Recruitment and resourcing fascinates and perturbs me in equal measure. Of all the areas of the HR lifecycle it is the one that tends to have the highest volume of opinions per capita and the lowest proportion of data. Which is peculiar, because it probably contains the richest opportunity of all to really hone the science of Human Resource Management.

At the recent TREC conference I was talking to Matthew Syed the author of Bounce and Black Box Thinking. He made a point which I found compelling and scarily obvious at the same time.

Consider a key hire:

We go through our recruitment process, we measure our KPIs, we long list, short list, assess and finally appoint. Three month later, six months later, the manager is happy with the hire.

That’s good right? We’ve made a brilliant appointment?

But compared to what?

What about the person you didn’t appoint? Surely that is the best comparator? Where are they now, what are they doing and how will their career progress? Do you measure the lost opportunity and what is the vested interest in measuring the “successful” candidate, successfully?

I also see this closed mindset in relation to technology, candidate experience, candidate management and pretty much every single aspect of resourcing. We are quick to make opinions, quick to justify opinions and slow to challenge our own preconceptions about successful or unsuccessful interventions.

I witnessed a debate on Facebook about using interview on demand technology (video interviewing). Left and right there were opinions being launched, most of them damning. The thing that struck me was that no-one there was offering any experience or data about usage, just their own opinions. Which is fine, but in a world where we are trying to show the relevance of our profession, shouldn’t we do better than, “I think”?

Measurement and data in the field of HR is notoriously difficult, we are awash with the bad and the dodgy. That will only change if we are willing to be open minded, curious and willing to challenge ourselves and our own preconceptions – nowhere more than in the field of recruitment and resourcing.

In order to get better, we need to listen and learn as much as show and tell. That requires a specific mindset and approach – one that we need to be checking for when we hire people to recruit in our name.