RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Why is staffing not important?

I was talking to a friend the other day who is the country MD for a global financial services business. To give you some context, the organisation sells financial products (which are widely available) to clients in exchange for a fee; it’s a very simple business model. Barriers to entry are low (requiring access to a product provider network, a person and a phone). The only source of advantage being the strength of relationship between sales consultants and their clients; a competence easily imitated by competitors (by poaching sales consultants).

We we’re chatting about various aspects of his role; operations, sales, strategy etc. We then moved onto the topic of recruitment….

I asked him how much time he spent focussing on sales figures; “pretty much all the time” was his response. I then asked him how much time he spent on focussed on recruiting his team. His answer, unfortunately, was “less than 10%”.

I was shocked that his focus was so heavily aligned to the output (sales), not the input (good people building strong relationships). To me it was a case of killing the goose before the golden eggs have been laid. If he invested more effort in recruiting, engaging and retaining good people, the sales will take care of themselves. After all, the business model is so simple that the quality of his team was his only hope.

When I shared my view he agreed, but when pressed on the preoccupation with sales, his response was clear; “When I recruit new Sales Consultants, I don’t know if they’re going to work out, I can’t measure it and therefore I can’t get investment to focus on it. When I see sales, there’s no debate. Sales are a language my boss understands; when he sees sales he’ll invest; but without it, he will not listen”.

I was staggered at the myopic view of his boss; a legacy to the days in which outputs over KPI’s and behaviours was the only measure worth considering. And before you ask, this is a successful business; having grown rapidly, but I can’t help but think how much more successful it could be if he invested on inputs which he was confident would convert to outputs.

This was a great example of the challenge in predicting recruitment outcomes and building credible human capital measurement. Sales = clarity. Recruitment and people = confusion, uncertainty, ambiguity.

So, what’s the answer; how do you predict the performance of new recruits? Organisations such as Activ8 Intelligence have built artificial intelligence models and we do a lot of work with clients predicting high performance. These approaches have been proven to significantly increase the quality of business outputs, but anecdotally, it appears the credibility with leaders remains weak.

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