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ABC, Inc.’s three recruiters are overwhelmed with requisitions. At the end of last week, they had more than 150 open positions to fill, many of them requiring hard-to-find candidates. Most of these requisitions had been open for more than two weeks, and hiring managers are upset. Most of the managers have not seen any candidates, and the few who have want to see more. At this week’s staff meeting, Peter, the director of staffing, announced that the VP of HR, his boss, was considering outsourcing a large portion of the recruiting function.

The reasons are obvious: a perception by hiring managers of poor quality candidates and long delays in presenting candidates. His two recruiters and most of the HR team were not pleased with this decision and felt that they understood the company and its needs better than any agency. They also felt that hiring managers were unrealistic in their expectations and that they were a bargain compared to the costs of outsourcing. This situation is increasingly common. I find that many organizations are turning to outsourcing as a solution to either the problem of too many requisitions and too few recruiters, or to that of too many hard-to-fill positions and no talent pool or legitimate candidate sources.

There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing the recruiting function (I’m on the board of the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association), and many organizations have done so with great success. Kellogg’s has outsourced recruiting for a number of years and has been pleased with the results. Some organizations have outsourced recruiting for one or two functions only, and leave the internal recruiters to do the rest. Given the scarcity of many types of talent, more organizations are turning to outsourcing as a last resort. Historically, there have been few options available to organizations, outside of keeping an internal recruiting function. Most agencies cannot (and don’t want to) recruit for all positions. They tend to focus on a market segment or a particular function and do less well at recruiting outside that. They are also expensive. But with the rise of recruitment process outsourcing organizations and the creation of broadly-skilled and capable agencies, there are a variety of choices. However, if your goal is to not be outsourced, here are a few things that you will have to do to remain successful.

Know What You Offer That Is Unique

What makes you better than a recruiter at an agency? What do you know and do that is unique or different enough to be difficult for an outside recruiter to reproduce or learn? Perhaps your recruiters have in-depth knowledge of the services or products you sell and can use that knowledge to better evaluate potential candidates and to sell the organization to these candidates. Or, maybe your team has the capability to evaluate both internal and external candidates together and make more useful recommendations. Whatever it is, you need to be very aware of it and communicate that uniqueness to everyone. If managers feel that you are a commodity, then anyone can do your job as well as you can. It is your responsibility to communicate your unique contributions in any way that you can. This includes face-to-face conversations, discussions, email, or whatever else can help hiring managers understand you better.

Learn to Build Internal Relationships

Most of the time internal functions are outsourced because hiring managers or senior managers are unhappy with the speed with which candidates are presented, or with candidate quality. They also believe that an external group can provide faster and better service. The only solution to these issues is to have built good relationships with the management team. Managers have to believe that you are not only well-qualified and capable, but also that you are trustworthy and deeply understand their needs. You can only attain that trust by, over time, getting to know these managers and letting them know you. You will need to spend time educating them about the talent pipeline and your sourcing activities, and you will need to present them with believable and quantified data when their expectations are unrealistic. I have found that in recruiting functions where the recruiters are physically close to the hiring managers and who spend time with those managers on an almost daily basis, there is no talk of outsourcing.

Suggest Outsourcing When it Is Appropriate

Sometimes, it makes a lot of sense to outsource some part of the recruiting function. This happens when there are large numbers to recruit and you have a limited staff, or when there are just a few very open positions that require hard-to-find skills. When these are the case, it is better if the proactive suggestion to outsource comes from the recruiting team and is supported with data, numbers, and facts to show the savings and to show why quality will not decrease.

Improve Your Recruiting Processes

Do you know that recruiting remains one of the least efficient processes in an organization? Transaction costs (cost per hire) are large, and there is almost no effort being made to connect that cost with delivering value (quality of hire). At conference after conference, I hear the same old measures being touted proudly: cost per hire, time to fill, number of interviews to offer, and so forth. It seems like no one is measuring the effects of our recruiting activities. Senior executives are starting to ask what value we are delivering to them, and sadly, few of us have any answers. You need to establish some time and cost reduction goals (once you have clearly determined what your current numbers are), and then set out to achieve them as quickly as possible. At the same time, you should be open about what you are doing and why, and be accountable for the results. Let hiring managers know that you are working hard to bring in better candidates and enlist their help to do so. They can be great allies once they are part of the team and understand how what they do affects what you do.

As mentioned above, the relationship between the recruiter and the hiring authority is the most important factor in the success equation. Your goal should be to be seen as contributing to the success of the organization. By acting openly, getting data and facts to support your arguments, improving your recruiting process in a systematic way, and accepting accountability for your results, you should be able to remain productively employed for a long time to come.

Schneider National, a trucking company with more than 20,000 people and revenues somewhere around $3 billion, just feels like a company that’s recruiting. It regularly sends out press releases announcing its hiring plans. It’s holding webinars to drum up interest in its positions. Its home page has a large photo of a man hugging his child, with the caption, “Drive for Schneider, be home 17 weeks per year.”

Seventeen weeks may not sound like a whole of time in one’s own bed, but Rob Reich, vice president, enterprise recruiting for Schneider, sure hopes it does. Some of his team’s efforts to find everyone from truck drivers to recruiting technicians have included:?

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The U.S. Congress may extend, retroactively, tax credits popular among entry-level employers like UPS, Federated, Wal-Mart, FedEx, and many restaurants such as Pizza Hut.

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Manpower is No. 136 on the Fortune 500 and is the world’s second-largest temp agency. It’s trying to let people know, however, that it’s more.

Manpower has bought an IT recruiting company, another company doing internal audits, the career-transition company Right Management, and is in the recruitment process outsourcing business. It is rebranding itself as a full-service giant, doing testing, training, and retention work. Most of its sales is overseas.

Allan McKisson, Manpower VP human resources, North America, came over from Whirpool, where he spent 20 years. (Whirpool went through its own branding exercises 10 years ago.)

McKisson is examining what the implications of Manpower’s new direction are to the employment side of the business. Right now, he says, that means two things.

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“Who ultimately receives employment opportunities is highly dependent on how and where the employer looks for candidates.” The above quote is found in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s compliance manual on race and color discrimination, which was released on April 19, 2006. While there has been a great deal of attention lately to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and its new definition of an Internet applicant, the EEOC has provided a clear signal that recruitment practices and procedures will be scrutinized much more carefully in the future for possible discrimination. The remainder of this article summarizes some of the key points regarding recruitment and hiring that are covered in this compliance manual, followed by suggestions for employers and recruiters to reduce their chances of legal problems.

A Renewed Focus on Discrimination in Recruitment and Hiring Causes of Recruitment Discrimination

This compliance manual notes five recruitment practices that may be given particularly careful scrutiny by the EEOC:

1. Illegal use of job advertisements and recruitment agencies. The compliance manual notes that job advertisements that specify race, ethnicity, or other protected categories are illegal. Similarly, asking a recruiter to use race, ethnicity, and other protected categories (e.g., age) in the hiring process is illegal. Indeed, the compliance manual notes that if discrimination occurs in the recruitment process, both the employer and the employment agency may be liable. Recruiters, employment agencies, and employers should beware; recruitment and hiring can create legal liability for all parties, not just the employment agency or the employer. You may be responsible for the discriminatory acts performed by another party.

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Before you begin reading this article, write down all of the reasons your candidates and hiring manager clients give you for not moving forward. Here’s my list. How does your own compare?

• Don’t have time to talk.

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“What do you mean you changed your mind? I thought you really wanted this position? Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Many of us have heard this or some version of this at some point in our careers. You have a candidate going through a process, and then you get surprised because he or she has suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly) had a change of heart. This is not uncommon. People making a career change are going through an emotionally-charged experience. In the process, people tend to get defensive and are reluctant to fully communicate their interests or reveal to you that they have other “irons on the fire.”

This is where up-front operating agreements come in to play. When properly used, an up-front operating agreement/contract will help a recruiter mitigate the tangles that will inevitably develop throughout the evaluation and hiring processes. Up-front operating agreements are quite simple and should be used early on in a candidate relationship. The first agreement I put in place is an agreement about agreements. I always ask a candidate if he or she is the type of person who tends to honor agreements when he or she makes them with other people. Everyone says “yes” to this one; who wouldn’t? But something else is happening. The candidate is also giving you permission to ask for commitments at different points, and at the risk of sounding inconsistent or at worst, psychotic, he or she will tend to stick to these commitments. Then, I always follow up with an out clause which puts people at ease. I ask, “From time to time, I may ask you to commit to something. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, it’s okay to tell me so. One of my biggest fears is a person who says ‘Yes’ to something when he or she actually means ‘No.’ People do this because they are polite and don’t want to be confrontational in most cases. Are you able to come forward to me if something doesn’t feel right, or if you want to halt or slow down our process?” And, you reinforce this contract several times through your process, by asking again, “Are you sure you are comfortable with this?”

You’ve got to let the candidate know that you will not attack him or her if he or she starts to get a funny feeling; you have to explicitly let him or her know that in an emotionally-charged process, he or she will most likely feel uncomfortable, and when this happens, you (the recruiter) are the best person to call. When a candidate gets that funny feeling, wouldn’t you prefer to know about it as soon as possible? You’re essentially letting the candidate know that you will not use pressure tactics. You operate in an environment of truth, and you give the candidate an incentive to be truthful. You’ll be amazed. The candidate will be relieved that he has finally found someone in which he can confide. It’s quite therapeutic for the candidate because all the other recruits will be pushing and shoving him or her to “just go out on an interview and see how it goes.” You, on the other hand, are not only a broker of jobs or a conduit to a new job, but also a confidant.

If you were a candidate, to whom would you be more loyal: someone pushing you though a process, or someone in whom you hold considerable trust because you have facilitated very open lines of communication? Let’s say that one day you’re sitting at your desk, posting an advertisement on one of the major job boards, and your phone rings. The person calling you is a candidate who is about to get an offer from your client. The candidate says, “I’m having second thoughts about leaving this job for your client’s, and I want to discuss it with you. Have you got a minute?” You bet you have a minute. You have all the time that candidate needs. “Remember when you told me if I was not comfortable with something, I should call you to discuss it?” Now, you can fix the problem, if it is in fact fixable. Or, at the very least, you can prevent yourself from looking inept in the eyes of your client. You want all of the what-ifs out in the open, and when you put in place up-front operating agreements, you create a relationship in which revealing these things is not something that causes discomfort in an already uneasy person.

In a past article, an amazing number of people weighed-in to trash professional education in favor of practical experience. Some of the commentators supported their position by citing three industry leaders without degrees who lead successful companies; maintaining that recruiting is an art, as well as a serious profession; or, arguing that some ERE authors are unqualified because they have never recruited. I hope the majority of people do not take these comments too seriously. These arguments may sound attractive, but are all seriously wrong-headed – and some are even dangerous.

For example: The “I Know People Who Are Highly Successful Without a Degree” Argument

• As pointed out by one reader, if education is unimportant, why do you suppose smart and successful folks like Gates, Dell, and others insist that their new employees are educated? Education does not make someone successful, but neither does self-imposed ignorance.

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Losing a candidate to a counteroffer is one of the worst things that can happen to a recruiter. Though the candidate will always do what he believes is in his best interest, our job is to educate him to make sure he understands the risks involved in accepting a new offer from a current employer. One of the biggest parts of helping defend against the counteroffer is what happens when the candidate gives notice. The way that I see it, if you can discourage an employer from even giving the candidate a counter, there’s no way the candidate will accept one. Giving notice can be the most emotional time for a candidate. The pressure that the current employer may put on someone, as well as second-guessing by the candidate, may take a toll. The easier that you can make this, and the more that you can reduce stress for the candidate, the better. Here’s what I tell candidates:

“I’m not concerned that you will accept a counteroffer (you don’t want the candidate to think that you don’t trust them). I just want to make this transition as painless as possible. The way that we do this is through the process of giving notice. The best advice that I can give you is to be very brief when you give notice. If it were me, I’d say, ‘I have accepted another position outside the company. My start date is _____________, so I’m happy to work out my two weeks’ notice. Under no conditions will I accept a counteroffer.’ You do not have to tell your current employer where you are going or what the job is. I strongly suggest that you do not give them any clue about your new compensation package. They will ask you a hundred questions; you do not have to answer a single one. All that’s important is that you are leaving. You don’t want to burn any bridges, so I’d just say that your new employer has asked you to keep this information confidential. Just have a matter-of-fact style and appreciate why they want to know this information (so they can use it to counteroffer you). The less information you give them, the easier this will be. When talking to your current employer, you can add positive things such as, ‘I have had a wonderful experience at this company, and am happy to have had the opportunity to work with you, but the time has come for me to move on.’ But be firm. If you show any kind of weakness or uncertainty in your voice or actions, your current employer will smell it. Most managers have been professionally trained on how to counteroffer employees. Your boss is going to be shocked that you have accepted another position and that you are leaving. The first thing that will go through your boss’ mind is how your leaving will have an impact on him or her. He or she may have to work more hours until a replacement is found; your leaving will lower the morale of the rest of the staff, and your boss may have an extremely difficult time finding someone with your qualifications to replace you. It is much easier and cheaper for your company and boss to try to keep you rather than losing you (especially if it’s to a competitor).

Expect your boss’ boss to get involved as well. Don’t be surprised if both offer to take you out to lunch or dinner. They are going to give you all the attention in the world. Expect a counteroffer. Most counteroffers that I have seen have been anywhere from a 20% to 35% increase in earnings. Enticing, isn’t it? But why weren’t you worth that much to them yesterday? Does it take you leaving to get something you should have been getting anyway? If so, is that the type of company you want to work for? Keep in mind that counteroffers come in many other forms than just an increase in compensation. Promotions are also ways for getting employees to stay.

Once you give notice, you are essentially breaking a trust that you had with your employer. If you are countered and stay, your company may feel that it owns you. You will be known as the one who caused your employer grief by threatening to quit. You’ll no longer be known as a loyal employee. Will this cause your boss to pass you over on the next possible promotion? I’ve heard of stories where companies only counter to get the employee to stay until they find a replacement and then let the employee go. Some companies feel that it’s better for people to leave on their terms instead of their employees’ terms. I promise you that in any research you do on counteroffers, you will not find anything that ever says, ‘Take the counteroffer.’ Please research this on your own, and if you do happen to find anything to the contrary, please let me know.”

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As previously discussed in Part 1 of this series, a corporate boomerang/alumni rehire program is an excellent, low-cost, high ROI recruiting approach capable of producing top performing talent. Often underused, it is a best practice that professional service firms like McKinsey and Booz Allen Hamilton have used for years to leverage a talent population that is familiar with their organizational culture and that has a proven ability to perform. While Part 1 detailed the reasons that any recruiting function should invest in boomerang/alumni programs, Part 2 will focus on the steps that you must take in order to develop a world-class boomerang/alumni program.

Steps in Building a World-Class Boomerang/Alumni Program

There is no standard format for a corporate alumni program, but there are a number of essential steps that you should consider when implementing a program if you intend on being successful. They include:

Program Start-up Steps

• Assign an individual or team to be accountable for the boomerang/alumni programs.

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In the May 13 Los Angeles Times, a front-page story described how top-tier college grads were making decisions about which of their many job offers to accept. The article started with the idea that when the demand for talent is far greater than the supply, companies need to be more aggressive and more creative in their recruiting efforts. It went on to say that with the first wave of baby boomers starting to retire, and with fewer replacements graduating from college, demand would continue to outpace supply for the foreseeable future.

With this scenario at play, the grads involved were going to be choosier. No surprises here. What was a surprise, though, was how they were choosing one job over another. While the company brand was important, it was not the overriding criteria. The actual job itself and who the person they would work for were far more important. This is especially vital as companies develop their recruiting strategies. Top Gen-Ys decide to take one job over another based on the specific challenges the job involves, the chance to grow, the chance to be mentored by a strong manager, an opportunity to learn new skills, the opportunity to work as a team of other top people, and the chance to do something important. Oddly – or, maybe not – this is pretty much the same criteria which top experienced people use when accepting a new offer. Look at your online job descriptions and the documents you provide to potential new hires, whether those hires are entry-level or experienced professionals.

1. Do your online job descriptions meet the more discriminating selection criteria that top people use when deciding to explore new career opportunities?

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As the resident ERE contrarian, I often find myself at odds regarding best practices (i.e., fair and effective ways) to hire employees. Past readers might even say that “quiet and unassuming” is not one of my virtues. However, several recent articles have advocated very bad advice; in effect, unilaterally tossing 50 years of hiring science out the window because a few authors and vocal recruiters disagree with it. I guess you could call this the “I never heard of it, and because I don’t know about it, it must be wrong” syndrome (or “INHOIABIDKAIIMBW,” for short).

INHOIABIDKAIIMBW

Although some authors may not be aware, there are approximately 6,000 members of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology and 235 graduate schools that read and conduct research on best hiring practices. In addition, there are hundreds of independent organizations staffed by I/O psychologists working in this field throughout the world (including the U.S. Department of Labor and the EEOC). All of these folks agree on a few facts about selection and placement:

• It should be based on a professionally conducted job analysis to identify competencies associated with job performance (i.e., ones based on job requirements and business necessity). The careful reader might notice that there are few or no references to job descriptions, top-grading, or reliance on company-wide competencies developed by the HR department.

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Over the past 20 years, scores of management fads – from situational leadership to business process reengineering to Six Sigma quality – have come and gone. Many of them were useful and brought improvements to the organizations that implemented them. But, as Jim Collins in Good to Great and many others researchers have found, none of them replaced the need for thoughtful, process-oriented, outcome-based leadership. These management fads actually underlined the fact that there are no magic bullets or one-way approaches to success.

Recruiting is full of fads as well. Over the past decade, we have seen the rise of behavioral interviewing, Internet search, applicant tracking systems, online screening and assessment, and most recently, employee referral. Each of these has been billed as the answer to some problem: Behavioral interviewing would improve candidate quality, Internet search would alleviate the need for cold-calling, applicant tracking systems would make paper go away and reduce administrative chores, online screening and assessment would ensure that only the very best candidates made it to the recruiter’s attention, and employee referral would guarantee high-quality candidates in abundance. Of course, all of them have in one way or another failed to live up to their promises. All of them have merit. All of them are useful tools, but none is a panacea or a magic bullet. Just as in management fads, there is no replacement for solid strategy, process, and measurement. Working with many clients, we have learned that the most important thing you can do is to invest more time and energy on understanding, defining, and refining your recruiting process than on implementing a new fad or piece of technology.

Basically, recruiting can be broken down into three large steps: the first is to attract and find candidates, the second is to assess them and convince them to work for your organization, and the third one is to track how well they do, and use that information to modify how you recruit. It is a dynamic and ever-changing process, but these three steps have been basic to success since the first person was recruited.

Attracting and Finding Good Candidates

While this sounds very simple – for many recruiters it means posting jobs on a job board, building a recruiting website, and perhaps implementing a referral program – it is actually the most complex and critical step of all. To develop an employment brand and an effective website requires a deep knowledge of the organization and its values and culture. To attract “good” people, one has to define what skills and competencies make up a “good” person for the organization and for the particular job that person will do. This means testing a variety of sources and developing multiple candidate channels. It also means putting in place ways to effectively communicate with candidates and experimenting with messages that will attract them. The hundreds of ineffective recruiting websites I see and the number of discussions about sourcing that flood recruiting chat rooms and blogs indicate to me that not much thought goes into developing candidate channels or into specifically and precisely defining the skills and competencies a candidate needs to have. Successful organizations are rarely short of critical talent and rarely make a fuss publicly about not being able to find good talent. I don’t know of a single company with a successful recruiting process that relies on any one channel or marketing tool. Successful firms have done their homework and use a wide array of tools and channels to source candidates. I know of one large and well-known organization that has developed a 25-year talent pipeline. The company starts by working with elementary school students to interest them in the areas of work the company has a need for. In high school, this translates into part-time jobs, information on the company’s website, school visits, and sponsorships of targeted events. In college, the talent pipeline moves to internships and to building relationships with professors. In the world of experienced recruiting, the company uses cold calling, search firms, job posting, referrals, and its website. No one tool is relied upon alone. But for any organization, it takes a carefully thought-out and carefully implemented talent strategy to ensure success.

Assessing Them and Convincing Them to Work For You

Assessment is not about interviews and tests. It is not about any single method. Behavioral interviewing will not ensure better candidates if you are not clear on what skills and competencies you are seeking. Testing only works when you have precise elements to test for. What is important is to know what specific competencies and skills will most likely make a person successful. And successful means that the person produces the services or products your organization needs in the time frame and with the quality that has been defined. Once this has been established, then an appropriate array of assessment tools can be used. If a person is expected to have a certain level of skill, tests may be the best way to measure that. On the other hand, if the person needs to have complex interaction skills, then interviews or assessment centers many help determine the candidate’s competency level. Good assessment is all about using the right tools for the right purposes. I frequently see inappropriate tools being used, and then I hear from recruiters that assessment does not work. We would not use a hammer to cut wood, yet I have seen the equivalent happen in testing because recruiters have not taken the time to really understand what they are doing and what they need to assess.

Tracking How New Hires Perform

The only way you can tell if your attraction and assessment processes are working is to have a baseline of expected performance in as many areas as you can, and measure how your new hires perform. This requires that you have established the needed competencies and levels of performance before you initiate a recruiting activity and that you can track new hires after they are on board. When you can do this, you will be able to change your assessment or attraction strategies so that you are getting better and better candidates and new hires. By carefully monitoring and tweaking various aspects of the process, you will know which steps are the real levers of productivity and which are not. Good recruiting, like almost everything in life, is the result of hard work. By working hard to know exactly what kinds of people you need and by putting in place an array of tools to help you attract and assess these people, you will always have a solid pipeline of candidates and an effective recruiting function. Leave the fads and the magic bullets to your competition.

Quick! The annual NFL draft is approaching and your entire career hinges on choosing the right players for your pro team. Choose correctly and your team will make millions and be remembered as champions. Choose poorly and your team will be just another bunch of “wanna-be”s who go down the tube of history. No fear. You draw on your extensive experience as a professional recruiter. You don’t need Monster because all the candidates are active. And, you don’t use competencies because you believe they seldom work. All you need is the list of open positions: quarterback, halfback, and backstop (or at least that’s what you thought the coach said). No matter. You carefully review each player’s resume and invite him to attend a probing interview. You “nailed” each candidate with insightful questions, such as: What was your greatest accomplishment? Would you rather be a coniferous tree or a seasonal shrubbery? How would your friends and neighbors describe your favorite Jell-O flavor? Yes, you dazzled the candidates with your insight and professionalism. You could tell by the look on their faces. You probably find this example to be silly and wrong-headed. You say that this is no way to hire an NFL professional; that it doesn’t even begin to evaluate athletic skills. That’s the point.

What Are You Looking At?

Just as each position in an NFL team needs clear-cut competency definitions, so does each job in an organization. While some unskilled or learn-on-the-job positions are interchangeable, many others need specialized skills such as technical knowledge, persuasion, complex problem-solving, or detailed planning. A recruiter who does not understand the requirements (e.g., basic job competencies) must rely on his or her own personal set of definitions. It’s the same for a coach or manager. Unclear expectations often lead to star basketball players wanting to become baseball players and discovering the bitter taste of mediocrity. In the same way, star technicians become bad supervisors, star salespeople become poor sales managers, and star performers in one company become mediocre ones at another. Titles may sound alike, but when jobs require significant change, few people are able to make the shift successfully. When I was in business school, the professors treated employees as “building blocks” that could be maneuvered, assigned, and directed into whatever direction management desired. Although the professors had abundant book knowledge of finance, accounting, or management, they seemed to take job requirements and employee skills for granted. ‘I’m sure that if the professors collectively owned sports franchises, they would have hired Tiger Woods as a quarterback, sent him to tennis camp, and coached him to bowl.

Bad Management Can Screw Up the Best-Planned Picnic

A bad manager can undermine and destroy the effectiveness of a highly qualified employee. That goes without saying. The real question is, can a good baseball coach turn Michael Jackson (sorry, Michael Jordan) into a star baseball player? Only in the movies. The rest of us can certainly become “better” but, like it or not, people are happier and more satisfied when they finally realize there are limitations to everything. One of our favorite images in the movies is the coach who takes full credit for his players’ skills. Viewers are led to believe that these wunderkind were formed out of mud (think of orcs in Lord of the Rings) and turned them into super athletes. This is the height of ego-centricity. All a good coach can do is develop existing talent. As an example, think about the athlete who trained all year for the Boston Marathon, only to lose to a skinny guy from Africa who started life by sprinting out of the womb. Half of the top 14 leaders in the 2006 Boston Marathon were Kenyan; 13 of the last 16 Boston marathons were won by Kenyans. I’m sure it is due to the excellent coaching provided by the Kenyan government.

You Can Learn a Lot by Watching

Let’s go back to the locker room. In one corner the NFL scouts and coaches are watching reruns. No. Not Desperate Housewives. They’re watching reruns of each potential draft-pick actually playing the game. In another corner, they are reviewing each candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and injuries. In yet another, they are evaluating their own team’s strengths and weaknesses. Why are they doing this? First, these experts need to know exactly what positions they need to fill and required skills (competencies). Second, they want to meticulously examine examples of each candidate’s athletic skills. Finally, they’re determining a strategy for acquiring the players they need. Did anyone notice they seldom use interviews? But, clarifying and observing athletic skills is one thing; clarifying and observing on-the-job skills is more difficult. For example, this statement has been used as a “competency”:

Is able to achieve talent development, including orientation, succession planning and preparation, prevention and management of employee relations issues, and performance management that further employee engagement, stability and productivity.

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Boomerang efforts have one of the highest ROIs in recruiting. When you take the time to examine the profile of new hires who produce the best on-the-job performance, invariably previous employees returning to the organization, or “boomerangs,” make the list. Boomerang is a term that was coined to identify top performing “corporate alumni” who are either purposely targeted and brought back into the organization, or who return voluntarily after some absence from the organization.

Boomerang recruitment is a high ROI activity, primarily because the cost per hire is very low and little time or effort must be invested in getting to know the candidate. While boomerangs make great hires, they also empower or embolden retention efforts by exposing employees at risk of attrition to first-hand accounts of life outside the organization and the selling points of what brought them back. Boomerangs are highly valuable to an organization not just because they bring back great stories, but also because they bring a fresh perspective, yet one capable of embedding years of history. By stepping out of the organization, there is a good chance that boomerangs have learned new skills and strategies that are applicable or valuable in redesigning and improving your approaches. They can also bring back valuable information about how a competitor does business and the strengths and weaknesses inherent to their approach. Having been exposed to an organization doing something successful a different way, boomerangs can recognize what is better about your approach and what can be improved. In short, these are A++ candidates who deserve special treatment.

Beware of Antiquated Thinking!

Hiring boomerangs can be political. A number of managers hold the antiquated notion that boomerangs are traitors and should not be allowed to return. This notion is silly because the job world has changed, and the number of employees who remain loyal to a single organization throughout their lifetimes is both extremely limited and suspect in nature. It is also illogical to assume in an era where specific skills are increasingly more valuable on a project versus a long-term basis that separation from an organization has anything to do with loyalty. Individuals with the most valuable skills are constantly offered opportunities, and should a valued employee accept one, it is as much the manager?s fault for failing to retain the employee as it is the employee’s fault for taking advantage of market conditions. In addition, managers should not assume that just because someone doesn?t leave an organization that they are loyal. It could simply mean he or she has few or no opportunities! Managers need to get over it; rehiring former employees is quite common in sports and no one ever holds a grudge there.

Best Practice Firms

Although the hiring of boomerangs using a formal process is not widespread, there are several firms that have implemented boomerang programs. Consulting firms like McKinsey, Ernst & Young, Bain & Co, and Deloitte have long nurtured the relationship between the firm and its alumni. Other firms like HP and Gensler (who have been written-up for having boomerang rates as high as 12%) have also been successful in building alumni programs and re-recruiting boomerangs. However, the best practice leader in leveraging this approach based on my observations is management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. It has gone the extra step and dedicated resources to a unique team known as the “comeback kids” that has proven very successful in getting former employees to return.

Reasons for Hiring Boomerangs or Corporate Alumni

There are numerous reasons why you should develop a formal effort to re-recruit top employees who left your firm. Some of them include:

• Fast hire. Boomerangs offer an opportunity to acquire a top person quickly (the search and the assessment take little time).

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This could be a very good article, maybe even a great one. It all depends on your point of view. For the chance it turns out to be a great article, wouldn’t you agree that it’s certainly worth investing a few minutes’ reading time? Some of you are already aware that the title and first paragraph demonstrated a few fundamental aspects involved in successfully recruiting passive candidates. First, you must capture people’s interest. Second, you have to keep them engaged. Third, you need to make an offer that has a potential big reward for a minor cost.

How these ideas can be used to recruit passive candidates will become clearer by the end of this article. In fact, if too many of your voice mails aren’t being returned, you’ll be able to use this concept to get a 75% call-back return rate. To get better at recruiting passive candidates, you first need to assess yourself (or your team, if you’re a recruiting manager) against some best practices. You might find my earlier ERE article, “The 10 Commandments of Recruiting Passive Candidates,” to be a useful benchmark. From my experience, you don’t need to be fearless to make cold calls ó you just need to be better prepared. From a performance management standpoint, there are five basic metrics you need to track to see how well you’re doing recruiting passive candidates. Daily tracking is part of this, since it allows you to quickly determine how well your changes are working. For our purposes, passive candidates are people who are not actively looking for work ó so you need to call them.

1. Number of cold calls made per day. Whether you’re using a list developed using ZoomInfo, competitive intelligence, or some Shally Steckerl Internet data-mining technique, you should be able to leave 30-50 calls per day. Try to limit these calls only to worthy people based on their names, companies, and titles. Worthy people are those who are either potential candidates for your open position or those who personally know someone who would be.

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It is getting more difficult to attract the best college graduates. For the first time in several years, the demand for a broad spectrum of college graduates has grown. Collegegrad.com reports a 7.8% increase in the demand for new graduates over 2005. This demand is spread across many majors ó not just engineering and the sciences, but also for graduates in business, government, accounting, and communications.

It is especially hard to get offers accepted if the first time you have seen or spoken to a prospective graduate is in the few months prior to his or her graduation. Organizations that have both a strong employment brand as well as a relationship with a variety of students on campuses tend over time to have greater success in getting students to say yes to their offers. Internship programs have been around for decades and provide students with valuable work experience and skills. These programs also provide employers with the opportunity to assess the culture fit, work habits, and skills of these students so that offers can be made to the best ones. Many corporate internship programs are poorly thought-out and do not capture the hearts or minds of the intern. Many hiring managers treat these programs as a cheap way to get extra help or as a service to students who need some extra spending money, rather than as strategic tools to build a continuous pipeline of talent. Programs that are not built on long-range strategic goals tend to be much less effective and become regarded as relatively expensive programs that do not deliver much to the organization.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that the average employer converts only around 43% of interns to full-time employment after graduation. Looked at in another way, almost 60% of interns do not go to work for the sponsor of their internship. In order to develop a useful and effective internship program that selects the most capable students and converts them to regular employment, organizations need to invest both time and money in thoughtfully constructing a program. Here are several steps that will lead to a program that will be regarded as a success and will produce most of the college graduates you need.

Develop a Strategic Foundation for the Internship Program

As you consider putting an internship program in place, you need to answer a basic but very important question: What do you expect to get from the program?? Do you want to develop a pipeline of potential hires? Do you want to provide a public service to students who need some sort of income?? Do you want to have access to professors and their research?? As recruiters, you should be primarily focused on developing a pipeline of the talent that is the most difficult for your organization to find and hire.

For example, if finding enough computer engineers is a problem, then a very strategic way to solve that issue over time might be to encourage engineering students to major in computer engineering by offering them internships. This is also the way to build a business case for getting the funding you will need to advertise and support the program. There may be secondary goals for these programs, but to make financial sense converting many of these interns to full-time employees needs to be the ultimate goal. At the same time, any human resource policies that inhibit conversions or that make it difficult to attract interns should be re-examined and rewritten. A second, and almost as important a question, is when to start recruiting students for internships. Should they only be approached after they have declared a major, or should you start the program very early and provide the students with some career guidance on majors your organization would find useful? Often, today’s students are unclear about what organizations are looking for and which majors are appropriate. Guidance early in their school career, along with carefully-designed internships, can be effective in creating talent pools that can be tapped three or four years later.

Structure the Program With Conversion in Mind

Surprisingly, many employers do not make conversion of interns a core piece of their intern strategy. They focus on providing the students with real-life experience or with doing a service to their key colleges and universities in the hope that their benevolence pays off in future hiring. No one tracks conversions very carefully, and often, no effort is made to hire the interns after graduation. However, programs without specific hiring goals don’t achieve much. While they may get some local acknowledgement for proving work for college students, they lose a potentially great source of talent every year. I know of a company where they have had interns for more than five years and have not tried to convert any. In fact, the few that have expressed interest have been discouraged from applying, because this organization focuses on hiring experienced people. On the other hand, many organizations make the internship experience the primary entry door to new talent and provide the quality of program that encourages the best to apply.

Provide Students With Real Work to Make the Internship Exciting and Meaningful

Students who have suffered through boring internships are not likely to want to work for your company. While this is obvious, a large percentage of intern programs do not actively engage the students in meaningful work. The Gen-Y students you are recruiting today want to be part of project teams and want to use their skills to help the team accomplish its objectives. They do not want to work alone or on routine activities that, while necessary and perhaps even essential to the organization, are not developing the skills the students feel will help them in their careers. I know of a finance student who was assigned to help a department controller. This involved collecting data, building a spreadsheet or two, and sitting through some very boring financial reviews. While this is actually what a controller does, and is the kind of position the student might end up filling as a new employee, it was not challenging. It did not allow him to use the concepts he had learned in the classroom and his manager was not a good coach. The experience was not positive and the student went elsewhere. A little twist on an assignment ó perhaps a project to look for ways to cut costs ó combined with a better manager would have made this intern an easy conversion.

Assess the Interns Realistically and Coach Them Well

Students are trained to expect fairly frequent feedback in the form of tests and professor comments. Going into the work environment can be a strange experience because they suddenly get much less information on how they are doing. Most interns want feedback, especially feedback that is constructive and is combined with coaching or development. Serious interns want to be part of projects that are important to the organization and that will stretch and motivate them. They need to get feedback on how their contribution helped the project or slowed it down. They need to know where their skills need improvement and where they are strong. Giving this kind of feedback is hard for almost all managers, but particularly hard to give to young people who are not employees. Managers of interns need to be carefully chosen and need to be skilled at mentoring and teaching. Assuming that interns are just a pair-of-hands to help out an overworked staff is a common mistake and a fatal one when it comes to converting the students to full-time employment. Remember, the manager they have as an intern is the model they will carry forth for all managers.

Make the Conversion Process Clear and Smooth

There may not even be a smooth process in place for making conversions from intern to employee. One firm I was talking to requires that each intern fill out an application, go through the normal interview process, and then be hired into an open slot that could also be filled with an experienced hire. Obviously, many interns are put off by the need to apply and interview once again, and many hiring managers would rather use that position for an expert than for a rookie. Good programs waive the application and interview process. After all, these people have filled out some sort of application for the internship and have been assessed for weeks or months as interns. These organizations have also set up some structure or process to allow interns and college hires to fill positions reserved exclusively for them. A semiconductor firm that I am well acquainted with reserves 5-15 positions each year, depending on the economy, for college hires and conversions. The hiring manager has to pay the salary, but the head count is carried as corporate for one year.

Separate the Poor Performers and Maintain Contact With the Good Ones

If your goal is to build a useful pool of talent, performance assessment is critical to ensuring you have quality candidates. Each intern should get a progress report at the end of each year. Interns who are not performing well need to told that and they should not come back for another year. I have talked to many interns who were uncertain about how they were perceived. On the other hand, if the performance and fit have been good, your relationship should not only continue, but grow. Email and other electronic tools can make staying in touch easy. A regular email, newsletter, blog, and even an occasional phone call to all high-performing past interns can make a huge difference in how they feel about your organization. Let them know if you want them back again, what the process of conversion looks like, and what they can expect. Clear next steps, definite timelines, and objective feedback will lead to many more conversions. I believe that if you convert fewer than 80% of your interns, you should make sure an internship program is the best approach for your organization.

Remember the glory days of the late 1990s? Friends became dot-com paper millionaires (and Friends, the TV show, was a hit). Enron and the stock market were really hot, and banner ads were all the rage. It was also a time when everyone and their mother became a recruiter. We even developed fancy names for the role at that time: talent scout, talent leader, resourcer, and so on. Some people might refer to this as the first “Golden Age” of recruiters. Unfortunately, those days disappeared quickly in the dot-com and technology correction in 2000, and in the subsequent economic downturn. Many people newly entering or being recruited into our newly sexy profession were laid off by companies and search firms. Having found jobs elsewhere, many may never enter the profession again. In the interim, organizations made do. They used HR generalists and others for recruiting issues and were very hesitant to restore the recruiting teams and infrastructure of the glory days. Or, they just left hiring managers to do whatever they needed to do to be successful. However, over the last year or so, I’ve seen a real shift.

Companies now face roles that are difficult to fill, low unemployment, a very competitive recruiting environment, and a growing U.S. economy. They are revisiting the whole idea of hiring recruiters inside the organization. Search firms and recruitment outsourcing firms are also attempting to ramp-up. As a result, I have seen the demand for great recruiting professionals increase significantly. Not only are there numerous postings, ads, and searches underway for recruiting professionals, but during this past conference season at ERE, EMA, HCI, and other functions, recruiters were in solid demand. Companies were actually buying sponsorships, booths, ads, and so on to attract recruiters. I get at least three or four calls a week from search firms asking for referrals.

The problem is that there are just so many good recruiting pros to go around; I cannot keep referring the same people. Some say we’re entering a second “Golden Age” of recruiters. The difference is that organizations are focused on doing it right this time, rather than slapping it together and hiring anyone. They’ll tap into the usual, known sources: other corporate recruiting departments, third-party recruiting vendors, recruiting outsourcers, etc. But we’ll need alternative areas from which we can get great people with the skills necessary to become great recruiters. For starters, we need to know what those skills are. I’m a big believer that if you focus on a core set of skills necessary to do a job, any number of people with varying backgrounds can fill the role (of course, you’ll have to determine if they can fit into your culture). In this instance, whereas the recruiters in the 90s (and even still today) needed great relationship, communication, sourcing, searching, and technology skills, recruiters today need to add skills in project management, enhanced teamwork, and political savviness, among others. Below is my quick-and-dirty list of the some of the core skills necessary in hiring recruiters:

• Communications skills (written and verbal)

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The national unemployment rate, now at 4.7%, continues to decline. Recruiting costs are rising, and it’s taking longer to find and hire people again. Hiring managers are starting to get frustrated. Believe it or not, employers still have the upper hand ó but not for long. In 2011, the first big wave of Baby Boomers begin retiring. This has the potential to leave a talent void that stretches all the way up to the executive suite. But don’t hit the panic button just yet. In a few years, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t take advantage of the opportunities you had today to capitalize on what was an employer’s market in comparison. Recruiting is often the hardest hit by an economic recovery. Stripped to the bone during a recession, fewer recruiters are left to do more work when a rebound happens.

Because of the increased competition for recruiting talent (economists would be wise to watch the ERE job board (for signs of economic life), companies start hiring rookie recruiters to fill in where experienced recruiters left off. Team productivity often suffers, but in the long term, new blood ends up being a great thing as it becomes less difficult to implement the new approaches necessary to deal with new realities. The ripple effect is just starting to hit other professions and the general media. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently posted a story about starting salaries for lawyers from top schools creeping above $135,000, with multiple-offer scenarios becoming common again. Another sign of a heated talent market in an early stage is the level of competition for MBAs. When economies are having trouble, there are MBAs with three to five years of experience in the available labor pool. During a swing like we’re in now, it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find an affordable MBA who isn’t “fresh off the boat.”

According to a recent survey from the MBA Career Services Council, the national job market for MBAs is growing quickly, with higher starting salaries, more jobs, and more employers competing for the same talent. Consulting, financial services, consumer products, and healthcare industries lead a rise in hiring across almost all industries. Signs of Trouble There are many signs that companies have not seen the writing on the wall and aren’t taking the steps necessary to prepare for an overheated talent market. In a candidate’s market, your organization may have a very rough ride if you:

• Have not optimized the candidate experience. Companies still expect candidates to fill out broken and painful online application forms that take up to 30 minutes to complete (if they’re successful filling it out at all). Recruiters in these organizations know that they lost more than 40% of their online applications once they implemented their new applicant tracking systems, but they didn’t cry about it when they had hundreds of people coming to them. If it ever really hits the fan again and you see multiple counteroffers flying around, you’ll wish that you had taken the time to think of your candidate experience like a customer experience.

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What Is A Recruiting Culture?

As we learned in Part 1, a recruiting culture is a recruiting strategy that shifts the bulk of the responsibility for recruiting to managers and employees. While the recruiting department provides leadership, every individual and department in the organization is assigned a prominent role in recruiting. No individual is exempt.

The Goals of a Recruiting Culture

Recruiting cultures can only be effective if they are focused, and that means that they must have clearly defined goals that everyone understands. The goals of a recruiting culture should include:

• Demonstrating to all employees that it’s in their own best interest to work alongside the very best talent.

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