The last of my man crushes and the tenuous link to recruitment...

Think about the next time you are on a plane... You and the three hundred or so fellow passengers in an aluminium tube flying at 500 miles an hour coming into heathrow in what is one of the busiest airspaces in the world.

Who is in control?

The plane itself...? Sometimes... Autopilot is better and better... The pilots... Partly... They certainly steer from time to time and look at the screens for updates from the computers... or a man named Keith sitting in a dull warehouse looking building many miles away with multiple screens watching small flashing dots move across his screen, completely in his control.  My man crush is not Keith but maybe it should be due to the power he wields.

Think about it, thousands of lives all deletable at the touch of a screen.  Now whilst I think recruitment is an incredibly important part of any business, it is not necessarily life or death like the control of a congested airspace.

Today, the film, 'Pushing Tin', the object of my affections, John Cusack.

Quirky rather than immediately or obviously good looking Cusack plays a new jersey air traffic controller. He needs to have spacial awareness unlike you or I can imagine, having to see the airspace in true 3D despite looking at a 2D view of it on a screen.  As with many of my man crush heroes whilst he is very good at what he does professionally he is pretty close to breakdown throughout much of the film.

I'm not sure which analogy to use here (no change there then).  Should the dots on the screen be open roles that need to be brought home with a safe landing or successful recruitment of a candidate?  Should parking at the stand be the same as the handover to the business as usual hr team?  Or should the planes be the candidates, bringing them into the appropriate airport and gate?

Let's take the 'a plane is a candidate', it becomes easier.

So stick with it.

You seem patient.

My experience of the corporate recruitment landscape is from both sides of the recruitment fence. It is both a strength and weakness depending on your own position in the recruitment hierarchy.  But the differences can be subtle or there is huge chasm to cross.  A northern recruitment pal of mine claims to be the best recruiter in the industry. He could be but he isn't. (sorry) It's not his talent that is in question it's his scope, his frame of reference is too limited.  All he see's is the sourcing part, for roles he wants to fill at a fee he wants to charge.  To be fair he is changing that approach but it is still sourcing biased.

Talent Acquisition has to see the whole picture, taking the good with the bad, any global location, any volume with a bigger concern that we hire well for the business, with the focus on the quality of hire, not the fee that is going to be earned once the rebate period is cleared.

I say this because it relates back to air traffic control. Talent Acquisition has to stack the big and the small prioritising big hitting senior roles and junior roles alike.  If we behaved like our external colleagues we would only be selecting the big roles to land and letting the others fly around to do their own thing, uncontrolled, hitting themselves or crashing to the ground when they run out of fuel.

Control is everything. I have yet to meet an external recruiter that either embraces that or even understands that sometimes.   So by creating corporate talent acquisition teams have we actually created control centres that rather than embracing creativity or the human interaction required to do a decent job are commoditising the experience?

Do we focus too much on the post sourcing acquisition activity rather than the person?

You tell me...