The most significant barriers to attracting, recruiting, and sustaining a high-quality workforce result from three fundamental issues:

• inadequate input from hiring managers,
• poor communication with recruiters
• focus on inappropriate metrics

Inadequate Involvement of Hiring Managers: The close involvement of hiring managers is vital to success in recruiting. These managers are ultimately responsible for attracting talent that can meet their organization's objectives. At the start of the process, hiring managers must clearly communicate their needs to the recruiter. They should clearly define position descriptions, identify required competencies, and develop appropriate prescreening criteria. Hiring managers should not rely on recruiters to interpret vague instructions such as, "Find me a great candidate." Without strong guidance from hiring managers, recruiters cannot identify and recruit quality candidates, and the recruiting process cannot succeed.

Poor Communication: In order to recruit high quality talent, there must be effective communication among all parties involved in the recruiting process: hiring managers, recruiters, candidates and potential employees.

Communication between hiring managers and recruiters: In order to hire high quality candidates that best fit the organization's need, the hiring manager and the recruiter must communicate effectively throughout the recruiting process.

In addition to clear direction from the hiring manager to the recruiters at the start of the process, on-going communication during the recruiting process is also required. Recruiters need useful and timely feedback on particular candidates, and they need to know quickly if the position requirements change during the course of an on-going assignment. They also need to communicate effectively in order to schedule interviews with the hiring manager and others in the evaluation process.

At the end of the recruiting process, once a candidate has been brought on board, the recruiter should get feedback from the hiring manager on the early performance of the candidate. This information is needed to assess effectiveness of particular recruiters and candidate sources in attracting high quality talent.

Lack of time and inadequate systems are among the hurdles to effective communications. Voice mail, email, chat and other technologies don't systematically facilitate the clear and on-going communication between hiring managers and recruiters that is needed. When communication and information flows are restricted, the recruiting process suffers and resources are not effectively focused on finding the best quality talent. And in an increasingly competitive environment, the risk of losing candidates to competitors will be even greater.

Communications between recruiters and candidates: Communications is often poor, too, between recruiters and candidates. Concentration on efficiency metrics frequently leads recruiters to terminate communications with prospects and applicants the moment the latter are no longer under active consideration. Frequently, companies even fail to acknowledge receiving applications and resumes, thereby immediately turning applicants' positive images of the company negative. And, after filling positions, recruiters often discard much of the detailed information obtained about applicants not hired. They may also place much of the information acquired about the new hires into HR files that are largely inaccessible to hiring managers and those who oversee employee training and development.

Communications between companies and potential employees: Communication between companies and potential employees has been almost non-existent because there was no efficient means to maintain the relationship. Consequently, high-quality candidates who expressed interest in a company were cut adrift, and no ongoing communication to retain a relationship was maintained. In markets where talent is scarce, individuals who have demonstrated clear interest in the organization can be a ready source of talent if they are appropriately cultivated.

Inappropriate Metrics: As in all aspects of management, measuring performance is fundamental to improving it. But, exactly what are companies to measure? In an interview in Workforce Management,⁵ Nick Burkholder, co-author of On

Staffing: Advice and Perspectives from HR Leaders, says, "A performance metric should measure an outcome associated with an objective." He further says it should drive the kind of performance you actually desire-in this case, improving quality-of-hire.

However, many organizations lack ready access to the data needed to adequately measure quality of hire. They are unable to measure the performance of a candidate and integrate that information into the recruiting process. For example, they are unable to assess which recruiters or which sources yield the highest performing employees.

As a result of their inability to assess quality of hire metrics, many organizations focus instead on more easily quantified metrics, such as "time to fill," and "cost per hire." While these are appropriate measures of efficiency, they do not directly relate to the quality of talent recruited into an organization. Focusing on these efficiency metrics as the sole measure of recruiting success provides an incomplete picture of effectiveness.