This week in HR, we presented to HR leaders at non-profits across the nation about building in purpose and intention to change. And I started to think about the concepts of purpose and intention in the context of my client, a large, national industrial services company I work with on strategic HR to improve certain KPI’s like retention and recruiting costs. One of the HR operational areas where we’ve intervened to improve efficiency is recruiting. When the topic of recruiting was raised, I was inclined to dive right in and attack certain secondary activities… I know from experience, however, that procedural improvements are almost always just incremental. Comprehensive and meaningful improvement results from painstaking project prep, like defining the why? of the initiative, discovery, and connecting dots between larger organizational goals: How many hires and in which key departments do we need and by when? and even more critical, What’s the organization’s mission and how is it adapted to hiring targets, recruiting practices, or our employer brand?
Don’t worry, this won’t be an abstract blog about how you’ve gotta write and direct a grand orchestral score before learning to peck out a melody on the piano. But I do hope to share some wisdom I learned over 10+ years of recruiting thousands of workers in the USA and UK about setting intention and sticking with the simple melody you’ve designed to align practices with your mission and to achieve success. I can honestly say I’ve done recruiting overhauls at multiple companies BOTH ways…with and without purpose and intentionality.
If you’re a recruiter, and you’ve been recruiting in the last few years, vying for talent in difficult markets, you know recruiting effectively can be a tall order. Environmental conditions are largely out of our control, right? Yes - ideally, your VP of Talent Acquisition takes the time to liaise with vocational school-, high school-, and university- career departments to impress upon them the acuteness of skills gaps and to help universities meet the needs of tomorrow. Ideally, your organization’s internal Training and Development department are carefully assessing skills gaps of new hires and properly equipping workers to meet the business’ demands. But this still doesn’t mean that recruiting practices are improving business outcomes. All this paragraph has succeeded in doing is to confirm certain things are out of Recruiting’s control that directly impact its effectiveness.
That is why it’s so important to take a step back and conceptualize the following:
- What are the organization’s business objectives?
- What are the organization’s workforce needs today and tomorrow?
- What are the biggest skills gaps that need to be addressed either pre- or post-hire?
- Hiring targets? (How many? By when?)
- HR goals? (Retention / Turnover / Productivity?)
- What’s the current state of the org’s brand, where are we going, and why?
In other words, does the Talent Acquisition department have a purpose for existence and a daily intention?
Have you ever thought hiring was sort of like throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping something sticks? When I recruited for large projects, I shared the sentiment. I would say, “How could I know that person’s resume and interview were so wildly aberrant from their work?” But looking back, things changed when my work was informed by the purpose of the organization, my interview style changed, my vetting process became more consistent. My daily intentions and mindset evolved, and my vision came into focus. I started imbuing my interviews with inspiring narratives about the organization. My candidates were excited to come on board. Sure, there were times when you just had to “get butts in seats.” Right? But the activities I took began to bear fruit. My worker performance notes were clearer and more thorough, thus eliminating bad placements down the road, and my project managers began looking to me for advice on how to manage people for better results. We started meeting weekly to discuss what was missing with new workers and veterans, so my interviewing and sourcing were informed in real time about missing skills and project needs.
I’m meandering here… but purpose—knowing the needs of the organization, identifying meaningful targets, evaluating effectiveness with real metrics—and intention are game changers. Now, when I feel my engagement slipping, I remind myself – “You know what’s happening here. You’re losing sight of your purpose for existing in this job! You feel the lack of meaning, because you’re not reminding yourself why you do what you do every morning.”
I cannot underscore how a simple shift of mindset, a little planning and deliberation, can change your game. Sometimes, I don’t know what exactly I need to write about, but today, this felt right. There’s so much stress and burnout across the world in jobs that have lost their meaning. We’d all be doing ourselves favors by spending a little time thinking about the why behind our activities and setting intentions every day. That’s my commitment today.
