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Developing a World-Class Staffing System

• Introduction
• Start at the Top
• Staffing System Best Practices
• Staffing System Benefits
• Additional Resources

Introduction

Few areas have more immediate and lasting impact on organizations than recruiting and selecting employees. One of the cold, hard facts of doing business is that if you don't get the right people in the right jobs, you won't accomplish your organizational goals and objectives. And as the world continues to shift to a knowledge- and experience-based economy, stocking your company with talented, creative people who can think on their feet and adapt to rapidly changing markets becomes more critical than ever.

The key to hiring effectively, say our staffing experts, is to have a staffing system that provides a template, a model and a process for those who recruit, screen, interview and hire new employees. When properly designed and implemented, a staffing system leads people through the hiring process from start to finish, telling them what steps to take, what order to take them in and what needs to be accomplished with each step. More important, it takes much of the risk and uncertainty out of the process by providing a standard approach that ensures that everyone in the company hires in a consistent manner.

Having a staffing system won't guarantee success every time. But it will dramatically increase your odds of getting the right person in the job with each new hire. Without a staffing system, you might as well roll the dice and take your chances.

According to staffing expert Barry Shamis, building an effective staffing system consists of five essential steps:

•  Painting a picture of the successful person

• Developing a cadre of qualified candidates

• Screening the candidates

• Interviewing the candidates and checking references

• Making the hiring decision

"In today's world, companies have to hire fast because the market will not allow you to take a month to hire a top prospect," explains Shamis. "At the same time, you must hire effectively by maximizing your resources and avoiding snap decisions that will cost more time and money should the new employee fail to work out. Without a staffing system, you dramatically reduce your chances of achieving these goals."

Start at the Top

Because personnel selection has such critical implications for the entire organization, the impetus to put a staffing system in place must come from the top.

"The CEO of an entrepreneurial firm has two basic jobs," says Shamis, "to set the vision and strategy and to hire the people to achieve them. Therefore, the CEO -- not the HR manager or anyone else -- needs to drive the implementation of a staffing system and hold people accountable for results."

Staffing expert Ed Ryan, who has delivered nearly 500 TEC presentations on staffing systems and techniques over the last 12 years, agrees.

"The commitment must come from the person at the top," he says. "But in my experience, most CEOs don't place much value on the Human Resources function, seeing it as something they have to put up with rather than something that can help improve the organization. When they do get an HR specialist, that person typically focuses on insurance, payroll and other administrative issues.

"I believe that HR should focus on one thing only -- recruiting and selecting talented people. So I recommend dividing up the HR function into two areas. Let your accounting and administrative people take care of the administrative issues and then hire a "director of player personnel," someone who reports directly to you and has the sole function of overseeing the staffing system."

As CEO, you can't get involved in every hiring decision. And depending on the size and nature of your business, you may or may not want to get involved in the operational details of setting up a staffing system. But our staffing experts unanimously agree -- if you want to improve the quality of your hires at all levels of the organization, you must make staffing a strategic priority and take full responsibility for the system that makes those hires.

Staffing System Best Practices

To make consistently great hires throughout the organization, our staffing experts recommend the following "best practices":

Build your staffing system upon performance-based criteria.
"The foundation for an effective staffing system begins with objective, performance-based criteria," says staffing expert Lou Adler. "Most hiring decisions are riddled with emotion, opinion and personal bias. Although many entrepreneurs feel more comfortable going with their gut instincts, research shows that hiring on emotion, instinct or personal likes and dislikes turns the hiring process into little more than a crapshoot. In contrast, a staffing system built around performance-based criteria allows you to eliminate personal bias, inject a healthy dose of objectivity into the process and make better hiring decisions."

The criteria can be developed internally, brought in from the outside through consultants or industry standards, or a combination of both. Regardless of how it is developed, a world-class staffing system always uses performance-based criteria that measure job applicants against an objective standard rather than against each other or any personal preferences the hiring manager might have.

Use a structured interview process.
Too often, hiring managers simply "wing it" during interviews, asking random questions that pop into their minds and allowing the candidate to control the interview. As a result, they typically evaluate and make hiring decisions with no hard data and no basis for comparison -- a classic recipe for failure.

A structured interview process removes subjectivity by forcing you to focus on past job performance, not personality, interviewing skills or any of the other areas that typically cloud your judgment. More important, it elicits information that allows you to compare candidates against the performance-based criteria rather than each other. Eliminating personal bias and focusing on past performance, say our staffing experts, always leads to better hiring decisions.

Develop a staffing plan.
An effective staffing system includes a forward-looking staffing plan that allows you to hire in a proactive manner and maximize the organization's resources.

"All companies should have a staffing plan, but especially those on a fast growth track," advises Shamis. "When companies hire in a reactive mode, managers feel pressured to fill the open slots. They lower standards and hire in haste in order to get enough warm bodies to keep up with the growth. A staffing plan provides order and discipline to a process that too often feels rushed and chaotic."

According to Shamis, a staffing plan should cover several key areas:

• How many new employees will be needed during the coming year

• Why those employees will be needed

• When they will be needed

• How much it will cost the company to hire them

• What value they will bring to customers and the organization

"Ideally, your staffing plan should be created as part of, or at least included in, your overall strategic or business plan," says Shamis. "It doesn't do much good to plan for 50 percent or 100 percent growth if you don't have the skills or resources to obtain the manpower to fuel that growth."

Train your managers on how to use the system.
In order to make consistently high-quality hiring decisions, all hiring managers must understand the process and use it in a consistent manner.

"The problem is that most people don't like to hire," says Adler. "They don't feel they have the skills and they view the hiring process as an intrusion on everything else they need to be doing. To develop an effective staffing system, train your managers on every step in the process so that they have the skills to follow through on the system and the confidence that they can make the right hiring decisions."

Staffing System Benefits

According to Ryan, a properly designed hiring system:

• Significantly increases your odds of hiring the right people

• Creates consistency in hiring decisions throughout the organization

• Supports management development

• Helps improve benchmarking throughout the organization

• Reduces the cost of the hiring process

"You can't make immediate wholesale changes in the quality of your people," Ryan says, "but by implementing a staffing system, you establish behavioral benchmarks and standards for each position in your company. As people leave, you start hiring to those standards and gradually improve the level of talent. Over time, you will see a dramatic improvement in the quality of your talent pool."

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