Using Internal Recruiters to Select the Best Candidates

 Given today’s economic climate, no one should be surprised that more businesses are utilizing internal recruiters along with the Internet to expedite the search and hiring process and avoid retaining search firms that often require paying pricey first-year hire’s compensation and certain administrative fees including consultant travel. An additional fact of life that most companies also realize is that many first-time hires leave their firm in less than two years, irrespective of how they are hired.

In my experience, you want recruiters to accomplish minimally three very important tasks: first, to find someone who can assuredly perform the functions the present job opening requires. Second, you want the new hire to fit easily within the organizational culture of the business and be a genuine team player. Finally, you want the person to possess certain attributes that make her or him able to move upward with the organization in years to come.

So, the inevitable questions loom: What do we look for in our job candidates? Beyond the obvious first question, can she or he do the job well? To help answer these and more, I offer the following three tips:

1. Recruit for integrity, recruit for character : You want someone who will add to the quality of your workforce and the reputation of your organization, represent you well wherever she or he travels and with whomever she or he interacts.

2. Recruit someone who truly believes in the purposes of your firm and who genuinely has a passion to join the organization for which you’re recruiting. I always look for someone who wants “to win,” not just secure a job.

3. Recruit a person who is adaptive, flexible, embraces change, and as my father often counseled me, “who wears well”—that is whom you will enjoy having in the organization, one who has the right “chemistry” and whom you can likely depend upon. You must find the person with the best “fit” and the best work ethic—the one that will go the extra innings.

Recruiters are taught to evaluate job prospects accurately and one of the best ways is to ask penetrating questions to those who know the potential recruit the best. Throughout my career, I have learned to question letters of reference, as many people are very reluctant to explain what you, the recruiter, need to know.

During the 14 years I lived in Ann Arbor, I watched and listened intently to University of Michigan Head Football Coach Glenn E. “Bo” Schembechler. As a result, I learned a great deal about how and what types of people he recruited. Bo would admit that he missed spending enough time with a few student athletes with great promise or misjudged some of them, but as you examine his record-setting tenure of success (13 Big Ten titles), one can only conclude that his recruits, if they stayed four years in Ann Arbor, became champions on the gridiron and later in life. He understood the organization he was working for and the importance of such key values as integrity, character, honesty, hard work, fairness and teamwork. His was a highly ethical, stable program built to last.

An effective leader realizes that talent trumps strategy over time, and talent must be grown from within for many positions that will become vacant. But talent can take an organization only so far if it is not constantly being renewed, refreshed, expanded and grown. Some of the best organizations look outside for only highly specialized or very sensitive jobs. And when they do, they tend to retain the best executive search firms money can buy.

The best investment a business can make, in my judgment, is to develop an in-house recruiting and leadership development program. By this I mean a different kind of culture than many organizations have where new talent is intentionally being sought and judged by virtue of both observation and results from challenging assignments given. This includes  more rather than fewer people being unleashed to determine if they have “the right stuff,” where job rotations are more the norm and less the exception and where performance appraisals are exacting, regular, thorough, candid and tied directly to performance. The experiences of GE, P&G, IBM and other large, successful organizations can be tailored for practically almost every entity.