Wise decisions, considering that only 23 percent of the companies surveyed intend to add full time workers in the next three months.

These are some of the findings reported in CareerBuilder.com and USA TODAY’s “Q4 2008 Job Forecast” released today. The report was based on a survey of more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals and over 6,100 workers in private sector companies nationwide.

The number of companies saying they would be hiring in the last quarter of this year is 8 percent lower than the 25 percent who reported adding staff between July 1 and today. The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive between August 21 and September 9, also found that 14 percent of companies had layoffs during the third quarter. That was 40 percent more than the number predicted in the “Q3 2008 Job Forecast,” a sign, perhaps of the worsening economy.

In fact, in a footnote to the forecast released today, CareerBuilder warns “The ‘Q4 2008 Job Forecast’ survey was conducted before the full financial crisis became known and so may not fully reflect the effects of that crisis.” That helps explain why the survey again found that only ten percent of the companies expected layoffs in the fourth quarter; 63 percent expect no change in their permanent, full time headcount.

“Employers are maintaining a conservative approach to recruitment as they maneuver through a weaker economy that has produced its share of casualties,” said Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder.com. “Certain sectors such as IT and Healthcare are still showing solid job growth while others struggle with reorganization, cost containment and other measures to stay afloat.”

The widespread corporate caution toward hiring presents opportunities for recruiters who, in most industries, will have less competition. The 3rd quarter forecast found that while most companies were not taking advantage of the talent inventory to make changes in their workforce, 26.4 percent were using the opportunity to replace low performers with new talent. Of course, sourcing candidates will be more challenging given that almost 80 percent of workers do not expect to make a job change in the next year. That may be why 24 percent of the HR professionals and hiring managers reported open positions they have been unable to fill.

Your Views on Video Resumes
It’s a question we see often on ERE discussion boards … are video resumes “just a trend?” Dianne Pierrot is looking for feedback that might be helpful for candidates rather than employers. After reading several posts on this topic, I think any vendor selling video resumes might be in trouble. Jeff Altman sums up the views of others when he writes “DON’T DO IT.” Jeff, Pam Claughton, and David Rees warn that video resumes can be dangerous for both candidates and employers. Not only are they time-consuming, but they expose candidates to unnecessary biases and leave employers at risk for violating EEO compliance. At HP, David Rees and other recruiters conducted all interviews over the phone to “reduce the influence of looks, dress, and the possibility that a disability might influence the decision.” On a more positive note, Paul Davenport feels the video can help employers identify skill sets for certain job roles such as field sales and marketing.

Monday’s Question of the Day
After reading a list of 10 ways to keep recruiting costs down, I wanted to hear what ERE members are doing in today’s economy to cut costs. Michael Finnell argues that now more than ever, recruiting goals need to align with overall business goals. Recruiters need to act more as consultants and work with hiring managers rather than outsource entire recruiting functions. Sound like a need for workforce planning during these tough times? Michael also recommends negotiating with your job boards for a better rate, and requesting referral fees from recruiting firms to use in your recruitment budget. Sounds like Rosita Cruz would agree with Michael, and offers some specific tips to cut costs including cutting benefits, turning to virtual workplaces, and automating phone messages. Josh Letourneau offers some comic relief on a sensitive topic and Michael Finnell closes his post with some encouragement: “Whatever you do, don’t give up!”

Should Corporate Recruiters Share Silver Medalists with Other Companies?
Sean Rehder thinks so. It can build strong relationships, and ties into an earlier ERE discussion about today’s recruiting field being more open than in the past. After a few heated posts and a little miscommunication, I think we found consensus … if a resume does not come from a TPR, “sure” — forward away. However, if a resume comes from a TPR, it is bad policy for a corporate recruiter to forward without the consent of the recruiter, and the recruiter who sent the resume is entitled to a fee. Rebecca DeBoer had a recent situation where her resume was passed over to another department and she was not informed. She asks, “why do people think our business is not for profit and that our bills are less at the end of the month than other businesss?”

Jobless Rate in CA: 7.7%
Maureen Sharib posts the “highest statewide unemployment rate since March 1996.” Danielle Canon brings the discussion to another level when asking how many of these individuals actually have degrees. Tessa Adler steps up to the plate by reaching out to the State Development Department to find out. They thought the question was very relevant and will provide us an update through Tessa soon. Although Jeff Altman argues that many of these jobs affect teachers, government workers, and manufacturing, Tessa learned that the mortgage and financial industries have been hit the hardest … not a huge surprise. In addition, CNAs and home workers have been heavily affected in California as nursing homes were losing money. One question Maureen brought up that I have also heard several times … is this recession different from past recessions because it is now impacting government hiring? What do you think?

Job Boards
Ah…the inevitable question of the week…what job boards are best? Dan Vaughn is joining a large insurance firm and wants to know what job boards will bring results in his industry. Are Monster and CareerBuilder worth it? Tim Davis and Scott Wilde recommend www.greatinsurancejobs.com. Scott also uses CareerBuilder. Denise Street-Roth is less enthusiastic about CareerBuilder and Monster. She has had success with closer.net but advises Dan to look beyond job boards. She contacts insurance-training schools, networks with insurance professionals and even real estate lawyers, professionals, and mortgage brokers. Good luck, Dan! Keep us posted….

The deal leaves intact Authoria’s management team including founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow, who said that the acquisition “brings us an investor well matched to the size of the market opportunity before us.” Bedford will inject an additional $8 million in working capital to accelerate Authoria’s expansion.

The price is half the $128 million that Taleo (profile; site)  paid for Vurv (profile; site) just six months ago. Both companies had similar staffing levels, but Vurv’s 2007 revenues were around $40 million, while Hoover’s, the business reporting service, estimated Authoria saw about $17 million that year.

Vurv was probably also in better financial shape. Since being founded in 1997 Authoria raised some $100 million in venture capital, including $58 million raised by Hire.com, a company Authoria acquired in 2005. It evidently also had some debt, since Loofbourrow pointedly notes in the announcement that “Bedford Funding will provide us with a debt-free capital structure.”

Jason Corsello, writing in his blog, The Human Capitalist, called the deal a recapitalization observing that existing investors shareholders, which include senior management, as well as the VC firms, would probably only receive “only a fraction of the investment and value.”

Even so, he is encouraged about the company’s prospects for the long term saying it “creates a much cleaner structure for the company to really attack the market as the first vendor that can truly bring together talent acquisition/recruiting with the rest of the talent management suite.”

What is a Difference Maker?

A difference maker is someone who is willing and able to fill all aspects of the role with confidence, one who consistently delivers on objectives, and who leads her team to peak performance. In many cases a difference maker shakes things up, brings forth change, demands results and at times, and is not the most popular person on the team. They hit their targets, and inspire their teams to do the same.

Difference makers are motivated. Difference makers tell the truth, they don’t cover up mistakes, and they are completely accountable for what works and what doesn’t. They take responsibility. Proactive, solution-oriented leaders, difference makers take action. Their values align with those of the organization, and these values drive day-to-day behaviors that pursue excellence.

How to Find — and Keep — a Difference Maker

In the war for talent, the challenges most organizations face are not limited simply to the unavailability of qualified people. In many cases, the hiring process is not set up to properly identify those who can truly make a difference. Focusing only on the skills and experience needed, hiring authorities often pay too little attention to values, motivations, habits, work styles, behaviors, and cognitive abilities. These are often left for the interview to uncover and interpret, and this is where the process breaks down.

What’s needed is a detailed approach to benchmarking the role and identifying the characteristics of likely top performers. Before you open that next job requisition, many questions must be answered, including:

1. What corporate objectives cannot be met without this difference maker?
2. What impact is this role expected to make on the organization in the next 3, 6, 9, and 12 months?
3. What values, motivations, skills, work styles, and learning abilities will position the incumbent for success?

Once these and many other questions are answered, employ a behavioral interviewing and selection process that helps you identify, engage, and develop difference makers with unprecedented success.

I call this new approach über college recruiting (über is German for superior) because it is so aggressive. This advanced approach began emerging in the late 1990s and was most often associated with high technology firms like Trilogy and Cisco.

The practices were so successful, so exciting, and so out-of-the box that urban legends still abound about what these true innovators were doing over a decade ago. Recently, über recruiting has been re-energized by the antics and the advanced methods of the Google recruiting machine.

Google has adopted the über approach in part because of its use of metrics. Most firms stick with mainstream college recruiting efforts because breaking free of the status quo isn’t easy, as few in the HR world seem willing to take on the challenge and make the business case for something different.

Google, being an organization full of advanced mathematicians, scientists, and engineers took the time to calculate that a top technologist from a graduating class is worth 300 times more than an average grad. When they talk about top technologists, they are not talking about the best who approach their college recruiting booth during a career fair, but rather that one truly unique innovator who may someday change the world. Having calculated the value of such exceptional talent, Google is willing to shift its approach and spend whatever resources are needed to become the #1 college brand. They have championed the über approach because the old traditional approach just can’t guarantee extraordinary hires.

Most Firms Utilize the Traditional Approach

I estimate that 95% of corporate college recruiting programs follow the traditional model because everyone is familiar with it and they are simply comfortable using it. I sometimes call the traditional model the “career center focus” model because it relies so heavily on services offered by the career center, and very little on actual scouting for talent.

The primary steps in the traditional model are simple and straightforward:

1. Pick your top schools in the U.S. and the majors to target.
2. Arrange with the career center dates for information sessions and interviews.
3. Place ads announcing the info session.
4. Develop brochures and recruiting collateral.
5. Offer food that is good enough to attract, and give a compelling talk.
6. Hold on-campus interviews.
7. Make your offers.

It’s straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and it produces enough hires to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, most executives, hiring managers, and recruiters are satisfied with it in part because they are unaware that there are other more advanced options that yield a clear competitive advantage. The advanced college recruiting model contains more sophisticated elements designed to ensure extraordinary results.

A Checklist of the Major Elements of Über College Recruiting

The advanced or über approach contains many elements that are either under-emphasized or completely absent from the traditional approach. The primary distinction between the traditional and über models is the reduced emphasis on campus information sessions and increased focus on branding, technology, relationship building, aggressive marketing, and fact-based decision-making.

If you want to be part of the “elite” 5% that use the advanced approach, here are 9 key elements that make the advanced college recruiting model so powerful:

1. Data-driven decisions. Under the advanced recruiting model, decisions are made based on data and facts rather than emotion or past practice. Which schools to target and what majors you focus on changes each year based on previous year performance measures. Recruiting tools and approaches like sourcing and advertising are selected based on the superior numbers they produce. Metrics also tell you in which jobs and with what individual managers new hires should be placed in order to produce the highest overall ROI.
2. A written strategy and plan. It’s difficult to have a strategic impact using a haphazard approach. Unlike the traditional model, the advanced approach requires that you have a written strategic plan to focus and direct your recruiting effort. Rather than using the campus career center focused approach, the über approach uses one or more of five possible approaches including:
   • Relationship recruiting. This strategy focuses on building relationships with “insiders” including faculty, students, alumni and staff. The strategy works because when you build long-term relationships with individuals that the students know and trust, these individuals will help you in identifying and selling top students on your firm.
   • Remote recruiting. This strategy is designed to allow a firm to “cherry pick” the very best students from a number of universities without having to actually physically visit each one. The remote recruiting approach emphasizes the use of technology, the Internet and social networks to identify and assess college talent remotely.
   • Continuous graduate recruiting. This strategy is a long-term approach that focuses on “continuous recruiting” long after the top students have graduated. One element of this strategy is the “delayed recruiting approach” where you identify the best while they’re in college but you “wait” until your targeted college grads “stabilize” and are trained by another organization for two years prior to recruiting them. Other firms utilize this continuous recruiting approach because they are unattractive to college grads and can’t successfully compete on campus. However as grads mature, they might learn to consider the firm for their 2nd or 3rd job. Working closely with alumni associations is another key element in this approach.
   • Off-cycle recruiting. This strategy emphasizes the “over-hiring” of top college grads during slack periods when there is little competition. This is an excellent approach for firms that can’t successfully compete for the high quality grads during most years but can “clean up” when there is little or no competition in down years.
   • Global impact strategy. This approach emphasizes developing the capability to recruit the very best 1-3 students from every top school located around the world. The strategy uses a combination of remote Internet recruiting methods and traditional approaches using corporate staff located in key countries to identify and assess the best in every country that produces top students. Each of the available approaches must “flex” to meet the changing supply and demand of college hires. As competition for grads increases, it is essential that your strategy “scale up” to meet the increased aggressiveness and competition. When no one is recruiting, the strategy should scale back to save resources.
3. Clear and measurable goals. Goals help everyone understand what they are working toward. Most traditional college efforts have simplistic goals like hire five interns and six EE majors. However, the goals of an advanced college recruiting program might include dominating the college market and getting a disproportionate number of exceptional students; building and maintaining a measurable competitive advantage in recruiting; building an employment brand that makes every targeted college student aware of your firm; the global capability to attract the best from every country around the world; and to win every “head to head” fight with our talent competitors over top targets.
4. Employment brand. In advanced recruiting, your external image as a “great place to work” is the cornerstone of the approach. Executing a formal plan to become an “employer of choice,” so that every college kid has heard of you and wants to know more about you, is the most critical element of advanced college recruiting. Google is the model to follow when it comes to employment branding. Key elements of college branding include winning “best place to work” awards, placing on the “best place to start a career” list, being written up for your best practices in media that your targeted students read, having executives speak on campus, and scoring high on the Universum employer brand ranking when compared to others in your industry.
5. Identifying top students to target. Advanced recruiting dramatically expands the number of available approaches for identifying top students by adding a comprehensive Internet component. Traditionally, students were identified through scholarships, and assessment of those who attended your information sessions. Advanced identification tools include the use of student and grad assistant referrals, online and on-campus contests, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online forums. Other advanced sourcing approaches include using campus professional clubs and honor society meetings to identify talent and having interns act as on-campus recruiting ambassadors.
6. Convincing top students to apply. Advanced recruiting puts a lot of emphasis on having multiple “selling” approaches. These selling approaches are designed to get students to take the specific action of formally applying for a position on your website or signing up for campus interviews. Some of the advanced approaches that firms can use to get their message out to college students include blogs written by recruiters and employees, podcasts that highlight best points, and providing information to parents so they also encourage their child to apply. Other advanced ideas: compelling videos on your website or YouTube, texting recruiting messages, video games, encouragement from other students making referrals, and a separate corporate careers page that is designed specifically to WOW college students.
7. Assessing their capabilities. The most traditional aspect of the “traditional approach” to recruiting are the face-to-face interviews that are scheduled through the Career Center. The advanced approach varies in that it also develops a process that allows you to interview students off campus. Additional features might include computerized online assessment, online Internet interviews, and using contests to assess. The most effective assessment process, on-the-job assessment, can occur during internships and by offering students short-term projects that they can complete remotely during college breaks.
8. Making compelling offers. You can’t classify your approach to college recruiting as advanced unless you use some aggressive approaches. The foundation of the advanced approach is identifying each target’s “job acceptance criteria” and then tailoring the job offer so that best meets each of the criteria. Another approach on an advanced level are offers and direct calls from senior executives and recent hires at your firm to encourage them to accept.
9. Metrics for improvement. Most traditional and knowledge recruiting systems are “dumb” because they don’t learn from bad hires and immediate turnover. Key college recruiting metrics should include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, the overall quality of the candidates, the percentage of diversity hires, new hire performance on the job, and 1-, 2- and 5-year retention rates.

Final Thoughts

There is a growing chasm between the corporate Directors of College Recruiting who live in an “unchanging world” and those who realize there are now many more exciting approaches and strategies available to them.

Shifting your approach is even more necessary because the way that college students communicate with each other and outsiders is changing rapidly. The growth of the Internet and new technologies now allow college recruiting to do things that just weren’t possible before. I hope this “checklist” has helped you assess your current program and understand what you need to do to transition into über college recruiting.

On September 16, 2008, Carly Fiorina (the former CEO of HP and McCain supporter) made the statement that none of the president or VP candidates had the experience to be the CEO of a major corporation. The McCain team wasn’t too pleased with her remarks, and she’s been taken off the tour.

However, her dilemma raises an important question: Are the skills and abilities to run an international, multi-unit corporation comparable to those needed to run the U.S. government?

The answer to this becomes quite clear once you prepare a performance profile for each job.

For background, a performance profile is not a job description listing skills, abilities, and experience requirements. Instead, it describes the performance expectations for the job, describing what the person must do to be successful. It’s filled with action verbs like build, create, develop, initiate, solve, design, etc., not passive verbs and statements like “have” and “be responsible for.”

For example, a performance profile for a sales rep selling plumbing products in Peoria might state “achieve and sustain the monthly quota 90 days after successfully completing the sales training program.” The job description for this same job would state something like, “must have 3-5 years b-to-b plumbing parts industry experience.”

As I have ranted on these pages many times before, the continued use of traditional job descriptions is the primary reason companies can’t find enough top people to fill critical hiring needs. Everyone agrees that skills and experience don’t predict future performance. This is the core problem with job descriptions.

Past behavior doesn’t predict future performance, either, if the person is doing different work. This is the problem with behavioral interviewing. The use of behavioral interviewing in combination with traditional job descriptions only makes sense when the person is doing essentially the same work in the same culture with a similar supervisor.

A performance profile overcomes all of these impediments by emphasizing the performance expectations of the job and the environment, not the skills required to do it. The assessment involves comparing the candidate’s actual accomplishments to these requirements.

There are typically 6-8 key performance objectives for any job, whether it’s entry-level or executive management. Once completed, a performance profile can be turned into a compelling ad describing the projects, challenges, and opportunities.

As part of this, the requirements to apply are changed from having identical skills and experience to having achieved some type of comparable performance. This instantly opens up the candidate pool to more diverse candidates, more high-potential candidates, and more top performers who have achieved similar results in related industries and fields.

It takes about an hour discussion with a hiring manager to ferret out the key performance objectives for most jobs. To get a sense of this process, ask your hiring manager client the following questions when taking your next search assignment for a manager or executive position:

1. Why would a top person want this job? What makes it a good short- and long-term career move?
2. What are some of the big challenges the person taking this job is likely to face?
3. What are some of the specific projects the person will be working on?
4. What will success look like after six months? What about 12 months?
5. What are the big technical issues the person needs to address?
6. Describe the team and some of the challenges the person might face in dealing with the team or rebuilding it.
7. What are some of the critical problems the person will face right away that need to be resolved?
8. Are there any process issues that need to be improved or redesigned?
9. Are there any long-term strategic issues that need to be addressed?
10. Describe the culture and environment of the organization. Does this need to be changed or modified in some way to put the organization on a long-term path to success?

The idea here is to develop a list of 6-8 performance objectives put in some type of priority order that describe on-the-job success. Candidates are then interviewed and assessed against this benchmark by asking them to describe a series of comparable accomplishments. (Note: if you use my two-question performance-based interview you’ll be able to accurately assess any candidate’s ability to accomplish these tasks.)

Now let’s get back to Carly’s dilemma regarding the presidential candidates’ ability to run a corporation. Let’s start by examining the following pretty high-level view of a performance profile for a CEO for a large multi-national firm.

1. Evaluate the current operating plans for all units and ensure they’re on track and that the reporting systems are in place to ensure real-time visibility into business performance.
2. Establish programs to determine if the executive teams at all units, including corporate and group headquarters, are fully able to handle the company’s current business opportunities and overall growth plans.
3. Ensure that the overall strategic path of each group/division is appropriate and established.
4. Identify critical weaknesses in every unit that could affect short- and long-term operating performance and implement immediate corrective actions.
5. Fully understand the company’s financial strengths and weaknesses and lead the establishment of programs and controls to meet government, legal, and investor needs.
6. Lead the negotiation of big buy/sell global mega-deals that affect company strategy and direction.
7. Lead the integration of disparate business units to achieve economies of scale.
8. Deal with the conflict between the need to balance short-term financial performance with long-term growth.

There are probably a lot more, but you get an idea of the complexities needed to be the CEO of a large publicly traded company that’s operating on an international scale. (As a separate task, you might want to rank your current CEO on these measures.)

From my perspective, it’s pretty clear that the current crop of Presidential candidates are not qualified to be CEOs; the jobs are just too different. In my opinion, Carly was 100% right on this point, and should not have been chastised for it. The media clearly doesn’t understand these differences in roles, either, since they’re the ones who misunderstood both the comments and the underlying issues.

A U.S. President isn’t directly involved in understanding markets, products, distribution, manufacturing, accounting, IT, performance reporting, and running a business for profit. The president might be tangentially involved in the budgeting, financing, trade, organizational management, tax, compliance, and some of the diplomatic issues involved in operating on a world stage, but it’s a stretch to think they’re the same.

One could argue that there are some other overlaps, but it seems to me the differences between a corporate CEO and the U.S. President are far greater than the similarities. Of course, a person qualified to be a corporate CEO wouldn’t necessarily be qualified to be the President, either. While the intellectual, organizational and the complexities of the problems faced are comparable, how decisions are made and executed are fundamentally different. (Here’s a companion article describing a performance profile for the U.S. President. You can judge for yourself which candidate is most qualified, and even if your current CEO could handle the job.)

Despite all of this, the idea of putting a performance profile together before interviewing candidates is one sure way to make better hiring decisions. This is true whether you’re hiring a U.S. President, corporate CEO, or entry-level accountant.

Preparing a performance profile, however, requires the active involvement of the hiring manager, often the biggest stumbling block of them all.

For some illogical reason, most fight the idea of clarifying job expectations before hiring someone using the “I don’t have the time” excuse. Yet they’ll spend hours after a hire is made over-managing their newest staff member hoping for average performance. Once you overcome this hurdle, don’t be surprised that you’re finding and hiring more top performers than you thought possible.

With the increasing awareness of CEOs and HR executives that quality of hire is part of the evaluation equation for recruiting programs, how those hires are performing is a metric no recruiter can afford to ignore.

“When recruiters can be measured on quality, some recruiters will simply be better than others at bringing in high impact, more productive, and longer tenured employees,” said Dave Lefkow, CEO of consultant talentspark and a veteran recruiter, in an article more than three years ago.

Comprehensive talent management systems do more, of course, than assess and track employee performance. Coupled with succession planning modules, they can make identifying promising internal talent a snap and in doing so encourage internal recruitment. The more sophisticated of these systems can also flag employees who are at risk of leaving, spot talent shortages and replacement gaps, suggest and track training, and lots more.

If your company doesn’t have a talent management system now, it could very soon. The market for these is growing strongly as if in inverse proportion to the U.S. economy. Authoria (profile; site) had a 93 percent growth in bookings for the first half of this year over last. Pleateau, whose recent release of its Plateau Talent Management 5.8 Service Pack 5 prompted this article, reported 2007 revenues that were 58 percent higher than the previous year. The 450 attendees at its user conference last week was the largest turnout in the company’s history.

During a demo of the new release Frank Leff, Plateau’s Pre-Sales Product Consultant, observed that companies can easily assign fields to individual employee profiles, identifying such things as source of hire, recruiter who had the req, and whatever else might be useful. He, and Dennis Gullotti, Director of Product Marketing, showed how easily a recruiter could find in-house talent before having to go outside the company.

But as we watched the demo unfold, we saw how easy it would be to identify the recruiters whose hires were making the biggest impact. Plateau’s competency comparison, intended to identify potential successors and assist with skills gap analysis, could also be used as a quality-of-hire metric.

Is that happening? Absolutely, Gullotti told us. People are “coming out of the talent management silo,” he said. As systems like Plateau’s are increasingly linked to other enterprise software, “We,” he said, meaning HR as a whole, “are connecting the recruiting silo to the performance silo to the other systems.”

That’s closing the feedback loop that will inevitably make quality of hire as important and common a metric to be weighed as time and cost to hire are now.

Unfortunately, here is a look into what I saw: typos and misspellings on resumes; zero mention of accountability; inconsistent information; absent information from previous jobs; half-completed resumes; and six out of seven resumes were from recruiter wannabes. The sad part is that some of the wannabes took more time to position themselves than some of the veterans.

If you are a serious player, and you want to separate your candidacy from the sea of competition, I suggest you take your job search seriously, even if it is for a contract recruiter role. Take your time. Who you are being in your job search is a reflection of who you will be on the job.

Read the ad or job posting in full. If asked, answer the questions concisely and accurately; in recruiting, time is money. If there are instructions to follow, don’t demonstrate what a rogue you are. These days recruiting has lots of processes, and the bigger the company, the more risk involved. If you cannot follow the application instructions, you are sending a message that you can’t assimilate to their ways of doing things.

On the other hand, if you follow the instructions verbatim and don’t do anything above and beyond — like using some creativity in your communication or application — you may be sending a message that you give just what is asked and nothing more.

If you are applying for a job with me, look me up, find me on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and talk to me in my language. Don’t address me by Dear Sirs when my name is Margaret. When I get resumes like that, I can them immediately. I have never met a ‘Sir’ named Margaret. And it tells me you don’t care.

Typically a person hiring a recruiter is someone who has done the job before, and done it well, so they are expecting you to blow them away with knowledge, pizazz, terminology, and technology. If you are applying with me and I am a recruiter and we both share a common recruiter language and use the same type of vernacular, I expect you to use that to your advantage. Recruiting is a form of sales; show you know that by positioning yourself in the right manner.

Do your homework. Find out what company you are applying with, go to your browser, type in the company’s site, and look at who is requesting your services. Tailor your application and response to the buyer.

Job searching is a sales process. You are selling me on why I should invest in you.  That takes positioning, discernment, listening, questioning/probing, and salesmanship.

Remember, who you are being in your own search process is indicative of how you will conduct your searches for your new client, or if you are a rookie, who you are being in your job search is an indicator of how you will function in this role for others. This seems easy enough to understand; however, sometimes when we are too close to something, we catch a case of running on automatic, or a case of entitlement. We forget the game we are playing. We also forget that in this game, it is always about winning. Winning the game means working. Losing the game means keep looking, or keep on trucking to the next gig, until that gig runs out.

A real recruiter in 2008 lists accomplishments, numbers of jobs filled, time-to-fill measurements, submittals, or interviews to hire. Great recruiters know their retention rates and their percentage of good hires. In third-party recruiting, a successful recruiter knows their billings, per month, per quarter, if not per week. They also know their sendout-to-placement ratio and their job order-to-fill ratio. A solid recruiter knows their fill ratios and their (fall off ratio) misery index.

As with every profession, people are evaluated by their performance; our performance in this industry is about quality of hires within a given time frame. There are a few other important metrics, yet none as important as whether this person filled the jobs with good people and whether the hiring manager/new employee was served within an acceptable time frame.

Another element of taking your search seriously is the level of effort you have put forth in personal competency development. What have you done to increase your awareness of the marketplace? What have you done to improve and expand your capacity to identify passive talent? If your biggest claim to fame is running an ad on CareerBuilder, scanning the resume and forwarding it to your client, you are in a bit of a pickle. While that sometimes might work, it is nothing to be all that proud of, unless you are spending a significant amount of time screening, assessing, and evaluating that talent, with considerably more tools than your gut instinct.

If you know how to and enjoy sourcing passive talent through using social networks and Internet mining tools, like Broadlook or Jigsaw, brag about it. Include your percentages of hires using passive candidate streams and social networks.

If you are a farmer of people and you use your personal and business community to continually generate passive candidate flow and you have your very own ‘affinity network,’ then brag about that as well. If you have a list, a database of candidates, live and usable candidates, hell that is something to brag about. You come armed and prepared to generate maximum results in a minimal amount of time.

Taking your job search and your career seriously means continually upping your level of service offering and depth of service. If your thing is sourcing, do it fabulously. Invest in your own development, learn the systems, learn the technology, and apply it. After all, you buy clothing, fine wine, and jewelry, so go buy a new way to source candidates, sign up for that $500 training, and then learn everything you can and apply it the second you get out of training. Brag about the results you produced.

If your bag is full-life-cycle recruiting, take that seriously and learn about the new wave of candidate selection tools that are being adopted into many company’s hiring processes. At the Onrec conference, a group of English business folks told me that 85% of all companies in their countries use behavioral interviewing, as well as competency and personality assessments to validate their hiring choices and create new employee development programs. I do not think the U.S. is there yet, but due to the financial and business strategy consequences of poor hiring practices, I believe many more are on that path.

If you are not getting better, you ought to get out, because before you know it you will be replaced by someone who is a lot more willing to do the same job for a lot, and I mean a lot less. If you like the business, live like you will be engaging in a job search, and stay ahead of the curve. Keep track of your results, operate with integrity, don’t make placements you know won’t work out, create solid contacts and networks, and learn everything you can. Always position yourself the way you want to be perceived.

Workstream issued a press release today saying it had appealed the latest delisting order. That gives the company some breathing room while NASDAQ reviews the matter. Workstream could avoid delisting by filing its annual report, Form 10-K, as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workstream is required to file 90 days after the end of its fiscal year on May 31.

Why the report has not been filed was not explained in the press release and company CFO Jay Markell could not be reached.

Company officials reported in July that Workstream’s fourth quarter ended in the black, the first time that has happened in the company’s history as a publicly held corporation. It reported an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter ended May 3 compared to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year. Only sketchy numbers were released then, however, with the company explaining there was some sort of analysis underway of its accounting for goodwill.

Nevertheless, delisting is almost inevitable for the company. In November 2007 the company was notified that it would be delisted by the NASDAQ exchange because its stock price had fallen below the $1 a share minimum. The company got an automatic extension to Nov. 17th., but with the stock trading around 16 cents a share for the last few months, Workstream will be dropped by NASDAQ. That will make it difficult for its shareholders to sell their stock. When they do, generally through private transactions, fees will be higher than when the shares are traded through an exchange.

Earlier this year, Workstream was courted by payroll processor Empagio, which made a bid to acquire the company. Though unsolicted, Workstream and its board endorsed the merger, which would have created a new company with Workstream shareholders owning 25 percent. The deal eventually fell through.

Besides its software business, concentrated in on-demand compensation, performance and talent management in its TalentCenter 7.0 released last year, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs.com and Allen and Associates, a candidate focused career management firm.

The story revolves around rock band Journey, which has existed in various guises since 1973. I suspect anyone younger than an ‘old Gen X’ (like me) won’t have heard of them unless they regularly listen to classic rock radio.

Journey were huge during the early to mid 1980′s with American Top 10 hits such as “Who’s Crying Now,” “Open Arms,” and “Don’t Stop Believing,” (probably better known to pop culture aficionados as the song Tony Soprano selects from the jukebox in the closing scene of The Sopranos’ final episode).

Journey’s lead vocalist at the time, Steve Perry, scored a 1984 hit with the single, Oh Sherrie (confession: I have the vinyl single somewhere in storage).

Last year Journey founder and lead guitarist, Neal Schon, was attempting to recruit a new lead vocalist to replace the departed Perry. Frustrated with the options he had auditioned live, Schon turned to the Internet and spent hours surfing scores of YouTube videos, looking at bands and singers to see whether he might discover what he was looking for online.

Amongst the many wannabes and try-hards, he stumbled upon a video by a popular Filipino cover band, The Zoo.

Schon listened in amazement as 40-year-old lead singer, Arnel Pineda, belted out a stunning and note-perfect version of one of Journey’s biggest 1980′s hits, Faithfully (amongst many other cover versions The Zoo had posted on YouTube).

Schon messaged The Zoo via YouTube, and although Pineda initially thought it was a hoax, Schon eventually convinced Pineda he was for real, and asked Pineda whether he was interested in auditioning for the vacant lead singer’s role.

Six weeks later, a still shell-shocked Pineda was winging his way to San Francisco for a two-day audition with Journey.

In December 2007, Pineda was announced as Journey’s new lead singer, followed three months later by his debut, fronting the band live at a Chilean music festival to an ecstatic fan reaction, glowing reviews, and a television audience of 25 million.

Revitalized by its new lead singer, Journey quickly recorded a new album which it released in June and is currently in the middle of summer/autumn tour of the USA with fellow 1980′s classic rockers, Heart and Cheap Trick.

What a fantastic story for the new world of recruitment: a story covering globalization, Web 2.0, and non-traditional sourcing strategies.

What I most love about this tale is that a U.S. rock band, whose fan base is solidly in the Midwest, resisted the temptation to go for a singer who “looked right” and instead recruited the best-performed, most-competent singer, even though he was from Manila, speaks heavily accented English, and doesn’t look like Steve Perry (save the long dark hair) or the band’s fan demographic.

It would be easy to dismiss this story as unique to music and not relevant to recruiters.

I believe that would be a mistake.

Consider that in this Journey-finds-new-lead-singer story, the following occurred via the World Wide Web:

• The employer sourced a potential employee, living in another country, online.
• The employer contacted the potential employee.
• The competence of the potential employee was able to be assessed sufficiently well to arrange a live interview (audition) in another country without any need for a resume.

No recruiter was involved in the process.

When you consider the growth of career portals and the rise of online testing of skills, competencies, and motivations, recruitment in the 21st century has only just begun.

As we rapidly head towards the 21st century’s second decade, are you ready for what’s ahead?

Candidates will come in for two days during the week of October 27-31. They’ll learn the Boulder life, hear pitches from startups, and interview, probably speed-dating style. (You can bet they’ll be wined and dined at night, too.) Their flight, hotel, and transportation are all paid for.

Tim Miller, CEO of Rally Software, says “the general economy and the tech economy are booming. We’re all competing over what is is higher and higher demand for tech talent. It’s hard to get people locally.”

Rally hires about 1 or 2 percent of its applicants. If it hires a couple of engineers from the Halloween-week event in Boulder, Miller says the approximately $5,000 fee he’ll pay for the event will be a bargain.

Casey Schorr feels about the same way. He’s the CEO of Printfection.com, where you can design and sell T-shirts. Schorr says that signing up for the fair was “pretty much a no-brainer.” When one of Schorr’s friends — who is helping organize the event — told him about it, Schorr responded, “that’s an amazing idea, I’m in” before knowing the cost. The money, as it turns out, is about a quarter of what he pays a recruiter.

“Finding really high quality software developers is very, very, difficult,” he says, referring to folks such as database administrators, PHP programmers, and My SQL developers. “Anybody you want working for you is already working for another company. We need to ‘import’ our talent, I guess you could say. There are a lot of great programmers out there who live in [for example] Fargo, North Dakota, or somewhere in Mississippi.”

Schorr says of the recruiting fair: “It’s pretty ad-hoc. That’s pretty much how the community runs up here in Boulder.”

Recruiting Ostrich Disorder is an often-fatal disease for recruiting directors, recruiters, and even VPs of HR. Symptoms include IBS (“Irritable Budget Syndrome”) which restricts the flow of required budgetary resource and RDS (Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome”) which prevents recruiting leaders and recruiters from getting the respect needed to be considered an essential strategic business resource — and the corresponding budget to cure IBS.

All hope is not lost. Inexpensive, disruptive, highly advanced and way-cool cures exist — many of these being self-administered solutions — which restore health, budget, respect, and often result in a comfortable Seat at The Table — or in the world of third-party recruiters, highly increased commissions!

What is Recruiting Ostrich Disorder (“ROD”)?

ROD is an unhealthy state of recruiting that is:

• Almost always based on hunch instead of data.
• Performed in a purely reactionary manner.
• Considered an administrative cost-center.
• Removed from the strategic planning process — even though every C-Suite officer says weekly that employees are their greatest asset.
• Exemplified by exhausted, over-worked recruiters who are near or beyond burnout from handling unrelenting, massive workloads, year-in and year-out.
• Rarely appreciated by hiring managers who usually complain about recruiting services being too slow, too costly, and too low quality.

What Causes Irritable Budget Syndrome (“IBS”) and Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome (“RDS”)?

According to recent studies conducted by the McKinsey Group, it is easy to extrapolate that both IBS and RDS are caused by business leaders lack of confidence in HR’s ability to understand the needs and requirements of the business. Unfortunately, Recruiting Ostrich Disorder (“ROD”) makes it nearly impossible for recruiters to actually see the issues facing the business and to also see successful talent acquisition solutions. Besides an occasional sand crab, it’s nearly impossible to see anything else when the head is buried in sand.

How are IBS and RDS Diagnosed?

If you possess one or more of the following symptoms, seek immediate treatment:

1. If your company is growing and your recruiting budget is flat or shrinking.
2. Your request for new recruiting technology is placed behind the request for balloons at the next company picnic.
3. All of your top external headhunters contact you on the same day with possible opportunities elsewhere.
4. If the compensation analysts start becoming nice to you and sympathetic to your salary recommendations.
5. Your boss is in charge of company policy, dress code, and company picnics.
6. HR generalists will not look you in the eyes when you ask for counseling. Since ROD means your head is buried in the sand anyway, this symptom will be very hard to change.
7. You are not invited to the annual event for pledging contributions to the company-sponsored charity of choice.

What are the Illnesses and Pains Associated with IBS and RDS?

• Being told to recruit for a major project when you know in your gut the talent doesn’t exist in the targeted business markets — but you don’t have the data to prove it.
• Or the compensation is not enough to attract the required talent — but you don’t have the data to prove that either.
• Or the talent is outside of the targeted business markets — but you don’t have the data to discover where it exists or how to reach it.
• Or to attract top talent you need to run precise advertising and networking campaigns — but you don’t have the demographic data of the targeted talent pools in the targeted cities and regions.
• Or you have an Affirmative Action or OFCCP mandate — but don’t have the data to actually know which cities with have the largest talent pools of diversity candidates inside budgeted compensation ranges.

Living with Recruiting Ostrich Disorder in the Real World

Being a dedicated recruiting leader or recruiter, you know the pain when a business leader calls with an order for 120 experienced professionals for seven position groups in nine cities with the invariable delivery date of “yesterday.” You don’t have talent-supply data; the business leaders do not consult with you regarding talent supply availability, recruiter resource availability, recruiting costs, or timeframes. The order is in. There are no excuses. Your edict is to deliver.

Conversely, in the world of business, major capital expansion projects are postponed or canceled due to increased costs of materials. Expansion of retail outlets are delayed or canceled due to the rising cost of capital. Healthcare system growth is shelved due to increased costs of land. In the world of business, data analytic systems actually do exist that examine and proactively predict trends of the required resources for major business projects.

In the world of recruiting, until recently, those systems have not existed. Consequently, it often seemed best for recruiters, and especially recruiting leaders, to simply keep their heads buried in the sand, making blind decisions, rear first — ROD!

ROD Recovery, Wellness, and Success Begins with Visualization

1. Imagine a world where the recruiting leader, senior recruiters, and even third-party recruiters are invited to the annual strategic business planning meetings with the C-Suite.
2. Imagine a world where retail expansion plans are halted in 12 of the 50 planned cities, and expansion is now targeted for four new cities not on the original expansion list, based solely on the input of the recruiting leader, and yes, even third-party headhunters.
3. Imagine a world where the COO requires a three-year talent availability resource forecast from recruiting leadership to protect lost opportunity costs associated with planned multi-billion dollar capital expansion projects.
4. Imagine a world where the chief marketing officer requires input from the director of recruiting regarding the demographics of targeted customers for new products.
5. Imagine a comprehensive, proactive, strategic recruiting plan, approved annually by the board of directors, funded annually by the board of directors and aligned to the most valuable components of the strategic business plan.
6. Imagine a world where the legal department has no fears about liabilities from discrimination in recruiting and where diversity recruiting becomes a scientifically based strategic advantage.
7. Imagine a world where third-party recruiters can focus recruiting efforts on the exact markets with the highest available talent pools, with high probabilities of fitting the culture of your client — inside compensation guidelines.

Quit Imagining: Pull the Head Out of the Sand and Begin Living the Career of Your Dreams

This is not snake oil. It’s as real as supply chain management. The amount of valuable, relevant and available recruiting data is mind-boggling. Some of it costs a bit; much of it is free. Anybody can get it. Recruiting leaders, HR leaders, and recruiters can be armed with precise talent resource availability, cost and trend data to have C-level strategic planning conversations with data-backed forecasts on par with the forecasts brought to the table by the COO, CFO, VP of Sales, and CIO! Valuable data sources include:

1. Insurance data aggregators
2. Credit card and banking information
3. County records (the amount of valuable recruiting data that can be gathered from counties for a $5 processing fee is stunning)
4. Government databases
5. Business databases
6. Education databases

Seemingly unimaginable types of disruptively advantageous recruiting information can be found:

1. The precise size of available labor pools for talent required to fill the demands of the business for 425+ unique position groups in 475+ cities.
2. The costs of the required talent in each of the 475+ cities for each of the 425+ position groups.
3. The availability of diversity pools by ethnic race in each city for each position group.
4. The number of surgeons, dentists, lawyers, or executives in a specific city block, or zip code, or city; their average income and the number bedrooms in their houses!
5. Specific buying patterns by position, by income group and location.
6. The employment trends in each city.
7. The cities with the largest number of veterans looking for jobs.
8. Commute times and means of commute to work.
9. And much, much more…………………..

Action Plan for Ending ROD, IBS, and RDS

1. Decide whether this data will be best used as a strategic business weapon and C-level relationship building tool, or a recruiting effectiveness tool, or a means to protect your position from what can now be statistically proven to be totally unrealistic recruiting demands. If the supply does not actually exist within allowed compensation parameters, CFOs and COOs can now adjust business plans accordingly, raise compensation allotments if affordable, and increase recruiting budgets.
2. Begin exploration of the various data sources. Call the credit card, banking, and insurance data aggregators to assess costs and understand the various product offerings — there are many.
3. Explore which resources the IT department can and will provide to this effort. A limited initiative is usually too large for Microsoft Access or Excel. SQL Server, MySQL, or other enterprise class database management system will be required.
4. Understand mathematical variances and standard deviations. Apply these formulas to your system. This gains huge credibility of all reports and forecasts from the executive leadership team, especially the CFO and COO.
5. Pull your head out of the sand, dust the sand from your eyelids, let the blood now flow out of your head, sit in your chair, smile, and get ready for the recruiting career of your dreams whether that includes rising through the ranks of corporate enterprises, public organizations, third-party recruiting firms, or RPOs. No more IBS, RDS, or ROD!

The winner of the 2008 ERE Excellence Award for the Most Strategic Recruiting Technology, TruGreen, was built on similar technology. This type of work just takes pulling the head out of the sand, and seeing what data and technologies are available to reposition your services as bottom-line strategic to the business plan or mission statement.

Recruiting is not rocket science. To be a world-class recruiting organization or recruiter, only requires a handful of fairly simple, low-cost or no costs processes. Combine sound processes with a bit of technology and a handful of data-driven systems, like the cure for ROD, and the sky is the limit.

Being a great recruiter actually follows basic Cajun recipes requiring a couple pinches of digging, the hallmark of great recruiters, a dash of technology, a wee bit of sound data, and a surprisingly few number of processes. World-class is not that far away. And some is way-cool and on exhibit annually at the ERE Excellence Awards banquet.

• Show off creative sourcing techniques. According to a talent acquisition leader at a major New York bank, some of Lehman Brothers’ top talent was off the market before the ink was dry on the bankruptcy papers. Recruiters will need to demonstrate that they have a network of contacts in competing firms and can reel them in.
• Provide metrics showing your value. Corporate recruiters from the big Wall Street firms will need to demonstrate their value or be willing to take a haircut to land a new job, especially if they relocate. New York salaries outpace the rest of the nation, according to Crain’s, and the current shakeout is certain to drive those down.
• Explain how you can hold the line on costs. “Businesses are looking for cost-of-hire reductions,” says Kevin Huston, director of service delivery for TalentFusion. “Corporate recruiters will need to show that they have successfully driven down the cost of hire to be marketable.”
• Go where the jobs are. Healthcare, education, and government have been stable throughout the economic slowdown, and the mid-size suppliers of goods and services to companies within each industry have also been hiring. They require aggressive recruiters who can deliver candidates without the benefit of a powerful recruitment brand. Life sciences and renewable energy were hot industries for executive search firms during the first quarter of 2008. The security and logistics industries are also projected to continue hiring. The outsourcing industry is stable right now because some clients haven’t been hiring, but RPO bid activity is robust and the industry may pick up some new contracts from reorganizing financial services firms. Huston says that sometimes RPO firms absorb the company’s corporate recruiters when they land a new engagement, but those decisions are contract-specific. He cautions that salaries are often lower than at corporate recruiting jobs. Staffing firms are always eager to land a hot recruiter, but if you want to work in search, you’ll need contacts because you’ll be expected to bring in job orders and candidates. “Search firms expect you to work a full desk, so recruiters will need to come in the door with clients in their pockets,” says John Pelconin, a contract IT recruiter assigned to State Street Bank. “Information technology is pretty hot, but it’s saturated, so you’ll need some good skills to compete.”

And then there is financial services. Not every bank is in trouble. Some regional banks and commercial banks are still doing well, and accounting firms have been hiring. The government’s mortgage bailout operation may also offer some opportunities for recruiters who want to stay in the industry. The Wall Street Journal lists the projected industry survivors.

In part 2, I will highlight some of the action steps you can take to implement a successful college referral program including advanced approaches, tools, and some added tips.

If you want to generate a significant portion of your college hires as a result of your referral program, here are a variety of approaches to consider. Select those that fit your level of aggressiveness and corporate culture.

Things to Do

• Offer rewards. Surprisingly, many people associated with a university are willing to make referrals with no promise of a reward. Why? Because they really believe in the abilities of the students they know and work with. You don’t need to give away a flat-screen TV in order to be successful. Students will readily refer with simple rewards like gas cards, iPods, software, movie tickets, a pizza party for their friends, professional sports tickets, or a chance to win a spring-break vacation. Offer students a choice from a list of rewards. It’s best to start small and then increase the rewards if you find those under $100 are ineffective. Since every campus is different, directly asking students or trial and error are the best ways to determine what works. You can also offer campus clubs and student professional organizations larger rewards for successful hires as a result of their referrals. The key is to offer an exciting reward but not one with an economic value so high that it might cause someone embarrassment.
• Referral cards. Referral cards are under-used in both traditional employee programs and in college referral programs. Think of the excitement an individual gets when they’re handed a card that says “WOW, you really impressed me. You’re just the kind of person that would be perfect at XYZ firm!” Referral cards can be electronic (like an e-greeting card) or on paper. It’s important to limit the number you deliver (to make sure the people who get them feel “special”). It is also extremely important that individuals responding to such invitations to apply are not treated identically to applicants walking in off the street.
• Utilize your databases. Use the information you gain from other sources, including scholarships, participation in community events, and working with alumni groups. Data mine the information in order to identify potential referrers.
• Use blogs. Have recent grads and interns (and even college recruiters) write blogs that discuss what it is like to work at your firm. Blogs are an effective way both to attract and “sell” students on your firm. Ask your most successful bloggers to evaluate those that make great comments or ask good questions on their blog and to make referrals if they identify someone special.
• Social networks. Encourage your recent grads, interns, and employees who work in functions that target college grads to be active on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Ask them to build relationships with individuals who show promise.
• Ads, posters, and campus radio. Although they can produce some good referrals, your screening program has to be able to handle a larger volume than when more targeted marketing approaches are utilized.

• Global referrals. If your college recruiters are Internet-savvy and well traveled, you will find that it’s possible to set up basic referral programs at universities around the globe, without ever visiting them. The office of international programs at international universities might even be aware of and be willing to make referrals from among their crop of U.S. students who are currently studying as part of an exchange program. This allows you to get students with foreign experience and no visa issues that other U.S. firms are likely to miss.
• Referrals at student conferences. It’s wise to send a recruiter to student conferences in order to make contacts and get referrals.
• Ask for referrals from other schools. Don’t restrict referrals to students from the same school. Instead ask them for the names of students they know who are good at other name universities.
• Collaborate with other college recruiters. Where appropriate, consider making informal agreements with other recruiters who visit your campuses to “trade” non-competing referrals from majors that “their” firm isn’t targeting but yours is. For example, in the case where one firm is recruiting only engineers and your firm is recruiting writers, both firms agree to make a referral should they run across a great student in the other firm’s recruiting target area. Obviously, no cash bonus should be offered in this case where both firms benefit.

Approach These People for Referrals

• Approach grad assistants. The most successful college intern referral effort that I’ve ever encountered in my research received a phenomenal 100% success rate by asking the grad assistants of a few top professors to make referrals from the undergraduate students they had worked with. Grad assistants are easy to find, well-connected, and willing to make referrals, often without a reward. In addition, a simple call to the department office can identify them. In addition, one firm I know successfully recruited them remotely, without ever meeting them face-to-face.
• Approach officers of student organizations. Other than grad assistants, no one is likely to know the very best students better than the student president of an honor society or an elite professionally oriented student club. Student organizations are easy to find without visiting campus because they are affiliated with student government. In addition, most have webpages that list their officers and contact numbers.
• Approach honor societies. Referrals from officers and members are likely to be of higher quality than other student groups. Also ask award winners to refer other students.
• Ask your recent college hires. Obviously, recent graduates will still know and be in contact with some current students. Ask them on the first day of onboarding to provide you with referral names and to help you in convincing the targeted student to apply.
• Approach interns as referral sources. Make it a standard part of your internship program to ask students to make three to five referrals during their internship. Also consider making them “ambassadors” for the firm when they return to campus. While on campus, ask them to make one or two referrals each month. Even using former interns (who chose not to return) as referral sources can yield a few top referrals.
• Ask references to make referrals. You might be surprised to find that the references of exceptional students, when asked, also turn out to know one to three additional students who are also likely to be exceptional. To take advantage of this phenomenon, make a list of those who referred the very best and make them a permanent part of your college referral process.
• During conversations with exceptional students. Whenever you find a really exceptional student, find a way to make it part of the conversation, email exchange, or interview to ask them to identify and refer a handful of other exceptional students. Because they compete against each other in labs and classes, they will know the best of the best.
• During conversations with diverse students. Diverse and international students can feel somewhat isolated from the rest of the university community. As a result they tend to stick together and share the same networks. Take advantage of this closeness, while simultaneously improving your diversity recruiting results by utilizing referrals. The key is to educate a few leaders in each community about the inclusiveness of your firm and the success that diverse and international student hires have had there. Use your current diverse and international employees as mentors and relationship builders. Once the relationships are strong, show your contacts how they can help themselves and their community by becoming a permanent part of your referral process.
• Use current employees. Your employees with kids at top schools are likely to meet some of their children’s friends during visits and school breaks. Take advantage of these contacts and encourage your employees to make a few “exceptional” referrals. Consider allowing your employees to make one referral from among their own children if they are currently enrolled in a targeted major at a targeted school. If you know of any of your employees who teach or volunteer at targeted universities, make them part of your referral effort.
• Ask high school counselors. Some firms start identifying talent early in their academic life. If you go this route, ask counselors at top high schools to give you names of their top students. Then build relationships with them as they move through college.
• Ask community college faculty and counselors. Build relationships with these students as they go on to other schools. Often community college faculty are less reluctant to make referrals because an immediate job is really being offered.
• Employees using educational reimbursement. Ask employees who are taking advantage of your educational reimbursement at targeted schools to make a few outstanding referrals.
• Night and virtual students. At some schools, a significant portion of the student body is not on campus during most Career Center hours. However, in my experience, both night and virtual students form academic and social networks at least as tight as those formed by traditional students.
• Approach faculty. Part-time lecturers and adjunct faculty generally have full-time “regular” jobs, and as a result, they are less likely to be fully aware of the services offered by the Career Center. In my experience, they are more likely to be willing to refer individual students directly to a firm than traditional tenured faculty. If you can build a relationship with them, ask if they would consider referring one or two students a year. Some tenured faculty will not make direct referrals, but some will (I do). Ask them to identify super students who might not appear on the “radar screen” of the traditional Career Center hiring process. Especially focus on faculty who already have some relationship with your firm. Some faculty are not comfortable making formal referrals, but if you ask them directly to “name your best student,” they will give you the name without hesitation.
• Alumni groups. Recent grads who are part of the Alumni association can be asked to refer current students they know.
• Administrative staff. Outside of “top 10″ schools and in low-demand majors, where the competition is not so intense, you will find that many staff employees are eager to help the students they know get an internship or job placement opportunity. If you find a university where that is the case, work with internship coordinators, tutoring coordinators, or the director of the computer or science labs.

Final Thoughts

If you are not fiercely competitive, you might initially resist the concept of student referrals just because you, or no one in HR, had ever heard of them before. But don’t let that stop you.

If you have concerns about the propriety of referrals, remember that students are not university employees and they are free to make referrals and even to accept gifts (like free pizza at your information sessions). If you use a referral program, you are not precluded from interviewing referred students through the traditional Career Center process.

Any concern about doing something new and bold will fade rapidly when you find, like other firms have, that college hire referral programs work almost immediately and they produce amazing results.

I am pointing toward the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Bureau; erstwhile INS) H-1B quota for the year 2009 that will open its doors to applicants from around the world in April 2009. Every year, USCIS allows and issues 85,000 H-1B visas, out of which only 65,000 visas go to candidates with specialty skills across the world. The rest of the 20,000 visas are available for foreign candidates with higher degrees from schools in the United States, which is generally a master’s degree or higher. Most of the 65,000 H1-B visas go to hi-tech workers across the world whose technical skills in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics are in high demand in the U.S. and Europe.

And so for companies and businesses dealing in the hi-tech industry, an opportunity to recruit professionals from this pool of qualified candidates is strategically important for growth, sustainment, and development of new products and services.

Although principles of recruiting remain the same, it takes a very different approach to recruit candidates from outside the country. Below are some of the pointers that recruiters must keep in mind to successfully recruit these professionals from outside the country. These points are a result of being tested as a recruiter in the global talent pool.

Getting Ready for the Long Haul

It takes a lot of preparation, planning, and commitment to recruit in a foreign market, and so before a company decides to start recruiting candidates outside the country, begin by forecasting your needs. Once the groundwork in terms of how many people, what skills, and when people are needed is done, the HR department must involve the recruiting team in planning the process of recruitment and selection. It’s important that recruiters are involved in the planning process so that:

• The HR department and recruiters understand the immigration/H-1B laws well because they can create some serious implications for a company both financially and in terms of future global recruitment if laws and rules are not followed correctly.
• The recruiters clearly understand the goals of recruitment and the plan to be followed because they are the ones to implement it. Besides, it would also look really unprofessional if the candidate — upon becoming an employee — realizes that things are different or have changed over a period of 12 months or more. This is a genuine possibility because 12 months or more is a long time for things to change in a company, and this may include change in the recruiting team, the HR team, the management team or the policies of the company.

This is also a good time to put together brochures and revamp the website and applications. Unless you are Google or Microsoft, there is going be a lot of competition to recruit people from this pool of candidates. You will have to sell your company to these candidates using your website and brochures with information about the company, its clients, its HR policies, benefits, and employee growth plan/path. It will also not hurt to provide some demographic information about the workforce of the company, and to give the candidates an overview about diversity in the company.

Stick to the Timeline

I call the recruiting process a long haul because the complete process from identifying the candidates and getting them onboard can take as much as 12 months or more. I like to call it a journey, because you start off with no candidates and over a period of time, some these candidates become friends, some remain good acquaintances, and some get lost along the way. An approximate timeline would include starting the process early on — some time in September of every year — so that recruitment, selection, and completing of non-immigrant worker application forms could be taken care of by March of next year. That way, your company will be ready to submit these non-immigrant visa applications by April 1st when USCIS opens up the quota for that fiscal year.

Once the visa is applied, accepted, and approved, it will be mostly a recruiter’s task or someone from human resources to guide these candidates through the visa interview process and work with them on arrival dates. Your candidates can start arriving in the states around October 1 because effective dates for these non-immigrant work visas is October 1 .

By the time these new hires show up at your company’s doorstep, your recruiting team would have spent an incredible 12 months or more working with them.

Starting Early

One will be surprised to know that there is fierce competition to recruit these candidates on these specialty visas. Companies big and small go beyond the boundaries of the U.S. to recruit these candidates with highly specialized skills not commonly available in the U.S. Begin the process early before everyone does, because this can give you some lead time in selling your company. It also helps in building rapport with candidates. Starting early is even more important from a company’s perspective because the cost of applying for a non-immigrant visa has gone up substantially in the past two years. To give you an idea: just the application fee to apply for a single non-immigrant visa today is $2,320.00. Add another $700 to a $1,000 in attorney fee on top of this application fee. More information on the fee can be found at www.uscis.gov.

Starting early will give your company enough time to not only assess the candidate’s skills but also to assess whether it’s worth investing that much time and money.

Successful recruiters understand the premise that recruiting competent candidates from all over the world is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of patience and persistence. They also understand that dealing with candidates in different socio-economic settings across the world calls for a cautious and calculated approach. Getting acquainted with the culture of a country to which the target candidates belong to can come in handy during the recruitment process.

Switch on your salesman instincts and nurture a working relationship with the candidate by staying in contact via phone or email on a regular basis. Meeting the candidate on an occasion or two can be really helpful in making the candidate comfortable with the company. Clearly defining the recruitment and selection process will help the candidate make an informed decision.

Evaluation

Since so much time and money is involved in global recruitment, evaluation of the recruitment and selection process is a must. Evaluation in terms of company’s preparation for global recruitment, how many recruiters are needed to focus on this effort every year, cost involved per candidate, time spent with candidate before acceptance, types of questions that candidates ask, FAQs, etc will help in identifying deficiencies and strengths in the recruitment and selection process so that the same mistakes are not repeated again. Evaluation will also give a better idea about what regions of the world to target for these niche skills.
A strategy successful in one market may not be successful in another.

A common theme that I usually hear when I discuss recruiting in Second Life is “Second Life is great for technical organizations recruiting young IT talent like Java programmers, but it really would not address our needs.”

There are many reasons why non-technical organizations can benefit from recruiting in SL. Most organizations would agree categorically across industries that there is a growing demand for a technically proficient employee base outside of the IT department, especially as more baby boomers head off for retirement and web 2.0 applications proliferate in the enterprise. There is a compelling benefit to having access to a geographically diverse pool of candidates during these tumultuous economic times, when fuel costs are exceedingly difficult to manage as well as travel budgets. Value is also realized by branding and screening in a virtual world that is typically the domain of leading organizations.

There are also numerous arguments that can be put forth as to why non-technical organizations will not be successful recruiting in SL. There is limited information on either technical or non-technical employees who have actually been hired through an interview conducted in SL. There should be more information readily available if this was a frequent occurrence. Virtual job fairs and islands of employment are not well-known, and I’m sure many job seekers have no interest in engaging in a virtual world. Even if a non-technical person did find a job fair and decide to participate, there is the challenge of operating within SL. It takes time to become adept at controlling your avatar and getting the right appearance for an interview.

What type of employees if any are being hired in SL?

Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy engagement at EMC, discusses a recent experience EMC had with career fairs in Second Life. EMC generated two hires for its effort. One hire was a developer with an accomplished IT skill set and the other a financial controller who had experience with large, global organizations. An article by ThinkBalm mentions the Accenture Career Island in SL paid for itself after five or six events, which I am guessing focused on recent college graduates.

The foodservice firm Sodexho is probably one of the last organizations one would expect to be recruiting at job fairs in for IT talent. MSNBC published an article on “How your fantasy life can get you a real job.” The article follows the journey of Ray Giordano, a job candidate rather new to SL, as he prepares to participate in a Sodexho job fair at the suggestion of a Sodexho recruiter. This is a caveat to others that it might be worth the investment to learn the basics of SL in case you also end up in this situation. The job candidate’s efforts in learning the nuances of SL eventually paid off and led to a job as a chef in the senior services division of Sodexho.

The Vancouver Sun wrote about the efforts of the Vancouver Police recruiting talent in SL. Inspector Kevin McQuiggin, in charge of the department’s tech crimes division, notes almost every major crime has a technical aspect to it. “Any new media that comes out, any new form of communication, crime is going to migrate there. As we move into the future, we’re going to need people who understand technology — that are conversant with it, that understand the impact of it, and understand how to use it,” McQuiggin says. Given the prevalence of identity theft and various cybercrimes that continue to challenge police departments not often equipped for the technical challenges, McQuiggin has an excellent point. I have yet to see any hard data on how many hires this effort has generated.

Toronto law firm Davis LLP is also open to recruiting in SL. The SL office was opened by the law firm’s Video Game Law & Interactive Entertainment Group. “The virtual world of Second Life gives us the opportunity to interact with our current and potential clients in a unique way,” says Dani “Lemon Darcy” Lemon at Davis LLP. “We also aim to generate business leads and attract job candidates for our bricks-and mortar business through Second Life.” SL may prove to be an ideal location for finding attorneys adept at defending the misappropriation of the intellectual property of others in the virtual realm. Still, given the specifics of practicing law in a specific locale, I would guess this is a very difficult area to recruit talent in.

The potential of recruiting talent in SL is vast but there is not a large amount of information suggesting this has been highly successful yet. The growing demand for technical talent may eventually lead others to leverage SL for connecting with talent as the generational shift in the workforce accelerates. SL may one day become a leading recruiting tool, but I think many would agree the verdict is still out.

His company, ABC, needed some very specialized people and he couldn’t find them. For over two years, Paul had tried to fill some very specialized and always open positions by using Internet search and revamping the career site. He had even put his reputation on the line a few months back when he insisted that a central sourcing team would solve the perpetual lack of qualified candidates.

He had just finished a tough meeting with his sourcing team trying to figure out why there were no candidates in their talent pool. He had been certain that there would be several potential people from that pool; when the hiring managers had told him about their openings, he had assured them it wouldn’t take very long.

After all, the team had known about the competencies these positions required for months. Now it looked bleak.

What had gone wrong?

When he took his current position, he was aware that finding the highly specialized robotic engineers and technicians the firm needed was his number-one challenge.

Even though the organization was located in the heart of the academic world, with major research schools and labs everywhere, these robotics people remained a scare commodity and the few that he did find were happier remaining in academia.

He had worked with compensation to sweeten the incentives and he had spent time with a big-name advertising agency honing the recruiting messages and redoing the career site. They had won awards and been written about in ERE and in recruiting blogs. Paul had been given several awards. But he was failing.

The company was quite unique. It developed robots that mimicked the human hand. These mechanical hands were incredible. They could pick up an egg without breaking it and yet they could slice through a piece of steel like scissors through paper. They could manipulate, sew, pick up tiny parts, and insert them into circuit boards and they could perform some types of surgery, with assistance from a human doctor.

The demand was growing rapidly, yet the supply of people to design, improve, and manufacture them remained small. Not many schools turned out robotics engineers and not many students choose that as a career.

The engineering team had also placed tight competency requirements on candidates. Every candidate had to have degrees in at least two related disciplines, such as mechanical and electrical engineering, or computer science and mechanical engineering. Or, they had to have 5 or more years of experience and a single degree.

Hiring managers wanted prior experience in robotics, if possible, or experience in manufacturing or designing miniature components or nanotechnology. They wanted engineers capable of demonstrating these products to a global customer base. And each robot had to be installed and “tuned” for each customer, which frequently required foreign travel for a long period of time.

Even though Paul had pushed back on these tough requirements, he had not been able to change their opinions. And his sourcing team couldn’t find the right people.

So here he sat on a lovely afternoon, befuddled and at a loss. Should he quit? Did he admit defeat? Was there a way out? What strategies or tactics could he apply to this situation that might rescue him, and the organization?

I am hoping you can help Paul. What are your ideas and suggestions? I will summarize them and add my thoughts in a future column.

One recruiting firm says the Wall Street turmoil has “triggered one of the largest and most historical talent feeding frenzies in recent history.”

Also, on ERE’s sister publication, Elaine Rigoli notes that Lehman and Merrill Lynch workers are connecting on Facebook’s Lehman profile as well as on MySpace’s Lehman and Merrill Lynch forum.

She also notes that:

• The collapse of Lehman has pitched thousands of investment bankers into the jobs market and recruiters were yesterday scrabbling to contact the best staff.
• This is seriously going to impact Wall Street compensation this year.