Rethinking hiring: a strategic imperative for growth
In today's professional landscape, the recruiter is often perceived as a mere logistical support, a support function devoid of strategic impact. A survey reveals that only 4% of HEC graduates go on to a career in human resources, in stark contrast to business development (40%), operations (14%) and finance (13%)(source). It's a profession often described as "old school" and "whose practices can be improved", as Antoine Freysz says in the podcast Génération Do It Yourself.
This tarnished image of hiring severely limits investment and innovation in the profession. At Sonnar, we're convinced that hiring is not only crucial to growth, but must be radically rethought.
A crucial profession...
The recruter plays a key role on two levels:
- On the business side, hiring is the sine qua non of growth. "For 71% of startups surveyed by EY, hiring difficulties are the main obstacle to growth"(La tribune). Yet companies have difficulty hire: more than a third of hires fail(Gojob), which can cost them dearly. "According to Antoine Freysz, "Failed hiring can cost much more than €30k, and can even threaten a company's very existence.
- On the candidate side, hiring has a profound impact on people's lives. Finding a new job is not just a routine transition, it's a major upheaval. A new job can be crucial to personal and professional development, enabling people to realize their ambitions and reach their full potential.
Who's lagging behind
Seen as a burden rather than a growth driver, recruitment is lagging behind. It's interesting to compare the recruitment and sales professions. Although the two professions are similar in many respects - precise targeting, prospecting, qualification, conversion, deal follow-up. The recruiter's job seems to be light-years away in terms of tools and processes.
Sales teams have access to advanced CRMs, telemarketing tools, coaching systems and knowledge sharing. recruiters, on the other hand, often make do with an application tracking system (ATS), and sometimes a sourcing tool to automate contact, but are sorely lacking in tools to improve their productivity.
Sales teams are often supported by Ops and Marketing teams, while recruiters usually find themselves isolated, faced with an avalanche of manual tasks. This approach hampers their productivity and limits their ability to focus on their real added value: selecting the best talent and building lasting relationships.
Rethinking hiring: our vision at Sonnar
We have identified three key avenues for rethinking the business:
- Position ourselves as a strategic partner: we believe that a recruter must be able to understand the market and the company's business challenges, and to challenge decision-makers to help them make the best hiring decisions.
- Use best consulting practices: in our opinion, a recruter should be an expert in the position he or she is looking for, and be fully dedicated to the business teams, giving them continuous visibility through the monitoring of a roadmap and weekly analyses of his or her performance.
- Drawing on Sales best practices: we're convinced that an excellent recruter has a Sales fiber. After all, hiring is a complex 2-part sale. You have to convince both the candidate and the company, and you can't sell at any price - bad hiring is the worst thing a recruter can do. To draw inspiration from Sales best practices, we believe that a recruter can :
- View each hiring as a Sales funnel, starting with the definition of the need and the Go-to-market strategy (target personas, value proposition, acquisition channels) and ending with the validation of the trial period for the hired candidate.
- Track data at every stage and analyze it to gain perspective and maximize search success
- Leverage tools and automation to optimize repetitive tasks and focus on identifying talent and building meaningful relationships with candidates.
Conclusion
It's high time we gave hiring its due. The Sales profession underwent its revolution in the 2000s with the advent of tools such as Salesforce (1999) or Hubspot (2006) and methods (e.g. MEDDIC in 1995). We're convinced that it's now hiring's turn to experience its revolution.