New Research: HR Is Still Chasing Its Own Tail

A survey commissioned by activ8 intelligence has highlighted a startling gap between the opinions of human resources professionals and those in business management roles on a range of issues, including the contribution of HR and overall view of recruitment strategy.

When asked to prioritise the most important deliverables for a human resources department, business and HR directors rated highly strategic goals as the key priority. In contrast, HR managers demonstrated a weaker grasp on strategy, being more interested in ëbums on seatsí thinking than their colleagues.

Out of the sample of 96 organisations surveyed, 72% of HR assigned a high priority to the statement ëAnything that gets vacancies filled more quicklyí, while only 28% of businesspeople felt this was relevant.

Laurence Collins, CEO of activ8 intelligence: ìThe results of our survey show conclusively that the human resources profession is chasing its own tail on some major business issues. Itís deeply worrying that 72% of the HR people we surveyed are more concerned with getting people in post than in making sure the right people are there in the first place, especially in view of the fact that our figures show that most businesses donít see this as a priority.î

Furthermore, business respondents as a whole disagreed with human resources specialists on the importance of reducing first-year attrition rates. While HR placed a high importance on decreasing staff turnover in employees with service less than 12 months, businesspeople were more interested in cutting the cost of bringing staff on board.

HRís priorities as they saw them were given as follows:

Attracting more potential top performers
Reduce first year attrition in the new hire population
Reduce the overall time to hire; from advert to on-boarding

Respondents from non-HR jobs gave the following top 3 priorities:

Attracting more potential top performers
Reduce the overall time to hire; from advert to on-boarding
Reducing the cost of recruitment

Laurence Collins explains: ìThis second figure only compounds the issues that HR is facing ñ perceived pressure from within businesses toward speedy recruitment is trickling through into poor first-year attrition rates because not enough care is being taken to ensure that the right candidate is placed in the right job.î

This concern with attrition rates is mirrored by the CIPD Recruitment Survey 2007, which reports that the number of employers experiencing retention difficulties has climbed from 69% in last yearís survey to 78% in this yearís survey.

Laurence Collins: ìOne of the key findings from this survey is that many HR departments are targeting areas for strategic growth which the rest of the business doesnít value. The rest of the business world, from line managers to CEOs want HR to deliver more top performers, in less time at a lower cost. Businesses are driven by solutions, so HR needs to think more strategically about how an effective recruitment practice can reduce attrition, rather than simply focussing on the problem. Trying to stop staff from dropping out in the first 12 months, especially if they havenít been recruited properly, can only be damaging to productivity in the long term.î