WebCruiter Research Quarterly - Q3 2009

Quality is widely defined as “meeting or exceeding customer expectations”. As such, it is many things to many people - though it is not hard to recognize when seen or experienced.

For the recruitment function typical stakeholders may be hiring managers, senior executives and job seekers. A high quality recruitment function is one that meets or exceeds these stakeholders’ respective expectations.

As potentially one of the most business-critical functions in the firm, the recruitment function needs a robust underlying management model.

With its good fit with process management, its implicit focus on stakeholder satisfaction and its ability to drive innovation in a traditionally non-competitive function, quality management is a well suited conceptual and managerial framework for the recruitment function.

The management mantra “You cannot manage what you cannot measure” effectively sums up the role and importance of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in quality management.

Our new whitepaper presents an overview of possible KPIs for the recruitment function and is intended to serve as a basis for identifying and selecting effective metrics, and to provide advice on the implementation of KPIs for the recruitment function. Access to this document requires registration.

As part of our research into best practice, WebCruiter invited Guri Korshavn, Consultancy Manager HRM at Bluegarden, and her colleagues Monica Heitmann and Karin Svanevik Furuseth, to share their thoughts on strategic recruitment.

Guri and her colleagues helped demystify the concept – and also shared their experiences on the underlying requirements for thinking and acting strategically in a recruitment context.

When the Norwegian Directorate of Public Construction and Property (Statsbygg) recruited Ola Melby as HR advisor, the directorate was already harboring ambitions for the quality of its in-house recruitment function to equal that of leading third-party providers.

“Top management has two stated objectives,” says Melby, “operational efficiency and completeness of delivery.” The same applies to the directorate's recruitment function.

To further its goal of an internal recruiting function able to compete with the best in the market, Statsbygg has opted to implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Driven by new media, new technology and global competition for the best candidates, the recruitment sector has in recent years become far more complex, both as a field to work in and as a market.