Brad and I have been involved in youth and high school sports for quite some time. I coach a girls frosh-soph basketball team at our local high school. Tonite we played a game where the other team relentlessly pressed us from the beginning of the game. I probably burned 4 of my 5 timeouts in the first quarter trying to instruct, motivate , and admonish the girls to execute the press break we had worked on all season.
I was so frustrated. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightening, it struck me: my girls didn’t have the talent necessary to execute the results I wanted from them. As a coach, there was nothing I could do to make a difference. I would have liked to go out onto the court and play the game for them. Unfortunately, they had to execute and they couldn’t.
In high school sports, you are limited to the talent who lives in your school district. In the real world, outside of high school sports, there are no limits. My question is: Why do companies put arbitrary limits on acquiring talent - such as compensation contraints, geographic constraints, industry requirements, and so on. Many companies limit their investment of time by running ads and taking who ever responds as the entire candidate pool of talent - which we all know is a false assumption.
Most companies treat talent acquisition like building a high school sports team - let’s take whoever shows up at our doorstep. Why should you get frustrated over lack of sales, inept marketing execution, failed customer initiaties, and performance that puts your business in the lower quartile? When you treat talent acquisition as if it’s a high school sport, you deserve what you get!
Brad and I have been working for over two decades to define a better method for talent acquisition and retention. We call this methodology the Success Factor Snapshot. Learn more at http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com about the simple steps it takes to move talent acquisition beyond the limitations of building a high school sports team.
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1 Hope is NOT a Strategy for Hiring Top Talent | Hiring and Retaining Top Talent Blog // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:02 am
[…] Second, most companies fall victim to high school sports recruiting as their primary strategy. There is a tendency to take whoever shows up at your doorstep as the entire candidate pool. It’s important to remember that running ads only attracts a very small percentage of the potential candidate pool and there is usually a very poor overall quality to the caliber of candidate that responds to an ad. See our article on Why Do Most Companies Treat Recruiting Like a High School Sport? […]
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