?

Brian Brown:
With 12 years in the recruiting and staffing business and being part of the recession in the mid-1990’s and also after 9/11, I have learned a great deal. When you look at hiring trends and mistakes companies have made, there are a couple of things that come to mind. In the late 1990’s, there was a bidding war during the dot com era where companies were bidding against each other to bring on talent and paying astronomical prices for people in an attempt to get them to join their organizations. After 9/11, we saw a lot of these companies laying off a ton of people. When they started hiring again, they started hiring at the lowest possible salary rates, which caused a lot of people to feel undervalued and go from one company to the next. Companies were losing talent and taking the best available talent, but not at the most effective cost. As 2003 rolled around and the housing boom started, companies started hiring again and prices started rising. One of the biggest things that really sticks out in my mind is that people don’t realize that during times of recession there are three huge mistakes that companies can make.

Interviewer:
I understand that you have narrowed it down to 3 common hiring mistakes. What are they and what can people to improve in these 3 areas?

Brian Brown:
Number one, and this is number one for a reason, during these times companies have to take the opportunity to upgrade their current staff when they have the chance. I have done business with hundreds of companies and placed thousands of people over the last 12 years, and there’s a question that I always bring up to managers. “Would you enthusiastically rehire this person knowing what you know now of their work ethic and ability?” Good question, right? There is always someone that is underperforming. Right now, there is an opportunity for companies to upgrade their teams. Here at SkillStorm we call this topgrading: making sure that we are getting the best possible people, at the current market rate, to do the job. You have to take advantage of grabbing the best people available now and replace the people on your team that are not performing well. It puts you at a huge advantage when things start picking up because you have the best team. There are a lot of great people in the marketplace, and if companies are not upgrading their teams now, they are definitely going to feel it as soon as the market picks up again.

Another big mistake is not understanding that recruiting is sales. A lot of people may take a little bit of a backseat to this, but the fact of the matter is that recruiting is an ancillary function of human resources. The HR function is not to be a salesperson or constantly reach out on behalf of an organization to attract the people. Recruiting is not posting a job on a job board and then waiting for someone to respond. Companies have to think about their current and future needs and need a formalized process to attract only the top talent. This includes a formal plan using all social networking sites, job boards, employee referrals, staffing agencies, executive recruiters, networking events and all other resources available to them. When you utilize these tools, it’s going to be key to your success. However, the big mistake that I can point out to people out there that are looking to bring people on board is that all of these things are null and void unless you have somebody with a sales-like personality calling out to these folks, developing a proactive plan, negotiating, selling your company and actually courting the best candidates to be intrigued and excited by your company. They use a sales script. A recruiter who looks at acquiring talent as sales will handle objections up front, ask for referrals, sell the company and be the company’s first line of defense for negotiating compensation, not just the salary. Most importantly, they do it all proactively, so that companies have a pipeline of people to look at it. The bottom line is that companies have to realize that recruiting is sales. It’s a sales-related job, not just throwing together a job description and putting it up on a website.

The third mistake is not taking the time to train managers on how to interview. Hiring managers talk to candidates every day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to candidates that I have put to work for clients and also people that interviewed for jobs. They came back to me with a bizarre look on their faces due to the poor interview skills of the hiring managers. Not only that, but the list of questions I have heard managers ask candidates have absolutely no relevance to anything regarding the position. Even when a company has done their job to bring somebody into the organization to be interviewed, they still end up shooting themselves in the foot by not having somebody that is engaged and trained on how to actually interview someone, get behavioral questions answered and find out if they can do the job as well as fit within a team. More times than not I see managers discount the best person for a job because within the first couple of minutes they do not feel like they can personally associate with the candidate, which causes companies to miss out on great talent, just because the manager has not been trained on the proper ways to interview candidates and bring them into the fold.

With the unemployment rate on the rise, this is a fantastic time for organizations to upgrade their staff, understand that bringing the best people to their company is a sales function and taking the time to properly interview and train people that are conducting interviews. This is going to bring great results to companies and really help them escalate and achieve tremendous success during these tough economic times.

Interviewer:
What would you say the secret to success is in the hiring world?

Brian Brown:
Don’t miss out on great people because you assume your hiring manager knows how to interview. Also, don’t forget that to bring the best people into your company, you need someone that is trained on how to proactively recruit, ask for referrals and perform tough negotiations. Most importantly, you have to take advantage of the fact that you can upgrade and improve your team by bringing better performers on staff.