I’m gonna be real honest here. For the 10+ years that I was a corporate recruiter, I ran lousy staffing meetings.
If you’re anything like me, you’d rather be talking to people about jobs, fixing problems, or best yet, filling jobs rather than playing with spreadsheets. I loathed entering data on Friday afternoons just so I could get a report to my boss. The data was accurate, right? Sigh.
Staffing meetings were the bane of my existence (other than “turn downs” of course). I always felt a little defensive during staffing meetings. The quality of my work wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was my inability to show the quantity of my work that bothered me. Did the VP of Engineering know that I’d picked through 250 applicants before sending her those choice 5? No, this wasn’t on the staffing report. Did my boos know that I collected 185 profiles of product managers that had knowledge of some obscure security protocol, called them all and got one to send me their resume. No, the report just showed that we only had one candidate interviewing. Double sigh.
I have a friend that says, “recruiters either make hires or make excuses”. I believe this. When I wasn’t making hires, I was forced to make excuses because I didn’t have the data to back me up to do otherwise. I didn’t want to be seen as a whiner, complaining about hiring managers not reviewing candidates or not giving me feedback or how many hours I’d spent to find that one person. I’d just say that I’d work harder. This was a vicious circle, one that I’d seen burn out the best recruiters.
So, a couple of years ago when I was given the opportunity to provide some input into a new tool that would help recruiters show all of their work and actually run a valuable staffing meeting, I jumped at it. Early on, I even used the tool to run a couple of recruiting programs at a recruiting outsourcer. And eventually, I went to work for that very same company that that great tool for recruiters.
This is how I’d run them today…..
