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John Sullivan’s great article on innovative sourcing ideas should be read by everyone in recruiting. The essence: You need to be super creative to reach out to the best candidates ó who by and large all are passive. This requires a shift in resources, from waiting for people to apply to reaching out and getting them interested. The implications of this shift in sourcing are huge. Systems and processes designed for hiring active candidates will not work too well for hiring passive candidates. Since they don’t work too well now, imagine what will happen when they work even less well. This affects ATS design, interviewing and assessment systems, recruitment advertising, the application process, and the selection and use of job boards, as well as the role of the recruiter, hiring manager, and everyone else on the interviewing team. Passive candidate name-generating methods will increase in importance. The big ones include:

• Proactive employee referral programs (ERP). Ask your best people to identify the best people they’ve worked with at prior companies. Of course, recruiters then have to call these people, determine if they’re good or not, and, if they’re good, recruit them or get more names of top referrals these people have worked with in the past.

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A few days ago, I read a Q & A article that frosted my pumpkin (and I have a big pumpkin)! It went something like this (paraphrased): Unbelievable question: How could we establish a selection policy and practice that makes it extremely difficult to be hired and thereby reduce high staff turnover? More unbelievable answer: Congratulations on being a highly selective employer! Do a phone screen interview; have applicant’s write an essay; lecture the applicant about your selectivity; look for “good attitude” and good communication skills; authorize a background check, a reference check, and a behavioral and integrity test; conduct a drug test and health records check; do a group interview and observe applicant behavior; give applicants problem solving tests; evaluate applicant leadership; conduct a peer behavioral interview; and interview the spouse. This process will send a very strong message that applicants have to be good to work for your company. Sorry, folks. This is pure nonsense. First, “difficult hiring” is seldom the solution to turnover. Second, the only strong message this kind of selection process will send to applicants is that the company is clueless. Reduce Turnover Question? Common sense tells us we cannot reduce turnover until we know its cause. Is it bad leadership, poor salary, lack of training, insufficient skills, bad working conditions, economic factors, a poor benefits packages? I am sure the reader can add a few more, but hiring good people and expecting them to work under bad conditions will only Increase turnover. Any organization desiring to reduce turnover needs to understand the cause first. This is a silly question, and silly questions have silly answers. Highly Silly Employer Answer? After ó and only after ó the employer has discovered the root cause of turnover can they decide upon a solution. If the hiring organization can track turnover to a lack of employee skills and motivations, then they should 1) identify which competencies are critical and which are not, 2) find tools that will measure each competency, and 3) validate each tool (i.e., be sure it works). Everything else is silly. Point by Point Let’s take a look at the “unbelievable answer” from above point by point:

• “Do a phone screen interview.” If you do not know what you are looking for, any interview question will do. Empty nonsense!

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Note: Please take the short survey on recruiting trends from my recent article. The whole process will take you less than 10 minutes, and I will report on the results in future columns. If you have already completed the survey, thanks and please don’t take it again. Last week I began making a case for moving college recruiting from an on-campus activity to a virtual one with a greater reach and scope. Many of activities in our lives have begun to be intermediated by technology. Whether that technology is the telephone, email, a website, a recorded message, or a semi-intelligent “agent” that recognizes the numbers and names we speak on the phone, we are increasingly dealing with technology to get things done. Baby boomers for the most part expect that they will deal with a person and have an opportunity for conversation and face-to-face contact. They find technology to be impersonal and uncomfortable ó not something we should use extensively for recruiting. On the other hand, our children and younger friends expect to deal with technology. They find it efficient, useful, and free from the prejudices often associated with face-to-face contact (we are all the same in the eyes of technology). All of this is why virtual recruiting makes a lot of sense for a college program. Student attitudes are in synch with the methodology of virtual recruiting, the technology for it is widely available on campus, and students have the tools and skills they need to participate. In my column last week I outlined the first step in getting a virtual college program off the ground. I mentioned that you need to determine which kinds of students you are after and then build a website that is attractive to them. But once you have built that great website, how do you get the word out to students to come to it? Marketing the Virtual College Program Getting access to college students is not too hard. Almost all of them have email addresses and most are used to screening and responding to email on a regular basis. There are a number of ways you can gather these address:

• Ask all your current employees for the email addresses of students they know.

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Cost per hire, the most commonly measured statistic in recruiting, has some unintended consequences. In many cases, it contributes to a perception of recruiting as a cost center or administrative overhead. It also creates a performance metrics for recruiters where they are by necessity more interested in quantity versus quality. Measuring recruiters on quality of hire is the first step towards breaking the cycle. Quantity versus Quality I worked with an organization many years ago that measured their recruiters on two statistics: cost per hire and number of positions filled. The recruiters that looked best? High-volume customer service recruiters who could hire 100 people a month for under $1,000 per hire. The recruiters that looked the worst? Specialized skills recruiters who found five to ten developers and analysts per month at a cost of over $10,000 per hire. According to these statistics, the customer service recruiters were the most efficient, yet the specialized skills recruiters were in fact hiring the people that were most crucial to the development and growth of the business. Your devotion to cost per hire, or even staffing efficiency ratio (cost per hire divided by salary recruited) often costs you something else besides money: respect. If all you are doing is trying to lower costs, you often unknowingly do so at the expense of quality and value. And the next time your company goes into cost-cutting mode, which cost centers do you think show up first? The ones that have demonstrated no relative value to the business or bottom line. Perhaps even worse, cost-based staffing metrics send a very bad message to your recruiting teams: ignore the impact of finding a top performer for a relatively small extra cost and get the cheapest person hired as fast as possible. Quality-of-hire metrics are designed to send the opposite message: get the best person possible for the job. On my blog recently, I hosted a fascinating conversation about the various types of quality-of-hire metrics with people like Heather Hamilton, Rob McIntosh, and Chris Barrick from Microsoft and Jeff Hunter from EA. The conclusion I drew from the dialogue is that although quality of hire sounds like a single statistic on the surface, it is actually many statistics with two major applications: value and efficiency. Value-Based Quality of Hire The first major way that quality of hire is used is to prove the value of human capital initiatives. The ideal statistic to use in this area is profit, but the challenge is that not many positions are directly tied to profit. For instance, a business analyst may perform a vital function in measuring and continually improving a crucial business process, but how do you quantify this in dollar figures? Sales, customer service, general management, retail, and business development roles are the easiest positions to tie to profit. Heads of business units and product lines can often also be measured in this way. For a great primer on how to do this, see Randall Birkwood’s excellent article on metrics for executives. Randall also gave a great talk at the most recent spring ER Expo, where he showed a comparison spreadsheet he uses to measure the relative value of various sources of hires for retail salespeople tied to profit, retention, and productivity. This type of effort paves the way for increased investment in human capital initiatives and helps ensure that your team is not the first to be put on the chopping block when times get tough. Recruiters who source for roles with direct links to revenue can be measured in terms of the number of people they brought in who:

• Performed above average in dollars generated

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Applicants are not stupid. They realize that 90% of companies treat applicants worse than most people treat their pet dog. Because applicants know the rules and where the power resides, they generally accept the indifferent treatment that recruiting functions offer. But what if you were to become one of the few firms that instead decided to treat applicants with some degree of courtesy? For example, if you offered them a “bill of rights” guaranteeing some degree of responsiveness and respect, wouldn’t applicants (after they got over the initial shock and disbelief) tell everyone about how your company is different? If you were the first to offer an applicant’s Bill of Rights (and assuming that you back it up with actions), your firm might just find itself with a boatload of applicants who believe that the way a company treats them directly reflects the way they treat their employees. Try it and you’ll find that the buzz will be amazing! Applicants are volunteers. They are volunteering their time when they participate in your selection process. Smart companies realize that fact upfront and thus, they treat them like volunteers throughout every step of the hiring process. Additional Applicant’s Rights In addition to the potential elements of an applicants Bill of Rights that I provided last week, this part includes:

• More examples of rights for possible inclusion in your own applicant’s Bill of Rights

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Recruiting is like sales and marketing rolled into one. If a company has a great brand, a great job, and a great hiring manager, not too much marketing or recruiting is required. But if your company lacks one or more of these factors ó or if you’re targeting hard-to-fill positions ó then stronger recruiters are required. Use the following “10 Commandments of Recruiting” as a guide to assess yourself, your team, or any new recruiter about to be hired when these strong recruiting skills are necessary. (Here’s the online equivalent.)

1. Thou shalt not take no for an answer. Do not accept a “no,” either literally or personally. A premature no really means, “I don’t have enough information to say yes, so rather than talk to you, I’ll say no.” As a recruiter, you must convince candidates to be open-minded enough to fully evaluate the job before making either a yes or no decision. When confronted with a premature no, saying something like, “Are you aware you’re making a long-term decision using short-term data?” will get the candidate to think. Then follow up with, “If I could demonstrate that this position offered significant job stretch, in combination with a faster growth rate than you’re currently experiencing, wouldn’t it make sense to spend at least 15 minutes discussing it in some depth?” Recruiters can’t afford to take no for an answer. This is the number one trait of all salespeople and ó unless you have an over-supply of hot candidates ó it should be the number one trait of all successful recruiters.

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Anyone who follows hiring trends knows that personality measures are gaining popularity as a tool for helping organizations make better hiring decisions. The good news is that decades of research has shown that the use of these tools can have a variety of positive outcomes including reduction in turnover, increased productivity, and better fit between employees and their work environment. The bad news is that there are literally hundreds of different personality instruments out there, many of which are simply not suited for use within most hiring processes. Even worse is the fact that many consumers are unaware of the differences between these tools, and thus frequently end up using the wrong tool for the job. This does not mean that the majority of personality tools available are inherently “bad,” but it does mean that they must be used in a manner that suits their characteristics. There is no better example of the above situation than the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. The MBTI is one of the most heavily used personality instruments available and has been applied in hundreds of different ways over the past few decades. While the MBTI may be perfectly suited for many of these applications, selecting employees is not one of them. A closer look at the origins and composition of MBTIs should help me clarify this point. What Is the Origin of the MBTI? Adventure Associates provides a good summary of the origins of the MBTI:

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a self-report instrument that helps to identify an individual’s strengths and personality preferences. The mother/daughter team of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers developed the MBTI. They based their lifelong work on Carl Jung’s theories about psychological type preferences. Jung’s book “Psychological Types,” published in 1921, studied ancient and modern cultures. The premise of his work was to discover how normal human beings take in information and how they make decisions. He also studied two core mental functions relating to how people get and expend their energy. After reading Jung’s work, Myers and Briggs devoted themselves to bringing the everyday applications of this work to the general public. Myers developed the pen and pencil test in the 1940s. They tested it on friends and family during World War II, hoping to resolve conflicts and help match people to appropriate work. It took over 20 years to fully develop the instrument. Myers and Briggs added a forth dimension to Jung’s scheme, focusing on how people deal with the outer world. They determined that each person has an external orientation towards orderliness and decisiveness (judgment) or towards new information and going with the flow (perception). MBTI is one of the most widely used personality instruments in the world. Its ease of use, high statistical validity, and reliability make it one the most respected personality instruments that exist. The test/retest measurement is very accurate; in 75% of cases, individuals will test the same in three of the four dimensions. Over 600 dissertations have been written on the MBTI and there are well over 1,000 articles and dozens of books. An average of two million people in the United States takes the MBTI each year and it has been translated into more than 30 languages.

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We are living in a world where face-to-face interaction is less and less expected, or even required. Here are a few examples of the virtual world I have experienced recently. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to upgrade my cell phone and so dutifully went off to my local provider’s retail outlet. Within two minutes, the representative told me (1) he could not really offer upgrades, as that was handled separately from new accounts, and (2) I could learn whatever I wanted to learn about upgrading from the company’s website. After I returned to the office and logged on to the website, I was able to upgrade to a new plan and a new phone within a few minutes. My doctor and my dentist now use a virtual agent to schedule all appointments, to remind me of the appointment, and even to relay laboratory results to me. Airfares are all booked virtually; upgrades and schedules are confirmed the same way. Even the ticket agents have been replaced with kiosks and electronic tickets. It is evident wherever one looks that we are using technology more and more to provide a better and faster customer experience. No more waiting on hold indeterminably, standing in long and slow-moving lines, or getting the old runaround from poorly trained service reps. But the world of recruiting remains firmly planted in the mid-20th century. We actually take pride in our face-to-face interactions and our requirements to see people and talk to them personally before we make a hiring decision. Even though this means that many people never get to talk to a recruiter at all or experience very poor, slow service, we still cling tightly to our face-to-face paradigm. College recruiting, even more than professional recruiting, seems to find it hard to break out of the face-to-face recruiting world. There are a handful of benefits from going on campus to recruit. It is true that a good recruiter can address the individual concerns a candidate may have about the organization, and it is true that where professor’s recommendations are important, developing a relationship with students on campus can mean the difference between getting them to commit to you or not. It is also true that a presence on campus can help to build a recruiting brand and show your organization’s commitment to college hiring. But there are many more reasons not to have a college program built entirely on campus visitation. The biggest and most obvious negative is cost and time. To travel to even a few campuses is expensive and consumes days or weeks of travel and time from work ó for both recruiters and any accompanying hiring managers. The second negative is the limited reach these programs have. Even if your organization is willing to invest huge resources in a college program, you can only effectively go to a handful of campuses. This has led to the practice of defining “key” schools and limiting involvement to only those schools. This is a bad idea in itself, which I will discuss in an upcoming article, but it also greatly reduces the chance you have of finding the real gems. The third negative is that by confining your activities to a handful of schools, you significantly limit your access to minority students and diverse candidates, who are often only found in small and scattered numbers across a large number of schools. Finally, the fourth negative is that you can only reach a very small number of students, no matter how big or good your program is. I know of an organization that invested three or four days at a campus and involved three or four people from the organization in campus activities twice in a school year. For that investment of six to eight days and six to eight people, they were able to talk to 125 students at two information sessions and interview a total of 35 students for 20 minutes each. The cost per hire for that program was exceptionally high. And the payoff? They made 4 hires! I will just say straight out that there is no way to justify that kind of a program. So what do I have to offer that is better? What’s the “paradigm buster”? It is really very, very simple. It is almost entirely virtual. And it works. But I bet most of you will find all kinds of reasons not to do it. After all, going to colleges, being the “BMOC,” revisiting the old alma mater ó it’s fun, isn’t’ it? How to Start a Virtual College Program This week I will focus on the first step in the process. Next week I will talk about the additional steps required to create a powerful virtual college recruiting machine. This first step is to decide what types of college students you are most likely to need and be able to hire. Focus on a few majors or specific skills that your hiring managers have demonstrated interest in or that will provide hard-to-find skill sets. Using focus groups, surveys, interviews with newly hired employees in those areas (and with hiring managers), put together a profile of what this type of candidate likes, expects, and is looking for in a job. Are they after a career, excitement, the opportunity to contribute fast? Are they interested in your organization because it will look good on their resume? Is there high interest in your organization or not very much at all? Your goal is to define the job and the things that attract people to that job in your organization. You need to learn how to attract the right student to you instead of focusing on which school is the right one. One of the major problems with the key school concept is the focus on the school and not on the students. It is not necessarily true that all great students are at the schools with the best programs, the largest endowments, or the highest paid professors. There are great students at mediocre schools and vice versa. You should define the competencies and experiences that you are looking for and that correlate with success within your organization. Once you have this picture of what candidates are attracted to, what they want in the job itself, and what competencies they need to have to be successful, you can begin to create a brand and an image for attracting them. This starts with a good website that is dedicated to these kinds of people. The website should use language that attracts and interests these students, and it needs to be tested and edited until it works well. Once the website is in place, you should focus on e-marketing to students on campus and off. You can use all sorts of tools ó from Google ad words to referral tools to email ó to get the word out to students to visit your site and learn about your opportunities. The website needs to be built to sell, screen, assess, and even close candidates. Organizations that have done this well include Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Federated Department Stores. You should check out both of those companies’ websites and see how you can begin to focus on attracting the right students to you. Next week I will talk more about marketing methods, online promotion, and “selling,” and how to screen and assess candidates virtually. [Note: Please take my short survey on recruiting trends from last week's article. The whole process will take you less than 10 minutes, and I will report on the results in future columns. If you have already completed the survey, thanks and please don't take it again!]

HR has come a long way over the past decade in terms of utilizing technologies and reaching out to employees with vital career information. But despite advances in technology, most companies rely on a similar approach to internal recruiting that they used twenty years ago: post a job (this time on a website rather than a bulletin board), and then let the employee identify the opportunity that is right for him or her. This process is known as the “self-nomination approach,” and as I discussed in my last article, it has many shortcomings. The result of these shortcomings is that many employees find it easier to look for jobs outside of the company than to look for them within. The good news is that internal recruiting processes can be changed. The HR decision-maker can lead that change, and in the process allow HR to take on a more strategic role with respect to talent management. So how can a company begin to implement a more proactive recruiting process ó one that gives the company the ability to find the right employee for an opportunity, just as it gives employees the ability to reach out for opportunities that suit them? The simple answer is to institute an internal recruiting program where the HR representatives or recruiters are permitted to proactively look for candidates among the employee population to fill vacancies. Proactive internal recruiting is not a new concept. On the surface it does not appear to be overly complicated, but it is very difficult to gain the organizational buy-in to actually implement the idea. This is the most important hurdle for organizations to overcome when attempting to create a talent management mindset. One challenge will be the perception that current succession planning, leadership development, and self-nomination programs are adequate and that there is no problem. In order to drive this type of change, it will be critical to define the program in such a way that it is focused on a tangible business need and backed by data. The first step will be to identify the business issue and then provide a measure that will articulate why something needs to be done about it. Create a Retention Index to Set Goals and Measure Effectiveness The issue of retention has received a lot of attention lately, particularly with the speculation that as the economic recovery continues more people will begin searching for new job opportunities. The cost of turnover is a well-documented metric, and most companies tabulate both voluntary and involuntary turnover rates. The typical approach is to focus on voluntary turnover and try to reduce the number as much as possible. By examining exit interviews, the reasons for leaving are tabulated and programs are developed to mitigate them. While tracking turnover rates and conducting exit interviews may be helpful in identifying potential issues, a new dimension of analysis may provide a better picture of what part of the company is turning over and what part of the company is being retained. I call that measure “the retention index.” The retention index is a measure comparing the average total turnover rate for all employees to the rate of turnover within a specific demographic category. The first step in determining a retention index is to select a demographic. In the example in the first table below, employees are grouped according to performance rating. To calculate the retention index, take the average turnover rate for all employees and subtract the turnover rate of the employees within each performance category. The resulting retention index will be either a positive or negative number. If the rate of turnover within a performance category is greater than the average rate of turnover for all employees, then the retention index will be negative. This indicates a segment of the talent population that is being retained at a lower rate than the average. If the turnover rate within a performance category is less than the average rate of turnover, the index will be positive, indicating that this segment of your talent pool is being retained at a higher rate than average. To observe the total impact on a selected demographic, it is important that both voluntary and involuntary turnover be included in this analysis. Table 1 compares the retention index for employees of different levels of performance. For employees in the “far exceeds expectations” performance group, the retention index is 0%. This means the company is retaining employees in this category at the same rate as the average. For “Exceeds Expectations,” there is a retention index of negative 10%, indicating that the company is retaining employees who exceed expectations at a rate 10% below the average. The “meets expectations” and “needs improvement” categories are both positive, indicating that the company is retaining employees in these categories at 8% and 5% above the average respectively. This can be interpreted as a leak of quality talent, because the company is retaining more employees in the lower performance categories than in the higher.

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One of the hottest phrases in recruiting these days is “enhancing the candidate experience.” Yes, treating applicants better is becoming a hot issue again, just like it was during the last war for talent. An improving economy means that the power begins shifting from the employer to the applicant. So if you want high application and offer acceptance rates, you need to begin to pay attention to your candidate experience. Applicants are not stupid. If you treat them harshly when they are essentially “guests” at your company, they will automatically assume that you will treat them even worse if they become employees. Business Reasons for Improving the Applicant Experience There are several reasons why recruiting organizations should focus on improving the way that applicants are treated. Some of them include:

• Passive candidates demand quality treatment. They are used to it at their current job and they expect the same level of respect and courtesy at other organizations. Because top performers already have a good job, these so called “passive” applicants won’t tolerate indifferent treatment. They will just walk away and keep their current job.

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There are more name-generating tools becoming available everyday. My favorites include Jobster, SearchExpo, Broadlook, ZoomInfo, AIRS Oxygen, and LinkedIn. These and the other networking tools should be checked out and used. But there’s more to recruiting and hiring passive candidates than generating a list of names. Success with these tools depends on how well you convert these cold names into hot candidates. Here are some other factors that need to be considered when hiring passive candidates:

1. The quality of the list. You can’t waste your time calling passive candidates unless they’ve been pre-qualified first. To the degree possible, restrict your calls to A-level people. A-level people know other A-levels, so even if the initial person is not a fit for your job opening, they know other people who are. Then only call “A” people who are potential candidates themselves or who personally know people who are A-level candidates. When you use any of the name-generating or referral tools, select companies that have a reputation for hiring top people and make sure you look carefully at their titles to minimize non-productive calls.

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A fundamental concept of Zen Buddhism is achieving a state of “no-mindedness,” the place where nothing exists separate from itself. We often see another definition of Zen no-mindedness in when it comes to sales hiring. Recruiter: “Think of a number between one and ten.”

Candidate: “Chocolate.” Hiring manager: “Sell me this pencil!”

Candidate: “The city flies at night.” Hiring manager (to recruiter): “This candidate has promise. Let’s make an offer!” No-Mindedness Enter the land of no-mindedness, where sales candidates are:

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What issues are topmost in your mind right now? Are you focused on improving your recruiting process, expanding or refining your talent sources, figuring out how to screen candidates fairly and legally, dealing with irate hiring managers, or are you just plain swamped with too many requisitions? For the fourth year in a row, I am asking the readers of ERE to respond to my short survey on trends and issues in recruiting. The key concerns you had last year centered on what the best recruiting measures were and how to measure quality of hire. You also reported growing recruiting activity in general, as well as a greatly increased number of new requisitions. At the recent ER Expo in San Diego, it seemed to me that while business remains brisk, other trends are emerging. I heard lots of recruiters talking about candidate relationships and emerging technologies. This survey will help clarify the picture and give all of us a better understanding of how recruiting is changing to meet new business needs and a changing economy. Last year, we published the results as a free white paper. We will, of course, do the same this year so you can get a quick overview of what your colleagues are experiencing. To complete the survey and help give all of us a clearer picture of recruiting trends, simply visit www.glrsurveys.com/recruitingtrends. You will be taken to our survey site where you can quickly and anonymously give us your thoughts. It should take you less than 15 minutes to complete, and a summary of results will be published here in about two weeks. A free white paper will be available soon after that with complete results. Thanks again for your interest!

At the end of the day, recruiters are judged by the number of positions they fill in a given period of time. This assumption is, of course, predicated on the hopefully obvious concept that recruiters are the standard bearers, always looking to raise the bar and ensure that quality is more important than quantity. But quality aside and all things being equal, a recruiter who fills many positions will generally have greater value than a recruiter who fills fewer positions. If number of quality hires is a fair way of looking at the overall value of a recruiter, is there not a significant flaw in this apparently straightforward line of thinking? I propose that there is, because recruiters do not actually fill positions; hiring managers fill them. This brings up an interesting question: How can a recruiter’s value be judged on a given activity when that activity is, in reality, controlled by another? If we as recruiters bring the horse to water and are only judged if the horse drinks, we quickly realize this flaw can be fatal. So what is a recruiter to do to be sure that quality candidates are hired? Bluntly stated, they must do everything and anything necessary to get their candidates through the hiring obstacle course and moved along to the end of the process. Naturally, this task will be easier if you invest the time to develop relationships with the managers you support, as a good working relationship is the first and best tool you have to keep the process flowing. However, in the absence of that relationship, anything goes if it will get the job done, because recruiting is no easy task. As recruiters we must manage relationships on the inside, wheel and deal with candidates on the outside, and know exactly what buttons to push in order to get results. In my career, I have had to beg, cajole, threaten, strong-arm, sweet-talk, bully, and even charm hiring managers and candidates alike to move the process forward. (Kidnapping and assault should only be used as a last resort. Call me if it gets to this point.) I have also gone above managers’ heads and made a lot of noise when nothing else worked. This did not always mean everyone liked me, but if I am to be judged on results, then it is results I will deliver. I would rather be respected based upon the results I deliver than liked but seen as ineffective. (I have been many things in my life, but ineffective is not one of them.) Keep in mind that the recruiter has to balance the politics, lethargy, and inertia of the organization with the indecisiveness, sloth, and chicanery of the candidate. (As an aside, don’t you love it when a candidate tells you that “the money is not important” as the process begins? You can be sure that this one will drive you crazy for more money at the 11th hour.) For recruiters to be successful, there must be a constant and relentless push from the initial candidate contact right through candidate acceptance ó and the person doing the pushing has to be the recruiter. Remember, your value is determined by whether the deal is closed and the position filled. To this day, I will call hiring managers who are not responsive and tell them I was just about to call the candidate and to say we were not interested (agencies call this ploy “the takeaway,” and it works like a charm.) If the manager goes bonkers, you know it is time to push to set up the next step in the process. If they say okay, you have just gotten the answer you were looking for and can go on to find new candidates (by the way, the takeaway works with candidates just as well). If filling more positions with quality candidates seems like a reasonable way to add more value to yourself and the organization, consider these three concepts:

• Getting people hired is the goal! The great football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged by only one thing ó the result.” That is what we as recruiters will be judged upon. Recruiting exists only to fill positions. Gathering resumes is not the goal, setting up interviews is not the goal, and making offers is not the goal. These steps are just part of the process, and ultimately we will never be judged on the process. Getting people hired is the only goal, just as making the sale is the only goal for your sales force ó cold calling, client demos, and proposal development are simply part of the process utilized towards making the sale. In this “show me the money” world, a miss is as good as a mile.

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Everything in the world of business changes rapidly. It used to be that a best practice could provide an organization with a competitive advantage for a number of years. But that has all changed with the globalization of the business world and the introduction of amazing new technologies. Because of the increased speed at which other organizations will copy your best practices, it is necessary to speed up the rate of innovation in everything in business. In short, innovation is the last remaining competitive advantage in business ó and HR and recruiting are not exempt from this fact. Perhaps this quote will illustrate the speed in which companies are required to innovate:

Innovation is what is at the foundation of the U.S. economy. Just to give you a simple example of my company…about 90 percent of December revenue comes from products which were not there in January. That sort of innovation, which is a total turnover of our revenue every year, is indicative of what innovation means to us. You miss a cycle of innovation, your revenue disappears.

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For the foreseeable future, I’ll be using this weekly ERE column to write exclusively about the challenges of finding and hiring passive candidates. Feel free to comment, send questions, or suggest topics. Recruiting less active and passive candidates will become the focus of attention as corporate recruiting resources are shifted away from pursuing active candidates. For example, at ERE’s recent conference in San Diego, a company called Jobster made its launch. This new offering raises the bar on the importance of using referrals to hire more passive candidates. While you should check this service out, don’t ignore other important name-gathering tools and techniques. Shally Steckerl and Peter Weddle are whizzes in using the Internet to generate names of passive candidates. I use LinkedIn, Broadlook, AIRS Oxygen, SearchExpo, and ZoomInfo regularly for every search we conduct. I also use competitive intelligence (purchased names of potential candidates from targeted companies) to insure we have identified the best candidates. But name-generation is only a part of the whole search process, no more than 50%, and you can waste of lot of time talking to the wrong people or saying the wrong things. To get good results from any of these name-generating or referral tools, you need good recruiters. Passive and less active candidates have unique needs, and their needs must be understood if you want to hire more of them. How these people look for jobs, consider evaluating them, and decide to accept offers is fundamentally different from how active candidates do the same things. For one, passive candidates are more discriminating. They want a better job, not another job. So if your job descriptions are boring, you won’t hire many passive candidates. For another, top less-active and passive candidates are interested in the short- and long-term growth aspects of the job in balance. They want both job stretch and job growth. Once you contact these people, you must make the case that the job you’re offering is worthy of consideration. Of course, there is much more involved in the recruiting of top passive candidates than this, but the role of the recruiter can be quickly seen as a critical factor. As the use of these name-generating tools becomes more prevalent, it’s important to measure and monitor their effectiveness. The following four metrics can quickly tell you how well these name-generating passive candidate programs are performing. 1. Quality Rate: Who You Call It takes a lot of time to call a candidate and present an opportunity. Even if the person has been referred, networking is a time-consuming process. A strong candidate will not proceed unless the job offers both growth and stretch. So before you call anyone up, make sure the person is worthy of this extra effort. A worthy person is someone who is either a potential candidate or knows a potential candidate. A potential candidate is someone who has already been identified as a top person doing the right type of work with the right type of company. Someone who knows a person like this is also someone worth calling. In this case, the person called must be pre-identified as an “A” player (“A” players know more other “A” players) in the right type of company, doing work that would put the person in contact with a potential “A” candidate. Getting this information takes a lot of preplanning, but it’s worth it. You can be three to five times more productive if you call only worthy people. In just 10 to 15 calls, you can obtain dozens of great referrals and a few great candidates. This can be done in a day. It would take a week to get the same results calling an unscrubbed list. 2. Contact Rate: The Percent of People Who Return Your Phone Call Getting the person on the phone is critical. Don’t expect good candidates ó even if they’re referred ó to apply on your company website. While a few will, for the most part these won’t be the stars you’re after. The best need to be contacted and convinced to consider your opportunity. The voicemail or email message the recruiter leaves will then be critical. Of course, if you can mention the referring person’s name the callback rate should be high, 80% or more. If the name was identified through the Internet or in some confidential way, the natural callback rate is closer to 20%. So you need to develop some creative voice/email pitches. Something like “Your name has been mentioned to me as someone I should contact on a confidential search for a senior-level marketing person” will get you started. Track the contact rate and modify your pitch until you get at least 80% of the people to call you back. An 80% callback rate is four times more productive than 20%, so don’t ignore this important process control metric. If you spend a lot of time identifying and calling pre-qualified people, you’ll need to make sure most of them call you back. 3. Acceptance Rate: The Percent of People Who Are Willing To Discuss Your Offer It is critical that everyone you call says yes to your offer to explore your opportunity. Remember that the only people you’re calling are worthy of your call. These are people who have already been pre-identified as someone who would be a strong candidate or someone who knows a strong candidate. Most of the time, you’ll be calling people who know other strong people, so getting these referred names will be the real purpose of the call. Only one in five or so will actually wind up being a candidate for your open position. The call needs to be positioned with this in mind. Before you make the call, recognize that no one you don’t know will ever give you the name of a top person right off the bat. In order to get a person to give you a name of a top person, you’ll need to establish both your professionalism as well as the fact that you have a great opportunity worth considering. I’ve written about this before, so check out my article on networking for more on this topic. It takes at least 10-15 minutes of professional discussion before anyone will give you the name of anyone else. Initially, don’t tell the person much about the job. “Would you be open to exploring a senior-level engineering position leading a major company initiative?” is both vague and tantalizing. With a pitch like this, you should get at least 80% of the people you call to say yes. Before you say anything more about the job, get the person to tell you something about him or herself. If the person is a potential candidate, give a two-minute overview of the job and suggest another call to discuss the job and the person’s background in more detail. If the person isn’t a potential candidate, but knows someone who is, you’ll need to proactively begin to get referrals. 4. Referral Rate: The Number of Pre-Qualified Leads One call to a worthy person should yield at least three to four good referrals or candidates. Getting good referrals is the heart of effective recruiting less-active and passive candidates. So you’ll need to track the number of referrals like a hawk if you want to get the most out of a passive candidate sourcing program. While you can identify and hire some people using the techniques described above, you’ll be able to leverage your effectiveness three to four times by getting more top referrals. Once you’ve established your professionalism (this can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few phone discussions), you’ll need to proactively ask for names. Don’t ask “Who do you know?” and don’t let the person say they’ll contact you later, after they think about it. Instead, try something like this during your contact call. Ask the person called to describe their team members ó their supervisor, staff, coworkers, vendors and customers. If the person has worked with design engineers at a prior company, ask who the best engineer there was and then find out why. If the person is too light for the job, ask about their supervisor and find out if this person is strong or weak. Obviously, there are many more ways to get names of top people, but proactively asking about current and former team members must be part of this. This is the only way you’ll be able to get enough referrals of top people from every call. You can hire plenty of top passive candidates at reasonable effort and cost if you only call the right people, ask the right questions, engage them, and proactively ask for referrals. Done properly, this becomes a self-sustaining candidate-generating methodology. Done improperly, it’s a waste of time, effort, and money. Don’t begin using any passive candidate program without understanding what it takes to recruit and hire these top people. The new passive candidate name-generating tools are great when used properly. Understanding and tracking their performance by using these four metrics will help you use them properly and tap into the vast pool of passive candidates.

You cannot truly lead or make a difference at your company without all the qualities ERE authors describe every day in their articles. But there’s one more thing you must also have: an absolute passion for what it is you are trying to do. It’s this passion that my colleague Mark Mehler and I wanted to capture as we embarked upon a series of in-depth interviews with staffing leaders who make a real difference in how their companies find and recruit great employees. Click either audio format to listen to this webcast:

Windows Media | RealAudio Presented by ERE, these interviews will attempt to shed light on how staffing leaders, in many cases working behind the scenes, overcame the challenges in front of them and led their organizations to implement best practices in recruiting. Susan Burns of Federated Department Stores Since coming on the scene in the late 1990s, Federated’s award-winning corporate careers site, Retailology, has become an icon for young people thinking about retail careers. Lately, its horizons have once again expanded, as the company moves to embrace experienced professionals in its staffing brand. I sat down to talk with Susan about the Retailology site and other recruiting initiatives at Federated. Have a listen. Click either audio format to listen to this webcast:

Windows Media | RealAudio [If you experience any technical difficulties in accessing this webcast, you may need to work with your IT department to resolve firewall issues. Send us an email at help@erexchange.com if you experience any other technical difficulties.] About Susan Burns Susan Burns is the operating vice president of employment initiatives and college relations for Federated Department Stores. Her role in leading the development and expansion of Retailology.com, Federated’s employment brand and recruitment website, has provided a platform for continued growth and expansion of talent attraction and acquisition strategies. Retailology serves the interests of entry-level through experienced hourly and salaried talent. Susan has delivered a progressive strategy to Federated by focusing on establishing productive, mutually beneficial vendor and university partnerships leading to highly effective relationships. Her contribution to Federated focuses on recruitment technology adoption rates and corresponding talent-centric initiatives through education and alignment of key constituents. Susan held a number of store line management positions, including store manager with Robinson’s May, assuming volume responsibilities of $30 and $40 million in the locations she managed. Susan completed an MBA at Simmons Graduate School of Management in 1997 prior to joining Federated. In 2002, Susan completed Stanford’s executive education program titled “Leveraging Human Resources for Competitive Advantage.”

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I have come to regard ERE’s semi-annual ER Expo conference series as a barometer of what is happening in employment ó and this eighth event may have been the most telling of them all. Many of us have ridden the roller coaster of attendance and interest, and this year’s record number of attendees, surge of vendors, and overall energy are all the proof we need to conclude that talent is back as a big corporate issue. Recruiters attended to find out what best practices were in vogue, what trends were looming, and to gauge where they were in the “great race” for talent. More than 500 people set the San Diego Marriott buzzing. David Manaster, ERE president and ER Expo chief, kicked the event off by hosting an awards dinner to honor the people and organizations who won the first annual awards for recruiting and staffing excellence. Judged by a panel of industry experts, eight organizations were awarded top prizes, including Federated Department Stores, Monster, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, PacifiCare Health Systems, FirstMerit Bank, HealthEast Care Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Plantronics. The highlights of the conference for me: 1. The energy and interest levels. People were packed into the main event room for every presentation. In past shows, after the first few speakers half or more of the people melted into the hotel to do other things. Not this year. The attendees were clearly there to pick up tips and best practices they could implement back at work. Questions flew and the buzz continued in the hallways outside. The vendor exhibits were also busy with recruiters collecting information and digging into new technologies. No one is complacent anymore. All the recruiting managers I met are struggling to get more efficient as fast as they can because they see a steady ramp in hiring demand. They were all on the prowl for better tools and techniques! 2. New, improved, and emerging technologies. Jobster was the star of the show, kicking off the first day with a breakfast and news conference to announce their new product. Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, along with his stellar team, showed the attendees the power of business networking when applied to recruiting. Other entrants to the employee networking space included BranchIT, located in San Francisco; Yorz, which offers a slightly different approach to referral; and LinkedIn, which has reworked its networking product to focus on recruiting. All of these products are worth a good look. Referral, whether employee focused or externally focused, has grown in importance. Most organizations are now saying that referrals provide anywhere from 20% to 50% of their hires and almost always a lower cost than other methods. The tools I have mentioned all take slightly different approaches to expediting the actual practice of delivering a great referral to the recruiters desk. There were many other technology companies at the show, including applicant tracking systems such as Hire.com, Taleo, Peopleclick, and Recruitmax, as well as a new and improved Eliyon, which has changed its name to Zoominfo. Zoominfo makes searching for the names, email addresses, phone numbers and background info on people easier than ever. It also provides key talent market information as competitive intelligence. 3. Great companies and people. This show had some really interesting people and companies attending including Starbucks, T-Mobile, Target, Federated Department Stores (Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s), Ameriquest, Amazon, Microsoft, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, PacifiCare Health, Booz Allen Hamilton, Monster.com, Plantronics, and a host of others. Conversations in the hallways ran from how to improve employee referral programs to how to best measure success. The workshops that Lou Adler, John Sullivan, Mark Mehler and I ran overflowed with participants ó several of whom signed up at the last minute. People are hungry for information, best practices, and useful hints. I was part of a number of in-depth conversations about recruiting strategy and tactics. Everyone was focused on finding out how to build a higher quality recruiting function. I was pleased that the main concern was on quality and performance excellence, and not on whining over requisition loads and lack of staff. I think most recruiting professionals realize that there is little to be gained by hiring a bunch of inefficient recruiters and would rather focus on leveraging technology, finding good sourcers and closers, and in general getting more respect from management. This Expo convinced me that the great race for talent is back on and that only the informed and daring have any hope of winning. I hope to see all of you at the Expo in Boston in late September. What better place to be next fall, where you can attend the ER Expo, engage in some great conversations, see the autumn colors, and catch a Red Sox’s game?

After completing nearly 100 return on investment (ROI) studies on retooling and new process implementations in the staffing departments of the largest companies in the world, we have come to a simple conclusion: the big easy impact from investments and change is often not where our customers ask us to look. At iLogos, we refer to this as the little secret of large corporations. Let’s consider an analogy to illustrate. Imagine you are coaching your child’s soccer team and that you are also responsible for the funds of the club. Many people advise you to cut spending on items such as drinks, mailings, etc. But the numbers show the most expensive items for the club are the jerseys. You just learned that if you centralized the jersey order you could reduce the number one expense in your club by up to 22%. However, you also know that all the players will complain, because they had their special provider make, for instance, a little red line on the side for his unique jersey or a special fabric for hers. Similarly in staffing, many organizations ask us, how could we save on search firms and on recruitment advertising? Certainly, there are spending analyses and cost reduction initiatives that can be implemented in those areas. Often, though, organizations are not suffering from being unable to solve the issues they are aware of. On the contrary, the bigger issues are those they don’t see. So what is a very big issue where you could impact your company performance so much that the CEO could be inspired to invite you personally for a cruise in the Caribbean? Contingent Labor Spending The low hanging fruit that most organizations are overlooking is contingent labor spending. When we mention contingent labor spending, most people look at us and say, “Maybe somewhere else, but not here!” Well, then, what does your organization spend on contingent labor? If you cannot answer precisely, most likely you are among those that don’t know what they don’t know. A case in point is an experience we had with a company that chose to inquire a bit more into this issue. At the end of the initial meeting they assured us the spending was limited and no more than $25 million. At the end of the second meeting, after further investigation, they revised their estimation to be double. By the end of the third session, the estimate for their contingent labor spending was four times the original number! Our studies on contingent workforce management show potential savings between 4% and 22%. The impact is derived from better negotiated bulk rates, control of maverick spending, rate enforcement, risk avoidance (remember the “Microsoft case”?), as well as better process efficiency of on-boarding and off-boarding. Some of those savings will not appear on your budget, and often are only considered by the people with the total corporate savings in sight ó your CFO and/or CEO. Like the soccer team scenario, perhaps you are not responsible for the procurement of the “jersey” today, or you are reluctant to be the target of much complaining from the players and the providers of the jerseys. But if you are not ready for that, you can pass on the cruise right now. How Can I Start? Some organizations we are consulting with are in fact aware of the potential savings, and either blame the lack of ownership or accept non-action and lost savings. Others tell us that they have taken the appropriate measure to control it by implementing a model called VOP, which stands for “Vendor On Premise,” in which a staffing firm comes onsite to fulfill open job requisitions and manage administrative processes such as billing and reporting. VOPs market themselves as “experts in contingent workforce management,” when in fact their expertise lies in “fulfillment,” that is, putting temporary workers into open job reqs. But fulfillment should not be confused with contingent workforce management; VOPs are staffing agencies or subsidiaries of staffing agencies. Although the VOP model seems to be a step in the right direction, it is a long leap away from reaching the full savings potential. A VOP’s primary goals (turf protection and generation of fulfillment revenue) are incompatible with the client’s goals of protecting the company from potential liabilities, managing costs and leveraging spend, and guaranteeing a high degree of customer satisfaction. Most organizations are satisfied with the VOP model for the simple fact that it provides a feeling of control. Indeed, having fulfillment and visible reporting gives the organization that perception. However, there is an inherent and unavoidable conflict of interest. It is like having one of those soccer jersey vendors come to the club and take all the orders at once, and constrain access to the other jersey providers. The motivation for the main jersey provider is to ensure that it captures most of the orders. When special requests are made, this main provider (a.k.a. the VOP) draws on its competitors ó and you suffer the double mark-up. It is important to understand the structures and nuances of the different models available out there. The pitfalls of the VOP model are part of the little secret that you have not heard about too often, simply because most of the staffing suppliers don’t want you to know. Now You Know What You Don’t Know Most of the organizations we work with either don’t own contingent workforce management issues, greatly underestimate the impact they have on them, or have deficient processes, such as Vendor on Premise, in place. Don’t forget, the worst situation to be in is to not know what you don’t know. The average company spends approximately 7% of its revenue on contingent labor. If we apply the average rate of savings that can be achieved to that 7%, it represents approximately a 1% increase in revenue on the bottom line of your organization. Knowing that, it is likely worthwhile to allot the time and resources to start figuring out what you now know you don’t know!

article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett For more than a decade there has been a stated interest among many HR professionals to emerge from their basement offices and start getting recognized as professionals capable of devising and executing a strategies that positively impact the bottom line of their organizations. As a result of their efforts, most HR professionals are no longer confined to the personnel office; many organizations now reserve a seat at the boardroom table for the senior-most practitioner. But in reality, has the modern-day practitioner truly evolved? Study after study points to the conclusion that, while HR professionals can now talk a decent game, they make no attempt to actually play it. Spurred by a report from the consulting firm Watson Wyatt that looked at the correlation between HR spending and what line managers identified as strategic, we set out to investigate what recruiters and recruiting managers were doing in the area of strategy. The survey, deployed electronically to more than 7,000 participants in March of 2005, produced results that shocked even the most vocal of HR critics. Over the course of just ten days, more than 840 companies, ranging in size from just 25 employees to well over a million, reported in on the existence and use of a strategy in their recruiting efforts. If you have ever wondered why HR professionals continue to be viewed in a negative light in most organizations, the following results might help you figure out the answer:

• Who’s hiring? Some 96% of the firms responding to the survey had plans to hire either new or replacement staff during the 2005 calendar year. Of that 96%, 26% planned to hire additional staff.

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