Hunt Scanlon Media - Leadership Intelligence - 2016 In-House Best Practices Study

1. In-house recruiting works best at companies in
which hiring managers and other key players take
an active role in enlisting good candidates. That’s
been the experience of Peter Cleary, director of talent
acquisition for Unidine Corp., whose long-running
search background includes stints with The Hartford,
Lehman Brothers, and Korn Ferry. Getting those
stakeholders to take an active interest has been
one of Mr. Cleary’s missions since he arrived at the
Boston-based food and dining services management
company three years ago.
A seasoned, professional recruiter and talent
acquisition manager, with more than 20 years of
full life cycle recruitment experience, Mr. Cleary has
worked in both agency (retained executive search
and contingency) arenas as well as in-house. He
has extensive experience with name generation
(extensive use of traditional and non-traditional
e-sourcing, and data base sourcing), competitive
intelligence, candidate development, selection,
offer creation/negotiation and on-boarding. He has
managed outside search firm selection and contract
negotiations as well as the candidate development
and presentation process.
Mr. Cleary has extensive experience with diversity
recruitment, succession planning, internal mobility/
lateral recruiting, pipeline management, proprietary
database development, and ATS/HRCM. Over his
career he has gained experience building, mentoring,
developing and managing world class recruiting
teams on a global basis that have dramatically
and positively impacted organizational profitability
(through successfully recruiting superior candidates)
while decreasing dependence on outside search
firms, saving millions of dollars in search firm fees.
Unidine Corporation
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2. “What we’re trying to do is to get our line managers
more involved in the recruiting process and make
them business partners and make them have skin in
the game,” says Mr. Cleary. “That’s when recruiting
fires on all sprockets. When your hiring managers
are bringing something to the table or at least when
they’re invested in the process, that’s when recruiting
works really well. As opposed to them just sitting on
their fingers waiting for us to deliver candidates to
them. A really good hiring manager should always be
their own recruiter.”
Those who actually sign off on hiring for specific
roles tend to know the competition in their areas
of expertise better than anyone, especially in their
own geographic region. Often they’re well aware of
who’s doing well for other companies. And if a hiring
manager is doing his job right he should always be
talking to others in the market about trends and who’s
out there among his firm’s competitors. That makes
hiring managers a gold mine of potential information
about would-be candidates when Mr. Cleary or
someone on his team sets to work on a search.
Unidine, which saw sales of close to $250 million
last year, provides dining services in 20-plus
states, with 200 or more facilities in healthcare,
senior service, government, college, and corporate
settings. These days, the company is in growth
mode. New acquisitions helped revenues climb 26
percent from 2013 to 2014, and it’s not over yet. And
while that’s good news for Unidine, it makes Mr.
Cleary’s job challenging.
Not to say it wasn’t already. “We can’t be everywhere,”
Mr. Cleary says of his in-house team, which consists
of four recruiters, two of whom job share, all of whom
work out of Boston. “We have to deputize our hiring
managers and make them kind of junior recruiters.
To the extent that they can identify talent in their local
area, get them networked with us so that we can get
AT A GLANCE - UNIDINE
A seasoned, professional recruiter and talent
acquisition manager, with more than 20 years of full
life cycle recruitment experience. Have worked in both
agency (retained executive search and contingency)
arenas as well as in-house – and have extensive
experience with name generation (extensive use of
traditional and non-traditional e-sourcing, and data
base sourcing), competitive intelligence, candidate
development, selection, offer creation/negotiation and
on-boarding.
Managed outside search firm selection and contract
negotiations as well as the candidate development and
presentation process.
Extensive experience with diversity recruitment,
succession planning, internal mobility/lateral
recruiting, pipeline management, proprietary database
development, and ATS/HRCM.
Partner with senior business leaders and line
managers on senior level assignments (direct reports
to the CEO|CFO|COO|Head of Technology) as well as
on more commoditized, high volume search.
Extensive experience building, mentoring, developing
and managing world class recruiting teams on a global
basis that have dramatically and positively impacted
organizational profitability (through successfully
recruiting superior candidates) while decreasing
dependence on outside search firms, saving millions
of dollars in search firm fees.
Function as an ambassador and master networker
for organizations in the talent arena - building and
maintaining a pipeline of superior talent.
Operate as a coach / player - managing and executing
a heavy search load while mentoring and developing
teams.
Peter Cleary
Director of Talent Acquisition
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3. them into the system so that we can speak to them,
and get some more intelligence.”
“For example, we’re operating at Metro Health in
Wyoming, Michigan, which is a big hospital. The
hiring managers know the competitor hospitals and
who’s good and who at Sodexo food services, let’s
say, we should be talking to and who’s doing an
amazing job. There’s virtually no way that I can know
that sitting at a desk in Boston,” he says.
“Who better to say, ‘I’ve got the perfect salesperson’
than someone who’s out doing sales pitches, who’s
sitting in the airport lobby or sharing a cab with other
sales people who are waiting to deliver the same
pitch? Who better to get that information back to you
than the people who are out in the field doing that
job? The most successful recruiting takes place when
everyone, all the stakeholders, are engaged and
involved and really working at it.”
Candidates with a such an outlook, too, are the type
that Mr. Cleary and company seek out. Everyone in
his company is busy, he knows. But a team-player
mindset helps those at every level succeed in the
end. “Maybe recruiting is not even in the top 100
priorities on their list,” Mr. Cleary says of Unidine’s
hiring managers. “Maybe they’re just trying to get
from Point A to Point B and they don’t have time to do
it. but people that have an eye on talent, that are good
colleagues and good team members, those are the
people that you want to get into the organization.”
Unidine, founded in 2001, has always had an in-house
hiring operation. But until Mr. Cleary came aboard,
most of that work was handled by human resources
generalists, basically as a side job, as opposed to
full-force seasoned recruiters. Outside search firms, for
their part, have seldom been much of a consideration at
Unidine. During Mr. Cleary’s tenure, external recruiters
have been called upon but a few times. And even then,
they were only used when capacity was strained.
The financial savings of hiring in-house, says Mr.
Cleary, is inescapable. “This is a very crude model,
but if you took the number of exempt placements
alone that were handled in-house and costed that
out at $10,000 to $30,000 our expenditures would be
somewhere in the $3 million-plus range,” he says.
“We’re not paying that in recruiter compensation. Even
if you add in our system, it’s much more cost effective.”
Even typically tough-to-fill niche roles are less
onerous for Unidine’s in-house team than one might
imagine, Mr. Cleary says. Positions in IT, for example,
which often prove too time-consuming for in-house
operations with little expertise in that space, are seldom
an issue at Unidine. “I’m in my third year and I don’t
think I have once done an IT search,” Mr. Cleary says.
But what about those peculiar roles that inevitably
arise? Mr. Cleary says he prefers to tackle such
openings with his own people. “They do come up
and some of them are peculiar,” he admits. “But the
decision is, ‘Do we have the capacity and the resources
to work on it?’ And also, ‘Are we willing to write a check
for $50,000 or $70,000 to have an outside search firm
do it?’ When we have engaged these firms the quality
of the candidates that have come to us have not been
significantly better than the quality of the candidates
that my team has produced. Quite honestly, in most
cases our candidates are better.”
Mr. Cleary knows firsthand the limitations that outside
recruiters often face. “At one point early in my career
QUALITY HIRE
In-House Recruiting at Unidine
How assignments are handled at Unidine?
98% In-House Recruitment
2% External Recruitment
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4. I was recruiting computational fluid dynamics PhDs,
literally rocket scientists,” he says. “If I was not doing
it for a specialty firm, and if I were an outsourced
recruiter, I never would have invested the time and I
never would have gotten up to speed. I would have
known just the bare amount to sound somewhat
educated on the phone,” he adds.
“Take my current role, for example. I’m also a
professionally trained chef and we’re a food service
company, so I can recruit the sales people. I know
the animals that I’m hunting. And my team is pretty
good at it as well. But if I went to someone externally,
90 percent of the time, even at the conclusion of a
search, they don’t have a clue what we do.”
Building a Network
Unidine has 5,000 employees. As the company
grows, capacity for the in-house recruiting team is a
challenge that will be answered with external search
partners, says Mr. Cleary. At any given time, Unidine
might be running 60 or 70 searches for exempt roles.
Earlier this year, though, that number was at 115. (The
top end of those roles are predominantly in senior-
level operations or home-based positions like vice
president of sales, director of business development,
or director of financial planning and analysis.) And
when Mr. Cleary threw in the non-exempt roles,
including some searches that have been inactive for a
while, Unidine had 340 unfilled positions.
With the opening of new facilities, Mr. Cleary and his
team indeed have periods when they are swamped
with the responsibility for dozens and dozens of new
hires, all to be resolved in a short time span. “I call
those tsunamis,” Mr. Cleary says. “We can handle the
riptides and the hurricanes, but the tsunamis were
where we needed help.”
This spring, he would have liked to hire another
recruiter, he says, but at least he had authorization
to bring in a contract firm as coming needs dictate.
Finding an external outfit that truly understands the
dining-services industry, however, is tough. “I’m
looking to be more networked to the arena of folks
that are actually worth their weight,” Mr. Cleary says,
“as opposed to a lot of these recruiters that just
burp up garbage, which has been my experience 90
percent of the time.”
Technology has been a great boon, but becoming
an effective recruiter demands more than access
to LinkedIn or a good HRCM system. On one hand,
recruiters ultimately need to differentiate between
the many candidates who surface on LinkedIn. “I
started in this business back in the late eighties,”
Mr. Cleary says. “I don’t even know if I had a
computer on my desk. We had recipe boxes with
index cards and candidate names and bullet points
with what they did and what kind of jobs they would
jump for. Back then we were constrained because
we didn’t have names. Now we’ve got the names
of everyone on the planet. The problem is trying to
access and determine which of those candidates is
the best fit.”
What’s more, nothing beats building a network,
in the cyber world as well as out in the real world,
and living the business one is in. “This is where a
lot of recruiters have missed the boat,” Mr. Cleary
explains. “You need to be plugged in, and it gets
difficult because when you’re working so many
hours with your head down on your desk you don’t
get to do it as much. But if you truly love what you
do, if you enjoy the environment you’re operating in,
BY THE NUMBERS
Unidine: Growing Savings by Hiring In-House
In-house hiring saves $3 million-plus
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5. you talk to people. You function as an ambassador
of your organization. You read articles. You email
people. You send them LinkedIn messages. You’ve
got an intellectual curiosity about what you do. That
will drive you forward and that will put you in the right
arenas to find candidates,” he says.
“A lot of recruiters are like automatons. They come
in, they punch a card, they work on the searches,
they punch a card, and they go home. But they
don’t immerse themselves in the environment or the
arena that they’re operating in. That’s what separates
excellent recruiters from the OK recruiters.”
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