I’m confused by the comment about avoiding candidates with a full skill-set because they are coasting and not growing. You don’t know that someone is coasting anymore than you know someone is “over-qualified” What am I missing?

Sorry if I offended you. Can you tell me what I should do differently so you don’t feel I’m advertising my firm/services on your Blog?

As for the information about myself, I have added that to my company website based on your comment. Thanks for the suggestion.

CorDell

@CorDell: Great comments. No problem with a link in your ID or even mentioning your company, but please don’t advertise on this board. I visited your company site. Odd that there is no information there about you or the principals of the firm. Lack of info about the people at a search firm raises my antennae immediately.

I could not have said it better myself!!!

I’m a talent management expert that has been helping companies improve profits and performance through recruitment, assessment and development of high performers for over a decade. I am continually amazed at how much money is spent at “automating” the hiring process or making it more “efficient” (driving down the cost of hire, the recruitment cost ratio, or time to hire) without any real measure of how it affects candidate quality (and hiring manager satisfaction at 60 or even 180 days after hire is not a real measure of candidate quality!).

In my humble opinion, no investment in the hiring process should be made (this includes investments in candidate sourcing tools like job boards) until a company can quantify the output of a position, understand what amount of output equates to percentile rank (i.e. what amount of output is produced by people at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile), and has the ability to reliably predict performance (or output) of a prospective hire before extending an offer. Once these things are known, or are in place, a company can make data driven decisions about where to invest their money to improve the hiring process by estimating the impact on overall worker productivity to see if the investment generates an acceptable ROI.

To quote one of my favorite management guru’s, Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The reverse is also true, “If you can measure it, you can manage it.” To me the problem is that companies do such a poor job of measuring worker quality that when they ask “what do I get for a dollar spent in HR” they often focus on what they can measure…drum roll please…the process. Cost of Hire and Time to Hire are easy to measure and most companies have this data so this is where they focus. Worker quality is hard to measure and to do it well I think you have to take a very impassionate view of human capital, which most people can’t do.
If you have additional questions you can email me at cordell DOT larkin AT cordellandcompany DOT com. For more about me see my LinkedIn Profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cordelllarkin.

The article quotes an HR VP on the big boards efforts to remain (become?) relevant:

But it may be too little, too late to convince Infinera’s Paul Whitney. Whitney, whose firm uses Jobvite, says traditional methods of recruiting, including job boards, “have failed us. They failed us badly.”

Sounds like ATH!