Robert Joseph “Bob” Vila is an American home improvement television show host known for This Old House, Bob Vila’s Home Again, and Bob Vila. ~Wikipedia

Bottom Line Up Front: Great recruiting is done by great recruiters, not computers or tools. If you want Bob Villa’s results, hire Bob Villa in the first-place.

An article over at ZDNet by Brian Sommer talks about some great HR technology and how adding some of the right technologies can improve a company’s technical recruiting.

Overall, it’s a good article, and there’s some good points in it, but I have to take Sommer to task on a few points–namely the tenor of the post that dropping in some tech can turn HR folks into great technical recruiters overnight.

The article references startup HireVue. I love HireVue. In fact, their in my backyard so-to-speak, and I have been watching them from their infancy and wish them the greatest success.

But, if an HR leader out there thinks that implementing a tool will suddenly uplevel their technical recruiting prowess, they have another think coming.

That’s like running down to Home Depot and buying a mitre-saw, belt-sander and a great assortment of (salesman recommended!) cutting-edge chisels and bring them home to your demolished kitchen space… lay them out on the sub floor, put on your leather toolbelt and expect the abilities of a master carpenter to suddenly distill on your mind like channeling the life-force of Bob Vila.

Tech recruiting, like excellent sales recruiting or really deep financial recruiting (think Sr Accountant with 8+yrs international tax-code experience, and (of course) big 4 consulting background that lives within 50 miles of Milwaukee) is hard.

The article got this part completely right: “The other part, the really hard part, is sourcing great candidates” and for sourcing great candidates you need three parts:

1. A top-level recruiter (think “hunter” in salesperson terms) who “gets” the market **AND** knows how to manage all the inflows coming from #2 and #3 (think “farmer” in salesperson terms)
2. Great employees who are first willing to TALK with trusted colleagues about the jobs available at their company (if they won’t, you have deeper problems. See your HR therapist ASAP, your company culture is dead) and second capable of interviewing very well.
3. A system to manage the ebb and flow of the interview cycle through seeding, planting, nurturing and harvesting (closing the deal).

Of course, most companies jump to #3 because it’s the easiest thing to apply change to (get a PO, put out an RFP, spend some cash, have some integration consultants camp out in your conference room for two months and *poof* you have a system!).

What they forget is two-fold:

First: Systems do not need to be technical.

In fact, they SHOULDN’T be technical. They need to reflect real, workflow that makes sense for the organization at that time. It can even be (gasp!) paper-based. I know a cool company who recently sold to a very large international software firm whose “recruiting system” was literally a set of three manila folders in the desk of the receptionist. One that said, “new resumes”, another that said, “Interviewed–passed” and another that said, “Interviewed–good”. The HR manager literally reviewed the three folders at the end of each day and made offers (with the managers approvals) to the ones in the “good” folder.

The end result is that, systems are the last thing that you need if you’re trying to improve your technical recruiting. Great recruiting requires great recruiters. You can approximate some of that using technology at times, but if it’s not implemented in a way that makes sense to the organization, and to the candidates, you’re creating more of a mess than you’re solving.

I see this all the time:

• Company needs people hired ASAP.
• Internal resources can’t handle the flow.
• Internal resources say they don’t have enough of the right technology or systems.
• Company invests money in technology systems to improve recruiting.
• Company has a great, expensive system, but still seems to not get the hires they need, or worse, uses an expensive system to hire mediocre people.
• Hiring managers, frustrated with the mediocre people, or lack of hiring, hire agencies to find the people they really need.
• Agency recruiters, also called head headhunters, completely blow away the internal systems (because they are recruiters not computers) and the company becomes addicted like a heroin drip. At $30,000.00 a hit.
• Half a million dollars later, the company tries to stop some of the bleeding by hiring a recruiter, but sadly thinks that one or two junior recruiters can compete with the agency experts.
• Waters: muddy.
• Rogue managers still hiring agencies as if the internal recruiter(s) don’t exist.
• CFO of the company institutes moratorium on external recruiting through agencies. Senior recruiters move on if they can’t get internal buy-in (no job is worse to a recruiter than being unable to recruit well. The only thing worse to a recruiter than a hiring freeze is incompatible/uncooperative managers)
• Junior recruiter(s) can’t handle the flow.
• Hiring managers either leave or eventually get their way.
• The system the company invested in early on is scrapped as it was implemented by people other than recruiters.
• Senior recruiting leadership finally hired. Costs of delaying total more than $1 million.

My advice: technology is great! Last year I hired personally more than 200 engineers and technical people to the company where I work. I could not have done this without great technology, and a great company culture. But all of these things have their place. Technology should be put in place after you have a platform to build on, and platforms are best built by experts in that field.

So, before swiping the corporate AMEX on some great systems and technology, remember this: If you want Bob Villa’s results, hire Bob Villa in the first-place!