Battle Scorecard

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  • 2 Won
  • 8 Lost
  • £650,720,000 Saved
  • £1534224164 Cost

£22million Lost

Wednesday, July 11, 2007   

The Role – Project Manager - financial services

The Hiring Circumstance – Changing legislation meant that a window of opportunity was open for a 24 month period. By pushing through a product offering, this organisation calculated that it could make significant financial gains, therefore a project manager to head up the initiative was sought.

The Strategy – The steering panel prepared a brief for HR to recruit against. The position was then advertised internally in line with policy, externally in the national media, and placed with the company’s recruitment agency suppliers. Selection process was HR interview, panel interview, assessment centre and behavioural profiling.

The Consequence – The steering panel’s role profiling meeting produced a basic specification that HR developed into a job description. However, the steering panel’s meeting failed to identify the pressure elements in the role and, hence overlooked the personality characteristics that would be needed to handle the circumstances that were likely to be encountered. Several months into the role, it became apparent that the person hired was unable to handle certain elements of the role, which resulted in severe role strain. Using an element of company policy to suspend the project, the person disrupted progress on the initiative so severely that the window of opportunity was missed; meaning the resource invested and the revenue opportunities all went to waste.

The Cost - £22 million in lost revenue and wasted operational costs.

 

 

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4 Comments so far

Monday, September 10, 2007 by Angus

I've worked with one of the organisations that Philipw mentions and as with many hiring companies at the moment they used the selection process with recruiters as a way of fine tuning their job and person spec (I know this isn't always intentional but it just goes to show how important the kind of stuff Mr Schofield is promoting is and why it should be an integral part of the internal process before going to market with a role) - the resulting impact was that far from creating advocates of their brand they created disenfranchised people who when asked their opinion on the business will not actually focus on their product or service but more their inability to make decisions and being left feeling somewhat duped by being lead to believe that they were in the running for something they were never truely right for.

This also alientated the recruiters that the firm worked with because of the contingent nature of the assignments. The result was 8 unahppy candidates who'd gone through the first round of selection and 2 who'd made it to third and final round only to be told that the client was reviewing the spec again. Needless to say the recruitment company in question puts forward a stronger case to join competitors rather than this business which given the fact that a recruiter is often the first point of contact a potential candidate will have with his or her future employer can create a powerful push factor away from this particular company. In today's candidate skills / experience and cultural fit short market recruiters have a very important part to play in nuturing potential recruits for a business but employers often feel that noit having to pay a retainer up front and working on a contingent basis means that if they don't recruit anyone then they haven't spent any money. Maybe they should think about the wages of the people involved in writing the job spec, the time for meeting / briefing the recruiters, the time involved in interviewing the candidates by the line managers etc. The argument I often hear back from companies is that recruitment is part of the job responsibilities for their line managers etc so they are already being paid to do this as part of their everday duties. Whilst that may be true I don't think the company share holders would take to kindly to finding out that because of getting things wrong at the start of the process when compiling / communicating the brief that they could have just as easily flushed some money down the toilet or told their managers to work a 4 day week that week.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007 by Peter Schofield

The biggest obstacle to progress may be that many companies feel that they already DO place hiring at or near the top of their agendas and focus heavily on culture and skills matching (see Blog post 'Mind the gap').

The difference between what employers do do and what they could do may be slight at first look, but the ultimate impacts on the organisation are huge.

I am hopeful that this debate will encourage people to look more closely at their options and reap the same rewards as the companies you mention.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007 by Philipw

I've been writing about high engagement, high performance companies for a few years now. Examples are WL Gore, Southwest Airlines. They devote huge resources to recruitment. No one's allowed in the door unless they fit with the culture and have all the right skills. It's nonsensical that recruitment isn't seen as one of the biggest management priorities.

Thursday, July 12, 2007 by Peter Schofield

By leading the steering panel through a number of potential scenarios, the process would have ensured the team identified that there was a very high likelihood of conflcts internally.

In such case they would have specified that the behavioural interviewing techniques discovered whether or not candidates had the experience and tools to handle such scenarios.

As it was, the output was a list of duties and the level of experience required to handle them. The person hired matched the hiring specification perfectly, but the specification HR was working from was fatally flawed.