Raise your hand if you think this is a good idea. I see no hands. Wait, there’s one. Thank you St. Dymphna. The rest of you, however, should stay away from Unvarnished.

This is a new site, just launched this week into private beta. It describes itself as “an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.”

TechCrunch, which reviewed the site yesterday, calls it “Yelp for LinkedIn.”

Personally, I call it trouble.

And judging from the 257 comments (as of this writing) posted to the article, most readers seem to agree.

Now that I’ve poisoned the well, let me tell you what Unvarnished is. It’s what LinkedIn would be if the interface was a bit less rigid and anyone could anonymously post anything about you they wanted and you had no ability to edit or remove it.

TechCrunch has a screen capture of one person’s reviews. TechCrunch has politely blacked out the name of the individual about whom one reviewer says, “Never worked directly with (name obscured), but have worked seen (sic) firsthand the outcomes of her management and business acumen. If you can, avoid working with her.”

The other review is no better.

If you were backgrounding candidates for a short list, would she be on it?

What! You’ve made a decision based on the anonymous reviews knowing nothing else about this person? Me, too. And that’s exactly the danger, as plenty of those posting comments to the TechCrunch have pointed out.

As more than a few of those comments point out: Human nature tends to focus on the negative. Or, as one poster elegantly writes, “Emotions take over and a tiny crumb of anecdotal evidence outweighs a mountain of statistics every time.”

Site co-founder Peter Kazanjy insists that a maligned individual can counter the negative reviews by claiming their profile and adding their own comments. They can also get their friends to write positive reviews and vote down the negative comments.

“That individual can reach out to his network, of his fan base, essentially, to make sure his professional reputation looks like that which he would like it to look like. But at the same time he can’t necessarily take down reviews he’s unhappy with,” Kazanjy explains in a TechCrunch video.

So fairness and balance become, on Unvarnished, a matter of brute force. If you can muster more firepower to soldier on your behalf than can your opposition, you win the reputation war. Observers can still look over the battlefield, but victory is yours.

Except as a recruiter or a prospective employer, do I even want to bother with the whiff of taint?

In fairness to Unvarnished, truly defamatory or libelous comments can be challenged and removed. Nor are reviewers completely anonymous; they login via Facebook Connect, which makes them knowable at some level, even if not publicly.

There are other safeguards, thin perhaps, but there’s at least some effort to slow down those with personal vendettas.

After you take a look at the site and read the TechCrunch article, I’d be interested in hearing your opinion. Is Unvarnished a site you would use either to promote your own brand and reputation or to background candidates? What do you think?

The same report also adjusted the previous month’s job loss from 20,000 to 24,000.

Economists had been predicting that the report would show job growth, not loss. Marketwatch put the estimate at 40,000, while a Dow Jones Newswire survey put the job growth at 50,000. So not only was the ADP report a surprise, but the size of the difference from the estimates was particularly troubling.

However, the job loss was the lowest in two years, confirming that there is improvement in the U.S. economy, even if it isn’t bouncing back as robustly as many are hoping.

The ADP report comes two days before the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its numbers on jobs and unemployment. Before today’s ADP report, economist surveys all pointed to optimistic job growth in March. A Bloomberg survey predicted the BLS report will show the economy added 184,000 jobs.

So far, the optimism is still holding. The BLS numbers will include the hiring of thousands of census workers. ADP does not count government jobs. The BLS is also coming off a weather-impacted February, which affects the government employment count much more than it does ADP’s, because of differences in methodology.

In the past 12 months, ADP numbers have differed from the official BLS report by as many as 189,000 jobs. The average over the last 12 months is closer to 18,000.

The Conference Board, which tracks job openings posted online, said today there were 29,600 fewer jobs online in March than in the month before. The difference is so small, The Conference Board said, “Labor demand was essentially unchanged.”

Still, the decline is the second in a row for the Help Wanted Online Data Series. In February, the decline in posted jobs was 66,900. It followed three months of triple-digit increases in the posted jobs.

Another report today, this one the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, dropped 6.1 percent to 58.8 in March from February’s 62.6 reading. Economists had been expecting the index would come in at 61.

The Purchasing Managers Index measures regional goods purchasing activity. As such, it’s one of several indices that are considered cumulatively by economists and Wall Street in divining how the economy is doing.

But coming on the heels of the ADP jobs report and Tuesday’s Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Index, which suggested housing prices were flattening out, it’s not a surprise that stock buyers were not in a mood to bid up prices.

Offsetting what might have been an even bigger decline than the day’s 50-point decline was Tuesday’s rebound in the Consumer Confidence Index. After nosediving 10 points from January to February, the Index was up six points to 52.5 in March.

It was at least something positive, even though The Conference Board’s Consumer Research Center Director Lynn Franco cautioned, “Consumers continue to express concern about current business and labor market conditions. And, their outlook for the next six months is still rather pessimistic. Overall, consumer confidence levels have not changed significantly since last spring.”

The U.S. Labor Department will release its March report Friday at 8:30 a.m. EDT. At 9:30 a.m. EDT, it will host a live web chat with BLS experts. Anyone can participate and ask questions about the national employment and unemployment data. The focus of the chat will be on the March report.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. Lessons for a new recruiter
2. Bogus posting or clumsy candidate experience?
3. How come you’re ignoring your employment brand?
4. Is pay to play the new norm?
5. Can you get a good background check for $25.00?
6. Featured group of the week: Canadian Staffing Experts

1. Lessons for a new recruiter

Matthew Hakaim had an interesting post about lessons he learned as a new recruiter. He writes, “It’s easy to find someone to teach the “doings” involved in the work, but to find someone who is passionate about what they do and the service they provided was key for me. I found that passion and experience in one of the client managers at the firm I worked for, and I immediately aligned myself with her. Her name is Maria Barton, a no nonsense Brit with a work ethic that most people could only aspire to achieve, and the people skills akin to some of the world’s greatest leaders.

What lessons did you learn as a new recruiter that you can share with others entering the field?

2. Bogus posting or clumsy candidate experience?

Kelly Blokdijk writes, “A friend of mine recently applied for a position that they spotted on one of the job boards geared toward six-figure salary earners. Based on what happened next, they weren’t sure if their application experience is the new normal or if there is something suspicious going on.

Click on through to read the exchange and give Kelly your take on the situation.

3. How come you’re ignoring your employment brand?

Sarah Welstead takes companies to task for ignoring some of the very things that attract people to their jobs. She writes, “Think of all the companies you’ve worked with/for in the past 5 years.  How many of them have an employment branding strategy?  How many of them are even thinking about it, outside of the recruiting department?  How many of them say that “improving quality of hire” is one of their top priorities – but don’t have a strategy specifically to attract A-listers? 1?  2?  I’ll bet you didn’t need more than one hand to count them up, did you?

Is employment branding on the top of your mind? How about other people in your company?

4. Is pay to play the new norm?

Maureen Sharib asks in SOURCING Techniques and Methodologies, “Has anyone asked you to PAY to get on a vendor’s list? This is a first. “They” want us to pay $395 to do work for them! <-Are you kidding me? They’re also asking who my competitors are.  Huh?

Have you ever heard of pay to play for vendors in any organizations you’ve worked with? What are your thoughts on it?

5. Can you get a good background check for $25.00?

A community member asks, “Is there a good trustworthy tried and tested site to get a good background check for $25.00?” Is $25 a reasonable number for a background check? What have you paid for background checks?

6. Featured group of the week: Canadian Staffing Experts

I am continuing to highlight some of the groups that we are hoping to reinvigorate and one of those groups are for our friends north of the border called Canadian Staffing Experts. The mission of the group is to bring together “Staffing Industry experts who are interested in sharing information unique to the Canadian marketplace.” In invite you to join in a couple of conversations revolving around what specific Canadian issues are being dealt with and the rise of contract staffing.

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

It reminded me of a scene from an old Monty Python movie where French soldiers high on a castle rampart shouted tauntings at the English below. The English, who spoke no French, had no idea what they were saying. The French, who spoke no English, had no idea their tauntings were being ignored. In frustration, the French hurled a cow at the English (i.e., a seldom-used medieval weapon of udder destruction).

Well, tauntings can also lead to confusion among bystanders who don’t know what to believe … scientists who study the effectiveness of different assessments under controlled circumstances, or someone with strong opinions and a product to sell. So, let’s see if we can clear away the smoke and mirrors.

Recruiting Objectives and Organization Objectives

I don’t direct these articles toward recruiting firms. The ones I know tell me their main quality of hire measure is surviving the guarantee period. Organizations, however, are different. They want lower turnover, successful training completions, and higher individual productivity. I have never heard an organization mention guarantee periods. So, if guarantee periods are your main metric, it’s time to stop reading and have some coffee or tea. If however, you are a typical organization, keep reading.

Assessment Defined

Assessment is just another term for measurement. Every method used to evaluate applicants is an assessment. That includes application blanks, recruiting sources, photographs, interviews, tests, training workshops, video interviews, and so forth. And, unless you hire everyone who applies, the choice is not whether to assess, but how accurate and consistent you want assessments to be.

Rolling the Dice

Hiring is a game of odds. In spite of statements to the contrary, nothing anyone can say, do, or ask will provide 100% certainty that a specific employee will survive a guarantee period, have long tenure, quickly learn, effectively solve job-related problems, or become a top performer. Anyone who maintains otherwise lives in a parallel universe. However, even though achieving hiring perfection is like reaching the carrot at the end of the stick, we can do a great deal to control our odds of success.

In most cases, a common interview has one good purpose: it screens out blatantly unqualified candidates. The more questions you ask, the more opportunity there is for a candidate to say something wrong. Upon passing the interview, however, research shows the odds of success are about 50/50. Starting with a base-rate of chance, a smart HR group has potential for improvement, providing, of course, they start with a clear understanding of job requirements and business necessity.

It’s critical to discover specific competencies associated with job performance or failure. Job descriptions and compensation bands are just one source of data. You need to extract trustworthy competency information from training programs, job holders, job managers, and a visionary manager or two. This is not easy because most people don’t think in competency terms. However, once you have a critical list of job competencies, you can start using assessments to mine three sources: a candidate’s past performance, future intentions, and present-day abilities.

Hiring Competencies: The Candidate’s Tool Box

Many people do not understand hiring competencies. I’ll keep it simple. A hiring competency is not something a candidate accomplishes on the job. That has too many variables. A hiring competency is a specific skill the candidate uses from time to time to get the job done; and, it has to be something we can accurately measure quickly.

On the simplest level, a hiring competency might include skills like learning ability, technical knowledge, problem-solving ability, organization skills, prioritization, coaching skills, persuasive skills, or the like. It might also include attitudes, interests, and motivations to apply those skills. Think of hiring competencies and AIMs as the candidate’s “personal toolbox.” It’s not a work product left behind at the end of the day.

Measuring Competencies: The Recruiters’ Toolbox

Hiring personnel have the responsibility for quickly and effectively measuring candidate competencies. The need to master questioning techniques that probe the candidate’s past performance while, at the same time, making it hard for the candidate to fake good. These are usually called behavioral event interviews or BEI’s. BEI’s gather complete stories, extract competencies, and compare them to job requirements. For example, if my job requires analytical skills, I might ask a candidate to share a time when they had to solve a problem, what the problem was, what they did, and what the result was. Once I learn how the candidate solves problems, I can use that information to predict performance in the new job. But, be cautious …

The high-structure of BEI makes it more accurate than garden-variety interviews, but BEI is not perfect. And, BEI is not a set of short questions. Candidates are still motivated to hide weakness and often give examples that are not even close to the job. On the other hand, BEI-trained interviewers must have the skills to dig for data, determine and evaluate hiring competencies, distinguish between hard facts and a good story, and know when to press for details. BEI accuracy requires thinking like a detective. It usually takes months or even years to develop the skills. And, even the best BE interviewer is only as effective as his or her job competency list.

That is why savvy organizations add other validated tools to the hiring process: Something they call a multi-trait-multi-method process.

Validation means the tool is tested and proven using some aspect of job performance. Validated tools include self-reported tests, knowledge tests, and generic ability tests. I’m intentionally excluding tests such as the MBTI or the DISC, as well as clinical tests like the MMPI. In my professional opinion, broad personality or clinical tests should never be used as hiring tools. There is often little or no proof they predict job performance (e.g., you can read about this in some of my earlier articles). Never use any test whose vendor who cannot provide documented proof the test was designed to predict job performance. Other assessment tools include simulations that require the candidate to perform critical parts of the job; skill tests that measure cognitive ability or technical knowledge; smart application blanks; and, realistic job previews that provide gut-honest descriptions of what it’s like to work the job.

About Correlations

Selection scientists do not trust personal stories or opinions. Because they have learned how easily people can be mislead, they only trust tests that measure something both necessary for the job and have a strong correlation with some aspect of performance. Knowing the difficulty of being absolutely, positively correct, they report results in terms of “strength” of the association between scores and job performance in terms of a correlation ranging from perfect negative (-1.0) to chance (0.0) to perfect positive (+1.0).

Correlations are frustrating for people who insist on certainty, and confusing for people whose last exposure to statistics might have lead to periods of prolonged rest and sedation. So let’s put stats on the shelf and examine a few facts that are no-brainers: 100 smart employees will outperform 100 dull ones; 100 motivated employees will outperform 100 unmotivated ones; 100 persuasive salespeople will outperform 100 unpersuasive ones; 100 coaching managers will outperform 100 non-coaching ones; and, 100 candidates who demonstrate they can do a job will outperform 100 ones who can only tell you about it. We may never be 100% accurate on a person-by-person basis (i.e., there are too many unexpected events that can affect our decision) but at the group level we can almost always skew the odds heavily in our favor.

So, which assessment methods do you think will deliver the best performing workforce? Those that start with job descriptions, or those backed with a detailed list of hiring competencies gathered from job holders, managers, and visionary managers? Those that use a few general questions, or those using validated tools such as structured behavioral or situational interviews, simulations that require the candidate to perform critical parts of the job, attitudes, interests and motivations tests, skill tests that measure cognitive ability or technical knowledge, smart application blanks, and, realistic job previews that provide gut-honest descriptions of what it’s like to work the job?

In all situations, we’ll use the gold-standard definition of quality of hire: collective turnover, training success, and on-the job-performance. Meanwhile, keep a sharp lookout for flying bulls!

College students are confused at the moment about their job prospects. They’ve been told the market is bad and jobs are few. And while it is true that large companies are planning on making fewer hires this year than in the recent past, they are still hiring. All in all, it bodes to be a fairly good year for college students.

So should small companies, those with 50-500 employees, get involved with college hiring?

CEOs, managing partners, and business leaders often ask me if they should even have a college recruiting program.

After all, they may compete with well-known firms, and they will have to work hard to explain who they are and what a career at their company would offer. They don’t have connections on campus and haven’t been involved in campus groups or sponsored activities.

And to top it off, costs can soar with the fees involved in promoting the company and sponsoring special activities and events to woo scarce finance, engineering, and technical majors.

Yet, organizations that do no college hiring often end up with a workforce that is older and less connected to emerging trends and technologies. I believe that every organization needs to do all that it can to increase the quality, breadth, and age range of the workforce.

Small firms often have to resort to suddenly hiring early career professionals to make up for retiring workers or to fill growth needs. They also tend to have worker populations with little diversity and often don’t realize that a college is the only really cost-effective place to get minority talent. There is evidence showing that a broad and diverse workforce leads to innovation and new thinking.

So, smaller firms should seriously consider developing a college recruiting strategy. To do so will take a commitment of time and money, but costs will be quickly recovered by reducing the need to pay agency fees and higher salaries for experienced professionals. Maintenance and incremental growth of a program can be cost reasonable by keeping college recruiting local and by using the Internet.

Here are a few ideas on how to get started. I’d love any of your comments, as well.

Idea #1: Focus locally and small

Find local colleges that have good programs in the areas of your interest. Leave the large research universities and Ivy League schools to the Fortune 500. Competition is heavy and the students from local schools are likely to be just as smart and more inclined to accept your offers and stay. If you are hiring just a few students — say 8-12 — probably two or three schools will be enough.

An internal person should be assigned to put the program together as a part-time effort. Keep it small and focus on getting some results to prove the value of the program and expand it later.

Idea #2: Develop a Longer-term Strategy

Think into the future and include high schools in your planning. Forward-thinking firms will invest in high school programs that encourage students to major in the fields that will lead to employment at their company. They work with colleges and universities to develop programs that make graduates employable immediately and they will keep in touch with students throughout their college studies via email and other Internet-based tools.

The person you assign internally, perhaps a recent graduate themselves, can communicate with selected students regularly, ask them for referrals to other students, and create an online community of students interested in the kind of work you offer.

Idea #3: Use the Internet

Use the Internet to find and communicate with students on campus. Set up a Facebook page for your firm and make sure than you have someone internally manage the content, answer their questions, and stay in touch with the students frequently. Send them literature and promotional information about your company electronically, and start a chat room for college students to talk to employees.

Some firms may want to start an online mentoring or coaching program where volunteer employees offer students homework help, tutoring in math or science, or just provide advice.

Make it a goal to rarely go to campus physically. Develop online relationships with professors. Some firms present case studies to professors to use in their classes or offer to speak to the class using Skype or other video-based system.

Idea #4: Develop an Internship Program

Encourage a few students to apply for internships at your organization. These can be summer internships but there are other possibilities as well. Some internships might be virtual where a student works as part of team to accomplish a goal that can be done from their college computer. Or they might be able to join a team using Skype or WebEx or some other online collaboration tool.

Other internships could be short ones — just a week or two perhaps — during winter or spring breaks or between semesters.

Using imagination and experimenting can lead to many possible ways to develop relationships and also give students practice experience working for you. When it comes time for graduation, you will have candidates ready to go to work for you full time who understand your company, like its culture, and have some experience.

College recruiting virtually has many, many benefits and nicely aligns with the lifestyles and habits of this generation of students. They are all connected via the Internet, they all use Facebook, email, and participate in online life. It only makes sense to tap into the Internet and use it to attract people that have been hard and expensive to attract in past.

Small firms can be far more innovative and experimental than most larger ones as they have less invested. Large firms have developed large internal staffs and have created expectations in hiring managers, professors, and students that they will be on campus physically.

To change this is difficult and takes time. The great advantage smaller firms have is their nimbleness, ability to act immediately, and willingness to try new ways. Virtual college recruiting opens the doors for many small companies and for thousands of students.

In my experience, there’s no better way to identify the best firms and their best practices in talent management than to examine the accomplishments of the finalists and winners in ere.net’s annual recruiting excellence awards competition. Like in past years, this year’s participants have done some amazing things that are certainly worth emulating.

Each year, applications for consideration in one or more of the awards program’s eight categories come in from all over the globe. There is a good mix of large, medium, and smaller organizations, and a wide cross section of industries represented. As one of the judges who has evaluated entries since the award program’s inception, I like to conduct a deep analysis into what challenges participants are addressing, and what innovations they are developing in response.

This four-part series will highlight some of the amazing practices that earned organizations a spot as a finalist. While not all of the practices described may be ideal for your organization, in general they are practices that the judging panel finds indicative of world-class recruiting in progressive talent management organizations.

As with all ere.net posts, you are encouraged to share your thoughts on the practices described, ask follow up questions, and suggest additional practices that elevate the game following each installment.

Best Practices in Employee Referral Programs

I have long argued that employee referral programs should be the foundation of all external recruiting efforts, and across the board most award nominees demonstrate why. A well-designed program does much more than distribute sourcing responsibility across an organization’s workforce; it enables organizations to hire better quality talent, faster, and cheaper than other recruiting sources. Practices that differentiate the best programs from average programs include extreme responsiveness, proactively seeking out referrals, frequent program updates, use of robust metrics, and a focus on prioritization of key jobs.

Award Winner — Aricent

Aricent, an 8,000-employee, privately held Silicon Valley-based communications product and service provider operates in 19 countries worldwide. It has developed a world-class employee referral program to fuel growth and drive organizational capability. Outstanding practices include:

• Responsiveness — Its dedicated team of five guarantees action on all referrals submitted within 72 hours of submission (it actually targets providing personalized feedback to referrers within the same time frame). Its referral help-desk also contributes to responsiveness by promising a response to all inquires within eight hours. The helpdesk is so well regarded that it achieved an astonishing 97.9% satisfaction rate among surveyed employees. This is truly a first-class approach. The No. 1 success factor in any referral program is its ability to maintain a high level of responsiveness. Almost all employee referral programs start out like gangbusters but quickly wane as employees realize that their referrals are not getting quick and responsive treatment.
• Service level agreement — Aricent developed a service level agreement that clearly spells out what referrers and hiring managers can expect from the ERP program staff and vice versa. Its SLA has produced the highest satisfaction rating of any program I have ever come across.
• Proactive referrals — Aricent used a proactive referral approach that took program representatives to employee workstations, meetings, social gatherings, etc., to educate about program specifics and to solicit on-the-spot referrals. It also publishes and distribute a referral program calendar in advance so that employees are aware of projected needs and events. In addition, at some of these referral events it provides on-the-spot rewards to solicit referral activity. This proactive approach might seem time-consuming, but it is one of the most effective ways to get referrals from ultra-busy professionals when you need them versus when other voluntarily opt to submit them. Traditional referral programs rely almost entirely on the employee making the initiative to refer in response to posters, e-mails, etc., which does little to ensure that the program produces needed results.
• Prioritization of jobs — The iRefer program is targeted to produce hires in hard-to-fill roles that require niche skills (50% of such roles were filled by ERP hires in 2009). By establishing hiring percentage targets for critical groups, Aricent made participation in the program by managers a priority as well, driving the program to produce 44% of all external hires, an increase of 9% over 2008. Anyone who gathers data on referral program effectiveness finds out pretty quickly that referrals work better on certain jobs than on others. And because there are always limited resources, prioritize jobs and business units in advance so that the program focuses on mission-critical, revenue generating jobs, and “hard-to-fill” positions.
• Referrals are pre-assessed — Tackling the subject of “junk referrals,” Aricent implemented a referral screening methodology that requires the referring employee to submit an assessment of the applicant being referred. By requiring employees to assess the technical skill and culture fit of the referral, the program forces the employee “to be accountable” for the quality of their referral, improving candidate quality and saving both manager and recruiter time.
• Goals for all managers — Aricent required all managers to refer at least one corporate alumni per year who they had convinced to return. It also involved hiring managers as iRefer ambassadors, which encourage their teams to refer profiles and to maximize their contribution during exclusive hiring events. Establishing referral targets or goals for each manager is a powerful method to drive participation.
• Boomerangs — It specifically targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their career. Sixty-six percent of all on alumni rehires came through the referral program in 2009. (Having a corporate alumni program and targeting former employees in order to get them to “boomerang” is especially important for organizations that may have been forced to lay off a large number of employees during the most recent downturn.)
• Use technology — Aricent developed a microsite on the firm’s intranet which it uses to publish a list of employees who have successfully referred. It uses management software to generate a daily status report on every ongoing referral, and it tags each and every profile against one or more domains or skills, so that whenever a new position opens up, it can more quickly and accurately identify potential candidates in the referral database. To ensure easy access to the micro-site, it places iRefer kiosks at events and “short list” individuals on the spot.
• A dedicated referral team — Perhaps its most important accomplishment is the leadership of the talent acquisition team’s ability to make a convincing business case to senior executives to fund a dedicated team of five to manage the employee referral channel.
• Bonuses — The Aricent program varies the bonus with the targeted position and offers “top-ups” as motivational bonuses on each of its unique campaigns.
• Robust ERP analytics — Aricent gathers and reports metrics in all of the important areas, including new-hire job performance, new hire retention, boomerang rehires, offer acceptance ratio, and referrals as a percentage of all hires. Analytics are the key to continuous improvement and for achieving a competitive advantage in any talent management program.
• Significant results were produced — Great features mean little if they don’t produce results, and the Aricent program has no trouble demonstrating impact. Some highlights include: ERP hires have measurably better on-the-job performance than hires from other sources, and referral hires have measurably better retention rates after one year. These are the two most important metrics in any referral program because they demonstrate to skeptical senior managers that the program is producing higher-quality hires. Also: resume-to-hire ratio of 3:1 compared to 5:1 of other sources; it increased the employee participation rate from 35%in 2008 to 66% in 2009; iRefer reached 45% of total hiring; ERP candidates accept offers at a significantly higher rate; and ERP hires cost approximately 20% less than hires produced via other sources.

Finalist — Accenture (Past ERE Award Winner)

This global consulting firm is well-known for excellent management practices, and its referral program is no exception. The current program began life as a pilot program in the Netherlands and received top honors in last year’s award program. Features that caught the judges’ attention last year (written up in the May 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) were senior executive involvement throughout the program, electronic referral cards, a charity component that motivates employees by providing a small donation to charity, and a reward for referrals that successfully make it to the interview stage. This year the program went global and was refined to better meet the changing economic and recruiting climate. Major program improvements include:

• Prioritized positions — Accenture focused its program design changes on features that would improve the quality of hire, including moving away from open referrals to position-based referrals, where only high-priority positions are targeted. In an economic downturn, a firm’s leadership should clearly explain why it’s critical to continue providing referrals for some jobs, while the rest of your organization is in slow-growth mode.
• Authentic communications — Accenture realized that the wording and phrasing used in requisitions and position descriptions is much more formal than the language used in normal day-to-day conversation. As a result, it changed expectations to be more consistent with how friends/colleagues would discuss the role/organization. They then used senior leaders in their communication campaigns to be referral “champions” and to explain the importance to the business of the positions being recruited for.
• Increasing employee feedback — Accenture provides referring employees with more status information by allowing them to sign up to online feedback channels that let them monitor the status of referrals via emails, RSS feeds, and text messages. It also provided referring employees with access to their referral history, detailing status of past referrals, rewards earned, a targeted listing of key positions in their group that are soliciting referrals, and current ERP campaign messages.
• Tailoring the website experience — It learned by listening to feedback that past referrers do not need as much program information and support as “first-time” referrers. Using that learning, Accenture retooled the referral website to tailor the visitors’ experience based on the visitors’ past referral activity. Past referrers can jump straight to submitting a referral, while new referees are still provided with a high level of guidance and information.
• Results produced — Accenture started the year with a great performing program, but program retooling has made it even better. Key performance gains include: reducing the resume to hire ratio from 5:1 to 4:1; increasing the percentage of hires attributed to ERP to 34%; and estimated recruiting cost savings of over $700,000.

Both Aricent and Accenture have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to servicing employees submitting referrals and are reaping the rewards of paying attention. Got questions for either of them, comments, concerns? Share them here and elevate the conversation!

Stay tuned: in part 2 of this series, I will cover the employer branding program and corporate career website award categories.

More significant than just surviving, SimplyHired and its counterpart Indeed.com (which launched five months earlier in 2004, but came out of beta almost exactly five years ago today) have thrived. Starting with zero traffic, both are now in the top 10 of career sites in the U.S. Indeed ranked 4th in the Nielsen report last year, behind Monster.

SimplyHired, sixth in the report, has probably already moved up. If by some chance it hasn’t already, yesterday’s announcement that it was becoming the job channel for Huffington Post almost guarantees it.

Huff Po, as it’s known, is getting 26.4 million monthly visitors, some 21.6 million of them from the U.S. Between the jobs channel SimplyHired will now power and the widgets the site will deploy to distribute contextually related job ads throughout its sections, the bump in traffic and visibility will be significant.

Traffic comes at a price. SimplyHired, which issued a press release announcing the deal, didn’t say what the revenue arrangements are. Rarely are financial details announced. Traffic deals, though, don’t come cheap. A few years ago, CareerBuilder snatched a deal with AOL from Monster, paying nine figures over four years.

The fact that SimplyHired can make a deal at all is a testament to the acceptance of the job search engines by the recruiting industry. Both SimplyHired and Indeed launched as totally free sites; jobs were gathered from elsewhere, indexed, and made searchable by job seekers.

As convenient as these sites were for job seekers, the question at the time and for long after launch was: How do you make money with a free model? I remember SimplyHired founder and CEO Gautam Godhwani and Indeed co-founder and CEO Paul Forster having fundamentally the same approach.

Forster went with a Google AdWords approach. Godhwani has Google AdWords on the site today. However, even with the kinds of traffic volume both sites get today, you don’t get rich (unless you are Google) purely on selling contextual ad placements.

Both CEOs told me back in 2005 that they would offer pay-per-click job ads in premium positions. Today, both sites do.

The marketing strategies of both sites run on parallel tracks. Through a combination of financial incentives and free widgets that are attractive to small publishers, both SimplyHired and Indeed have built impressive networks. Servicing these low-volume sites, many of which have highly specialized readerships, is possible because of the apps that make everything self-service.

In exchange for sharing some of the revenue with bloggers, professional organizations, publishers, and the like, both SimplyHired and Indeed can offer highly targeted ad placements presented to audiences of passive users.

Without too much effort, a publisher can even take a completely customized feed of jobs and have an instant job board offering dozens, hundreds or thousands of opportunities, depending on the level of targeting.

Way back at launch and for a time after, many of us wondered how long the major job boards would permit the search engines to aggregate their listings and redistribute them. That was a worry to the search engines themselves; Craigslist did shut them out and still does.

Of even bigger concern was Google’s intentions. The search dominator launched its own classifieds business, calling it Google Base. Clearly in its sights, or so many of us believe, was the multi-billion dollar recruitment business. Like many of Google’s toe-dipping ventures, Base floundered and its traffic tanked.

One well-placed insider at one of the leading job boards told me at the time they were watching how the search engines would handle the listings. Google, being the 800-pound gorilla, was the bigger worry.

Being small, SimplyHired and Indeed just didn’t have enough of a footprint to have much of an impact. And there wasn’t any financial hit to the majors, who were busier battling each other anyway. The added visibility SimplyHired and Indeed brought to their listings was a welcome addition to the traffic count, slight though it was at first. Today, that added distribution is a factor for which the job boards get the credit; to apply or read a complete listing from an off-site source, job seekers must go there.

In the unlikely event that Monster and CareerBuilder were now to shut off their spigots, there would be an impact, but no crisis. So many employers are providing job feeds directly that job seekers might hardly notice the loss. Of course, neither search engine wants that to happen, one reason (there may be others) neither has gotten into the resume business. That keeps job seekers engaged with the job boards and recruiters paying to search them.

So today, on the fifth anniversary of job search engines, they have come to occupy an important position in recruitment advertising. The job seeker traffic testifies to their usefulness, and employers have responded by including them in their ad spend. Both sites are profitable, according to their CEOs, and have been for sometime.

It will be interesting to see how they evolve over the next five years.

I’m going to outline how and why approaching telephone-sourced names is very different from approaching names you’ve found on the Internet or persons behind the resumes sent to you each day.

We received a rather large order (300 names) in this week from a customer that we had done substantial work for (about 200 names) in the last half of 2009. Corresponding back and forth refining some of the current search’s details, I casually asked, “How many hires have you had out of the last names we sent?”

Expecting to hear, “Half a dozen,” or something close to that number, to my surprise this is what I received back from a circular sent through the team that asked:

“Do you recall, with your work with TechTrak, whether you hired anyone they provided?”

One of the recruiters said:

“Out of my searches thus far, we have not.”

Another said:

“No, I did not. I very rarely received a return call from the messages I would leave people.”

Alarmed and wondering what was going so terribly wrong, I asked that recruiter what it was he was saying when he called the telephone-sourced names we had sent. Sounding ill-fitting, he replied that he’ll typically say the following:

Hello, my name is ___________. I located your contact information online and have a very exciting (marketing/sales) opportunity to discuss with you. Please reach me at (___) ___ – ____ to learn more about this great opportunity, I promise not to take more than a couple minutes of your time. I look forward to speaking with you; have a great day!

I say ill-fitting because, although you may be thinking to yourself that the message sounds good (and ordinarily it might sound good) it is not being applied properly in this situation.

The situation I’m referring to is the first contact of a truly passive candidate. Remember, as I’ve written before, the truly passive candidate deserves an entirely different approach than what you’d use to approach someone you found on the Internet’s very popular social networking darling LinkedIn. When you call someone you found on LinkedIn (or anywhere else on the Internet) chances are they’ve been called before by recruiters about different job opportunities. Don’t kid yourself. You’re not Amerigo Vespucci.

Calling someone back who sent you their resume is another example of a technique that differs wholly from calling a phone-sourced name. Those job-seekers don’t ask questions when you call. They’re just so glad you called them they’ll generally tell you anything you want to know. There’s not a whole lot of challenge in engaging people who desperately want to be engaged.

The first thing most telephone-sourced people will say to you when you call is something akin to a surprised, “I’m not looking for a job!” or “How’d you get my name?” You must answer both of these concerns while at the same time capturing their attention, whetting what may be a sated appetite. It calls for an approach that engages them from their perspective.

Their perspective is that of a happy and satisfied employee who’s not looking for another job and is productive and fruitful in the one they have. Capturing their attention must be done within moments and overall must be done by surprise.

The following is an example of how we approach phone-sourced names. Bear in mind we are mindful at all times that the majority of these people are not looking for jobs.

When we “profile” a phone-sourced list we call through the field we’ve identified a minimum of six times before we even think about leaving a message. Most calls go to VoiceMail, and in our call sheets we detail what happens on each call. The following is an example of a divisional controller position for a billion-dollar division of a bank we phone-sourced and then profiled. There were about 30 companies on the original target list that yielded a total of 75 names that were later profiled. The call notes are in italics.

The client wanted only the group controller/chief accounting officer profiled at this company:

Company Name:

Location:

Phone:

Fax:

Mutual funds

Annual Sales (mil.): $344.9

Total Employees: 1,500

Employees at This Location: 900

*It appears that the CFO and Group Controller for ______ are out of Atlanta. Call to be transferred to either (Georgia Number): ___________

Name: CFO

Name: Group Controller/Chief Accounting Officer

Mar 15 10:40 Assistant answered; he’s on the other line

Mar 16 9:25 VM

Mar 17 1:56 VM

Mar 17 4:55 VM

Mar 18 10:51 Assistant answered and said he’s in meetings until after lunch — sometime mid-afternoon

Mar 23 2:22 In Europe this week — should be back next week

When you see “VM” it means we reached VoiceMail. We did not leave one. We rarely leave VoiceMail before half a dozen calls are made.

The following is an example that shows more of the consistent contact approach and some of the results from that approach. The client wanted both the managing director, strategy and finance group, and the corporate CFO names profiled from the corporate side. It became immediately apparent that both people had the same assistant answering their calls  and we’d have to go through her to reach them. In this case we left a message with her early on.

Company Name:

Location:

Phone:

Fax:

2009 Employees: 13,000

1-Year Employee Growth: 4.5%

Employees at This Location: 9,500

There are two CFOs here: one for the fund side, and one for the corporate side.

Name: Managing Director, Strategy and Finance Group

Mar 15 10:41 Long phone system waits — company may be having phone trouble

Mar 16 9:29 Assistant takes his calls and answers “VP Strategy & Finance;” press zero for Regina. He’s in London/out this week/she’s not sure when he’ll be back

Mar 23 2:23 “You’re nice to call/I’m very flattered/this is an unusual call — we have very good things going on here so now’s just not the right time for me – would be happy to pass along to others though.” Sent job description to him by email.

Name: Corporate CFO

Mar 17 1:56 Regina answers for him — He’s in a meeting from 1-2, 2-3, 4-6. I told her I would call him back later in afternoon between or after his meetings — she said “fine.”

Mar 17 6:00 Company closed at 5:30 and there was no way to navigate phone system to him after hours

Mar 18 10:52 In a meeting; left message w/Regina. He called me back in the afternoon and said most of the people he knows are at his own company — sees this as a step down for him but he’d be happy to pass along — send job description to his email address.

The following is an example of one company where we reached (and profiled) someone. The client wanted both the CFO and SVP finance/controller profiled. The legend shows the results:

Company Name:

Location:

Phone:

Fax:

2008 Sales (mil.): $680.1

1-Year Sales Growth: (34.9%)

2008 Net Income (mil.): ($154.7)

2008 Employees: 1,186

1-Year Employee Growth: (21.6%)

Name: CFO

Mar 15 10:54 Out of the office for a family emergency — assistant is not sure when he will be back

Mar 18 11:00 VM

Mar 23 2:30 VM — he’s on other line

Name: SVP finance/controller – under him are divisional controllers if you want them.

Mar 15 10:52 VM

Mar 16 9:36 VM In middle of a meeting — can I call him back in ten minutes (9:47)?

Mar 16 9:47 VM I left message and he called me back at 10ish …  profiled, interested in talking further

Here’s a result that shows a possible business opportunity for a recruiter working in this space. The client wanted both the SVP/CFO and the VP finance profiled:

Company Name:

Location:

Phone:

Fax:

2009 Sales (mil.): $651.9

1-Year Sales Growth: (6.7%)

2009 Net Income (mil.): $99.0

1-Year Net Income Growth: (11.7%)

Name: SVP and CFO

Mar 15 10:45 No longer with company. Last day was last Tuesday, Mar 9

Name: VP Finance

Mar 15 10:45 VM

Mar 16 9:35 VM

Mar 17 1:58 VM

Mar 17 4:56 VM

Mar 18 10:54 VM

Mar 23 2:29 VM

Sometimes it takes several attempts at differing times on different days to reach these telephone-sourced names. When you do get them to answer, remember that you have only a few moments to capture their attention.

Hi. This is Maureen Sharib. You don’t know me, but I’m calling you from Cincinnati, Ohio, on behalf of a company called ___________. They have an open position for a divisional CFO role that will be reporting to a global CFO and they’ve asked me to contact you to see if you might have an interest in talking about this opportunity at this time.

When I just hear silence I continue:

“Nobody said you were looking for a job. The intent here is to locate and talk to persons who are happy in their positions with the idea that these people are likely to be the most productive.”

If that doesn’t move them, then there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got a dud on the line and you may as well cut bait as fast as possible. But usually, 9 times out of 10, at some point in the above exchange they begin to talk. That’s all I need. Once they start talking they usually spill the beans.

Recently I saw a tweet that reiterated this principle:

Research indicates that it takes an average of eight attempts to reach a decision-maker.

If that’s so, why would these people be any different? They’re decision-makers for their own careers. It’s going to take some time to reach them.

To circle back to the hapless recruiter’s message that he’d been leaving for telephone-sourced names, it’s now pretty apparent to see why the message isn’t working.

Hello, my name is ___________. I located your contact information online and have a very exciting (marketing/sales) opportunity to discuss with you. Please reach me at (___) ___ – ____ to learn more about this great opportunity. I promise not to take more than a couple minutes of your time. I look forward to speaking with you; have a great day!

The great majority of the people he’s calling are not looking for a job, so his message isn’t resonating.

Because these people aren’t looking for new jobs I want to be in control of the process and own the element of surprise when I call.

I want to address the surprised objection in person when they say “I’m not looking for a job” or “How’d you get my name?” rather than having them think it while listening to a voice message left on their VoiceMails and deleting it as a result of their (negative) thought process.

Hammering an early question across like “Why do you want to work for us?” won’t work because they’ll back up and say something like:

“…Uhh, well I didn’t really ask to work for you — you’re calling me — remember?”

Likewise, talking about salary may be a little premature but you’ll be surprised how many ask you what your new position pays. It’s a perfect opportunity to find out what they’re earning now, if you’re after that kind of information.

Remember to frame your questions in a “first-touch” sort of way for better results. Asking them to tell you a little about themselves usually opens the floodgates. At this point, your job is to listen.

If you’re only calling telephone-sourced names one time and leaving a message for them, you’re making a huge mistake in your approach and throwing good money down the drain. These people need to be courted and wooed. If that’s too much trouble for you, maybe another line of work would be more appropriate.

When compact flash memory replaced disk drives, none of the hard drive makers were able to make the transition. To the incumbents, the change feels dramatic and unstoppable. To the new moguls, growth feels like it always does.

The Five Scenarios project (sponsored beginning to end by Pinstripe) was designed to suggest some of the sorts of things that might cause disruptions in recruiting. Only one of the five scenarios really involved technology. The rest were from the standard cookbook of disruptive stuff: economics, disease, migratory patterns, shortages.

This year’s ERE Expo was amazing. (Here are some pictures) Part class reunion and homecoming, part trend definition, the spring Expo was a high energy get together with lots of blazingly bright minds soaking up and giving off powerful ideas.

The recruiting disruption session, scheduled cleverly at the end of the last day, was packed with people who had read at least some of the material in this series. The short introductory presentation moved from a high energy Prezi to flipchart paper in a matter of 20 seconds. The hotel’s wireless couldn’t sustain the presentation. It was its own little disruption.

Fortunately, the crowd was prepared and the five group facilitators were in rare form. After the initial outline was presented, the room broke into five groups led by

• Claudia Faust
• George Larocque
• David Pritchard
• William Tincup
• Peter Clayton

The bulk of the session was a series of five parallel conversations on the topic of “What’s the impact of this scenario on recruiting”? The conversations were impassioned as the members of each group debated and synthesized the impact of big things on the profession. If there hadn’t been pressure to finish the conversations and return to the mother ship, things might have gone well into the evening.

One thing was clear. The smartest people in the session were in the room, not on the podium. Conflict, contention, respect, and breakthrough happened in each of the five groups.

There were a number of common conclusions:

• Recruiting is dependent on a number of organizational functions. When they stop, recruiting changes
• While there is an important human component of recruiting, it’s somewhat smaller than you might think
• Outsourcing is a pretty good idea under a variety of settings
• There is a really important role for recruiting in disasters. Recovery depends on people who can make good team building judgments
• The real value of recruiting may not be very well articulated under the current circumstances

Scenario planning is not an attempt to address all possible contingencies. It’s a way of understanding competitive weakness and opportunity. It’s a long form of a traditional SWOT analysis that forces you to understand where the breaking point is.

The session, with its pre-planning and breakout groups proved to be a useful and repeatable model.

If you’re interested in the whole process, we’ll be publishing a white paper in conjunction with Pinstripe. It will cover all of the material and include a guide to Scenario Planning for your Recruiting operation. Fill out this form to reserve yours. They should ship in early May.

If you were there, we could use your comments and criticisms.

Here’s the whole series:

• Five Scenarios: I Introduction
• Five Scenarios: II The Trends
• Five Scenarios: III The Marketplace
• Five Scenarios: IV The Future Matters
• Five Scenarios: V Guild Cities
• Five Scenarios: VI Invasion of the Shallybots
• Five Scenarios: VII The Pandemic
• Five Scenarios: VIII The Games
• Five Scenarios: IX Opportunities

The intriguing part of this is that I actually look forward to it. I enjoy connecting with people. Some I know very well, a few I know somewhat, and fewer still, I barely know at all. I feel like a tourist visiting people in countries I have not toured and, in reality, may never. It’s fun and certainly interesting. I guess that’s why I have many followers on Twitter from Great Britain and Australia. At first blush, I can’t help but be a little amazed thinking about why they would want to be connected to me and what value they get from my updates. I am flattered and amazed.

For me, the stream of consciousness soon takes over and my mind wanders to the bigger picture where I think about the myriad of companies that are befuddled and tentative about these social behemoths, and understandably so. Just because the social network thought leaders espouse that we all need to be “there” and comfortable with the social concept does not automatically assuage the apprehension these companies are experiencing. I see that it will take more than the “be there or be square” admonishments.

So how do companies get ready to take the plunge? It will take 1) time; 2) understanding; 3) preparation; 4) a willingness to stand up in front of the classroom for Show and Tell and last, but never least; 5) evaluating the effects of the decisions made. I liken this entire process to being on a diet. Even though you know you need one, no one can make you adopt change if you’re not ready.

Here is what I’ve seen companies do to manage these five stages:

• Time = Observation. This is what companies bide. Companies want to see what other organizations experience in the social network arena and decide if they are ready to handle the publicity, whether it’s good or bad. This supports the efficacy of case studies and why inside knowledge matters. We all want to know what someone else has experienced and how they reacted to the outcome.
• Understanding = Knowledge. We all know knowledge is power that comes from learning and experience. We don’t expect students to obtain a Bachelor’s degree in fewer than four years, so why would we expect companies to upheave their cultural beliefs in a day? Company culture is an evolutionary process that thoughtful organizations create over time, not overnight.
• Preparation = Teamwork. In this instance, the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” certainly applies here. All knowledge is gathered and stakeholder recommendations weighed for expert and uniform opinion. This is where the company narrative has been mindfully crafted with buy-in from the top.
• Show and Tell = Transparency. This is the exposure stage in the process, with the company story public for all to see and know. This is when a company holds its collective breath and prays. It’s scary and exciting all at once.
• Evaluation = Results. This is the last and hopefully first stage in the process. Evaluated results will be the culmination of the experience and guide an organization to better understand both where it falls and how it is perceived within the social network continuum. Being armed with this knowledge can only make a company stronger and more in control of the story it tells. Smart companies will use this information to retool their story and come out swinging in subsequent forays in a more focused way than during their initial entre.

I tend to disagree with the pundits who claim “companies just don’t get how to be social.” I think they do. They just need to work through the mysticism of it all in their own way. My greatest wish is that this will be sooner rather than later.

In this case, there are two someones and they self-pantsed during the Super Bowl in front of the largest U.S. television audience in history.

All would have been well if the one hadn’t done it right after the other. But it happened that CareerBuilder’s “Casual Fridays” commercial was immediately followed by a Dockers ad, both of them featuring pants-less characters.

CBS, which did the scheduling, decided to give Dockers free ad time to make up. But CareerBuilder got pantsed by the network.

AdAge reported the other day that an unhappy CareerBuilder got bupkis.

“You would think that as much due diligence and as much pre-thought-out placement and trafficking would be given to this as possible,” Richard Castellini, chief marketing officer of CareerBuilder, told AdAge, “and it just doesn’t seem like that was the case.”

Dockers supposedly got three free 30-second ads during the NCAA playoffs as reparations. CareerBuilder, AdAge reported, was told that because its ad ran first and because it also got an extra bene — an on-air mention and logo display during the Super Bowl — it wouldn’t get anything more.

“We believe CareerBuilder got excellent value for their Super Bowl ad,” AdAge reported CBS as saying in a statement. “Until recently, we thought they agreed. We are sorry to hear they do not.”

Ever since 2005, when CareerBuilder hit a home run at its first Super Bowl appearance with its clever monkeys in an office commercial, it has been trying to duplicate that success. Alas for the recruitment ad firm, it hasn’t, though it has occasionally gotten more attention for its apres Bowl activity.

After the 2007 Super Bowl, CareerBuilder put up its ad account for review, supposedly on the basis of its poor showing in the USA Today ad popularity poll.  The whole thing blew up when ad agency Cramer-Krasselt quit the account very publicly, when a memo blasting CareerBuilder got published.

The  2005 ads were ranked in the top 10 by USA Today. One of them was named “Funniest Commercial of the Year” in TBS’s annual poll. This year, CareerBuilder’s no-pants ad ranked near the bottom in the USA Today poll. Monster’s fiddling beaver ad made it into the top 10.

Here’s what’s going on in the ERE community this week:

1. The dreaded employee referral?
2. Internet background checks on prospective hires
3. Being yourself and why it works
4. Is the 6.2% payroll tax incentive helping to hire more unemployed people?
5. How recruiters should respond to a vague sales manager
6. Featured group of the week: New England recruiters

1. The dreaded employee referral?

Simon Meth writes: “Popular opinion is that employee referrals are the #1 source of hire in a corporate environment. I believe that to be true. But are employee referrals the #1 source of quality hires? I doubt it! Following are some thoughts from my own experience. Your mileage may vary.

Can employee referrals backfire? Are they the number one source of quality hires?

2. Internet background checks on prospective hires

A community member asks, “Are any of you on the corporate or in-house recruitment side doing routine Internet searches on prospective candidates or new hires? If so, do you have legal counsel support for it? And, how is it going? I have been tasked by the VP of HR at my site to look into this. I have consulted two attorneys — their opinion is that its okay to do but know that the info is not reliable and should not be used for a go/no go decision. Our third party background check company won’t touch it either. I’m interested to know if any of you out there are doing it and if so, what kind of results are you getting?

Do you do Internet background checks? Let this member know in the forum.

3. Being yourself and why it works

Matthew Hakaim writes, “My ‘perfect world’ had just crumbled in a matter of seconds. I was faced with the need to find new work, and I had no clue what I wanted to do. A few weeks later I was introduced to a guy who owned a recruiting company that specialized in finding talent for the video game industry. After a few short conversations I had accepted a job at their firm as a recruiter. There was a slight hurdle to overcome though. I was not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination and I really had no clue what a recruiter was.

I like the simple message: be yourself and life will be a lot easier!

4. Is the 6.2% payroll tax incentive helping to hire more unemployed people?

Maureen Sharib posted some interesting information in the Compensation and Benefits group: “Employers who hire unemployed workers this year (after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax incentive, in effect exempting them from their share of Social Security taxes on wages paid to these workers after March 18, 2010. More here.

I have to wonder if these incentives will actually help employ more unemployed people. Is this the start to recruiters preferring active candidates over passive ones?

5. How recruiters should respond to a vague sales manager

Lee Salz started an interesting conversation in the Ask the Sales Hiring Expert group: “Sales managers are infamous for asking recruiters to find “great sales people.” Yet, that isn’t enough information to surface the right candidates. What should recruiters do so they don’t waste time spinning their wheels?

What’s the best way to nail down criteria for sales people from sales managers?

6. Featured group of the week: New England recruiters

The New England recruiters group is a networking group based around the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. While it has been dormant for some time, we’ve started to revitalize the community through some discussions and e-mails about where to take the group. Take a look at our most recent discussion about using Facebook as a recruiting tool or join up and start your own discussion!

To see what else you’ve been missing, check out the ERE community.

Reflecting on my Facebook and LinkedIn experiences got me thinking about the excellent article about Brazen Careerist that recently ran in the ERE Daily and how it is seeking to use social networking to change the way people demonstrate their ability to perform jobs. It was at this point that I had an “aha” moment in which I realized once and for all that Social networking is here to stay.

Forgive me for being a master of the obvious but I think that while many of us are actively using and benefiting from the latest in web technology, a good number of us have yet to fully contemplate the gravity of the changes that are currently going on right under our very noses. To begin comprehending the depths of what is going on, just observe any person under 30 for even a short amount of time and you will realize that connectivity and interconnectivity are becoming firmly woven into the fabric of our modern existence.

I then must ask myself why it has proven so attractive.

The answer lies in the fact that social networking is really the next logical extension of the Internet’s ability to create a level of interconnectedness that has previously been unknown to mankind. I think we can all agree that social networking, while providing tremendous entertainment value, is also popular because it allows us to be more productive and efficient while also serving to help us share knowledge, experiences, and opinions. It is probably not a stretch to assume that we have all grown personally and professionally as a result of social networking.

The next question that popped into my head was “How will social networking impact the use of pre-employment assessment?”

To answer this question, we must first examine the bigger question “How will social networking impact the world of staffing and hiring?” Of course there are many easy and obvious answers to this question, all related to increased interconnectivity and access to information about people and their work-related experiences. Here are some more specific things related to social networking and hiring that I think we can look forward to experiencing in the near future.

Death of the resume as we presently know it: The various elements of a resume are being teased apart and presented in a different format that is based more on profiles and portfolios that follow a standardized format.

Providing a capabilities presentation via the communication of ideas: The ideas that are driving the folks at Brazen Careerist are really interesting to me. The ability to use dialogue and discussion to present one’s capabilities, interests, and knowledge will have value to potential employers.

Creating a transportable, evolving identity that relates to the workplace: The various elements that are presented as part of a social networking profile are continuing to expand and evolve. It seems that we are moving toward standardized profiles that contain a wide range of information about who we are and what we have done. These profiles will grow and change as we do, allowing us a venue to remain highly current and relevant in our presentation of ourselves to others.

Sharing input, information, and opinions from others about work-related issues across moments in time and technology platforms: Social networking is a great way to get third-party information about someone whom you do not know. Relying on opinions and comments from others to build a real picture of the relevance of something or someone is standard for today’s online communities. This already has and will continue to be applied to the hiring paradigm.

The evolution of the concept of a “job.” One of the biggest factors that will continue to impact hiring is the impact that interconnectivity and technology will have on the idea of a “job.” We can expect to see jobs become a short-term proposition, with movement between work “moments” facilitated by the ability to easily and accurately identify persons whose skills and experience can be used to help companies reach specific short-term goals.

Assessment has a role in helping the hiring process evolve along the lines presented above. The overall way I see assessment making a strong contribution is in its ability to help create trait-based virtual identities that capture an individual’s ability to perform specific types of work within a specific environment. Here are some of the ways assessment will contribute to this end:

Replacing resumes with profiles: Matching persons with job opportunities and evaluating them relative to the requirements of a job or project will be greatly facilitated by the creation of profiles that include information provided by assessments. Adding information provided by assessments to one’s online profiles can help provide a more complete view of an individual in terms of their work-related identity. Important factors such as values, traits, personality elements, and interests can be summarized via assessment results that are added to one’s profile. The real key to this advancement lies in the acceptance of a standardization of the work-related information that comprises one’s profile so that one common language can be used to describe everyone. This will allow matching to be highly relevant and accurate while helping provide a standard way to discuss humans and the work we do.

Providing the ability to view a person from multiple external perspectives: In the world of performance management, 360-degree feedback represented a quantum leap. Efficient 360 was just not possible before web-based technology. The ability to collect work relevant information from a variety of sources, all linked via social networks, has already begun to make a difference. The next step will be using standardized assessments to provide all parties with a common, work-related language with which to discuss an individual relative to a specific set of work or environmental requirements.

Demonstrating relevant capabilities in real time: I fully expect there to be an intersection between social networking and gaming that allows individuals to demonstrate their work-related capabilities to potential employers. While sandbox worlds like Second Life may not have made an instant impact in the short run (when is the last time anyone even mentioned Second Life with regard to recruiting?), the rise of avatars doing virtual work is coming. In the short run, I think it is only a matter of time before we see collaborative real-time simulations that tap into traits, skills, and knowledge required for a wide range of jobs and careers. Job simulations have long been one of the most powerful and relevant forms of assessment used to predict job performance and I expect social networking and collaborative gaming to take simulations to the next level.

While some of the things I have mentioned will likely require artificial intelligence that is presently beyond our comprehension, the foundation will still be provided by the science of psychology and its ability to use scientific methods to understand and measure the traits and characteristics required to do a job within a specific environment. As with the evolution of employee selection thus far, an equal blend of technology science will be required. The result will be a much more exciting, dynamic, and relevant dialogue between employer and employee.

But would you get the company’s logo tattooed on your arm?

Michael Long did. And he only officially become an employee at tech hosting company Rackspace this month.

Here he is, though, at last week’s South By Southwest getting his tat as bemused onlookers take pictures.

The tagline on the video sums things up pretty neatly: “Fanatical! has now been defined.” That’s a double entendre, describing Long’s personal commitment and Rackspace’s corporate culture. Everywhere on the company website you find references to Fanatical Support, a mission as much as a slogan that Rackspace takes so seriously it’s registered it as a trademark.

I tried to get a hold of Long and his boss, Rackspace SVP Wayne Roberts. But no luck. I wanted to talk about the tattoo of course. But I also wanted to know how the company developed the kind of culture it did. Not everyone (hardly anyone?) will get a logo tat, but in developing the company’s new talent portal, Rackspace opened up the project to its employees. It crafted the core values statement, says Long, who was a consultant to the project.

You might know Long better as The Red Recruiter, progenitor of The Red Shoe Project. The project raises awareness, particularly in the recruiting community, for a San Francisco non-profit, My New Red Shoes, which provides indigent kids with new school clothes.

Since last September, Long has been consulting with Rackspace to develop its new recruiting site. (It was an ERE awards finalist three years ago for the best site.) He became so taken with the company, that when he was asked to take charge of its social recruiting and branding efforts, he said yes. Racker Talent launched earlier this month, and, as Long says in a blog posting, it’s a talent portal, not merely a career site.

“We wanted to create something that would allow future Rackers to peer through the window and gain an understanding around what the culture at Rackspace really meant,” he blogged. “The hope being that once they had a chance to see it, they would be more inclined to engage in dialog about potential opportunities.”

Racker Talent is still being developed. The pictures of the people at work and play will be supplemented by videos; the blog posts will grow. But the fundamentals of an engaging site are there. When you see the pictures of CEO Lanham Napier flexing in a Rackers t-shirt (red, coincidentally … or not) at SxSW, you certainly get the impression that there’s nothing starchy about this company. You certainly get to peer through the window.

The world is constantly changing and thus, recruitment is constantly changing. However, the basics of recruitment haven’t changed since its inception. Once a recruiting need is identified:

• Get clear on what type of talent is needed.
• Do research and sourcing to find potential matching talent.
• Convince the talent that they are interested in your job.
• Evaluate the talent’s match to your job.
• Negotiate an offer.
• Onboard the talent.

As people have changed and technology has changed, some of these steps look a very different. I am not arguing that technology is not extremely valuable and important. Technology has made many processes easier, but without the right people executing the process, that technology is of little use. If you take a state-of-the-art sniper rifle and give it to an individual with no marksmanship skills and no desire to kill, the sniper rifle is of little use as a tool. In the same way, if we provide the best technology in the world to recruiters who don’t have the basic skills and motivations to use it, it’s useless.

So, you desire to save your recruitment department from impending doom, instead of shopping for technology, start with the people. Based on my experience in both third party and corporate recruiting, there are five things you should look for and develop in your recruiting organization.

1. Curiosity. The best recruiters are those who are constantly trying to figure out new and different ways to do things: recruiters who are curious ask a lot of questions. They are on a constant quest to learn more about why things happen the way they do, so they will ask that awkward question that others might not because they want to know the answer. Curious recruiters are always trying new things. The curious recruiters are those who have been on Twitter for three years and were talking about sourcing before anyone else had heard of it.
2. Business Acumen. Respect as a recruiter comes when your hiring manager feels like you really understand her business and can help her make good people decisions. Let’s face it: most of our hiring managers aren’t good at hiring. They need a guide and facilitator to lead the way. But, they won’t follow a recruiter who can’t “talk shop” with them. Hire recruiters who study business. Teach your recruiting team to understand financials. Send your recruiters out to spend time within the business learning how things work and how the company makes money.
3. Sales Savvy. Recruiting is a sales job; let’s stop pretending that it’s not. We sell our hiring managers on our expertise and ability to help them. We market to and sell applicants the opportunity at our organization. We sell applicants to the hiring manager. Finally, we close the deal by negotiating an offer between the hiring manager and the applicant. If that’s not a sales job, I’m not sure what is. So, a great recruiter needs the same tools and abilities as a sales person in any other field. If you have recruiters who would question being sent to a sales training course, you need new recruiters. Great recruiters watch Glengarry Glen Ross and Tommy Boy as instructional videos–they see themselves as sales pros.
4. Creativity. Sourcing for talent is hard and getting harder by the day. While technology like social media has made it easier to find prospects, technology like caller ID has made it harder to actually reach them. What works in recruiting seems to change daily, so it has become a requirement to bring creativity and innovation to the table as a recruiter. One of the best cold-call recruiters I ever worked with was a master at leaving creative and interesting voicemails. She used a number of different techniques, and she experimented a lot. It was common that applicants would later tell me that of the dozens of voicemails from recruiters they received weekly, hers was the only one they returned because she sounded so interesting in her voicemail that they wanted to talk to her. The ability to generate new ideas and approaches is vital to surviving in recruitment today.
5. Courage. Recruiting top talent isn’t for the faint of heart. Sometimes, you’ve got to pick up the phone and call people who you are intimidated by. Sometimes, you’ve got to try a recruiting approach that others within your company may think is crazy. Sometimes, you’ve got to ask the really tough, awkward question that might mean you’ve got to start the search over from scratch. Recruiters who lack courage spend their days hiding behind computers posting job ads and talking themselves into sub-par talent. The best recruiters are bold and fearless. They are committed to doing what it takes to find their customers the right talent to propel their business forward.

As a recruiting leader, rather than worrying about your technology and how that might be impacting your success, spend time putting the right team in place. If you populate your team with the best talent, they will lead you to the technology that you need. And, more importantly, when you put new technology in their hands, they will know what to do with it. Just as a sniper rifle in the right hands is an incredible weapon, once you have the right people in the right seats on your team, investments in recruitment technology can become a tool to make your team a world-class recruitment machine.

(You’ll need a special invite, since it’s in private beta. JIBE is offering access to 100 ERE users. Enter ERE in the invite box.)

The site leverages networking sites Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to show job seekers who they know at companies posting job openings. That description, while accurate, doesn’t do justice to the elegance of the idea.

It’s a referral system that makes it simple for a job seeker to use their network to find out about the company and the job. But it works the other way, too. Recruiters can search the profiles and when they find someone interesting, they pay for access. Unlocking a candidate’s contact info also gives them access to the candidate’s connections at the company.

JIBE is aimed at Gen Y, more of whom will have Facebook profiles than they will LinkedIn. When a job seeker registers with Jibe, the site uses Facebook Connect to pull in the user’s work and education information to populate a candidate profile. Then, for every job on the site, users see who they know there.

They can link their Jibe account to LinkedIn, should they have a profile there, and to Twitter. Joe Essenfeld, Jibe’s CEO who walked me through the program last week at ERE, said other social and business networks will be added as demand grows.

The magic of JIBE is that it’s not attempting to create yet another network. It leverages what people already use and makes the connections more valuable.

As might be expected, JIBE has some fun, and interesting, and even useful bells and whistles. For instance, job postings get automatic rankings based on how often they are viewed. Candidate profiles likewise get ranked so recruiters can see who’s most in demand.

An earlier incarnation called localbacon (as in”bringing home the”) made its debut at TechCrunch50 last September. Its DNA was job board, but the business model was to charge job seekers 99 cents for each application. Just enough to discourage resume blasting, it was hoped, but not enough to stop qualified applicants.

LocalBacon got mixed reviews when it was written up on TechCrunch. And for the reasons you might think: Not enough value for job seekers; Why pay for what can be had for free on the major job boards?; Nothing much in it for employers.

Essenfeld, who spent most of his young career in the food industry, most recently as  COO for a late-night cookie delivery company, Insomnia Cookies, explained that JIBE incorporates a lot of what he and his team learned from localbacon.

“We wanted to have some sort of control on the number of applications that a user can send in a week,” he says. “So we can up with this system of credits. You get some when you join and you can get more by buying them or updating your profile. It’s a way to get people to think about the jobs instead of just shooting out emails.”

localbacon, which is still online, gave the team experience collecting job postings, and polishing and parsing them. They also developed filters, which JIBE uses to ensure that candidate profiles are easily imported into all the leading talent acquisition systems.

Besides announcing the private beta of the site, JIBE also announced it has gotten raised $875,000 in seed capital funding led by Polaris Venture Partners. Also participating in the funding are: Jason Calacanis, Ken and Ben Lerer from Lerer Media Ventrues, Josh and Jared Kushner from Launch Capital, and Zelkova Ventures.

Essenfeld says the funding will be used for further development, and for marketing and sales. He’s going out on the road for the next few weeks visiting college campuses to promote JIBE as a job searching tool for students, especially those seniors looking at a still-tough job market.

For the time being, JIBE is focusing on entry-level jobs and candidates from east of the Mississippi River.

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I just returned from ERE’s Spring Expo in San Diego, California, where hundreds of recruiters were upbeat and positive (quite possibly the most upbeat in several years.) Regardless of the subject being discussed, the outlook by nearly all was optimistic; that is, until the compensation department was mentioned. Anytime the conversation touched on the working relationship between compensation and recruiting, the tone of the conversation turned darker.

Phrases like “hard to work with” and “out of touch” emerged frequently, and words like dislike, roadblock, and yes even “hate” characterized the relationship. It’s like water and oil. Compensation and recruiting don’t seem to mix well and rarely work together smoothly. Here are some quick reasons that justify being critical of the compensation department.

Slow Offers: As recruiters, we know that the very best candidates have multiple offers and that you have to act quickly to successfully land them. Unfortunately, compensation doesn’t seem to be aware of the negative consequences associated with a failure to respond rapidly. All too often it takes compensation days, and in some cases weeks, to approve a final offer. For firms with lengthy processes, the added delay from compensation means that all too often top candidates will have already accepted an offer at another firm before an offer can even be presented.

Lowball Offers: You would think that by chance alone occasionally a recruiter would receive an offer from compensation that was “too high,” but every recruiter knows that compensation professionals seem to take pride in undervaluing talent and generating “lowball” offers consistently. Undoubtedly, at some point in your profession you have been asked to present an offer so ridiculously out of touch with reality that you were embarrassed to do so, knowing in advance that the offer would not only be rejected but damage the candidate’s perception of the organization and the hiring manager in particular.

Equal Doesn’t Cut It: Compensation departments routinely set uniform market pay targets across the organization. Regardless of the mission-criticality to the organization of the role, all comp ranges are set at some percent of market. (I won’t dive into the lack of data-based decision-making used to determine that target rate, as the entire concept is flawed.) As recruiters, we realize that easy-to-fill roles or roles with little performance differential between top and average performers should be compensated at market, but also that hard-to-fill and mission-critical roles should have target compensation rates above market. A uniform pay target penalizes the most valuable talent and rewards the least valuable

Ugly Job Descriptions: Great recruiters understand that job descriptions are “sales collateral.” If crafted well, they can excite potential candidates, but the reverse is also true. History tells us that if the compensation department is involved in producing job descriptions, they will most likely be long, dull, full of generic jargon, and littered with antiquated compensable factors that do nothing to excite but are easy to benchmark. To make matters worse, the woefully-out-of-date job descriptions of job structures rarely get refreshed at the rate the business itself is changing. As recruiters and former candidates ourselves, we know that out-of-date job descriptions that include dated terminology and approaches can scare away even mediocre applicants.

No Brand Connection: Recruiters are always striving to make it easy for potential candidates to learn about what features position their organization among the best. Unfortunately, the compensation department is of little help in building brand image because they’re hung up with secrecy. Organizations rarely publish pay and benefits information that is honest and compelling. Even organizations that pay extremely well and offer a bevy of unique people programs that impact employees’ lives find it difficult to get compensation to package information in a way that potential applicants and employees can easily grasp.

No Rewards: It’s well established in business that “what you measure and reward gets done.” Unfortunately compensation departments rarely if ever tie HR function and hiring manager compensation to great recruiting and retention. By not measuring and rewarding great talent acquisition/retention, compensation schemas send a clear message about the relative importance compared to those activities that are directly bonused. Because managers are not measured or rewarded on recruiting, recruiters end up suffering, as reading resumes and interviewing candidates is not a high priority. In order to increase their level of commitment, cooperation, and understanding, compensation professionals should have a significant percentage of their pay tied to successful recruiting.

Salary Survey Lag: The concept of using yearly salary surveys to at least partially determine market compensation is a sound one, unless of course, you’re in a market or region that is growing/evolving rapidly. In those cases, the rate at which market compensation is changing far outpaces the cycle time required to produce the benchmark data, making such research outdated upon completion. As many firms adjust such studies to account for aging using a uniform approach, it is likely that highly competitive talent areas where market compensation is growing exponentially will be undervalued in your schema.

Integration and Accountability: Most interdependent business functions are willing to work together to ensure that their efforts work toward accomplishing a common goal. To improve their chances of success, many leverage clear communication channels, documented processes, service-level agreements, and shared performance metrics. While service-level agreements and shared performance metrics have become common in recruiting, I have yet to see a functional example of such efforts emerging from compensation that unite the two departments under a shared set of goals.

Final Thoughts

Successful recruiting truly requires an integrated team effort. It takes a high level of cooperation between interdependent HR departments and hiring managers to produce optimal results. Each of the players need to understand how their actions directly impact one another and the overall success of the hiring process. Recruiters need a compensation department that provides a higher level of customer service and that accepts accountability for their role in ensuring that the organization attracts and retains the very best talent. Should that ever occur, “hate” would transition to “love” rather quickly.

I’ll lay out my hand and concerns in this article. We’ll address them in the upcoming debate. To get started here are a few of the big problems I have with BEI:

1. Is a structured BEI all that predictive? According to the oft-cited Schmidt and Hunter Validity and Utility of Selection Methods study, the correlation between a structured interview and on-the-job performance is .51, meaning only 25% (squaring the correlation coefficient) of the person’s performance can be predicted by the interview. This means that 75% is unexplained. Wouldn’t any structured interview give the same results? Also, what’s the predictive value of an unstructured BEI?
2. Past performance, not past behavior, is the best predictor of future performance. The same study clearly refers to past performance, not past behavior, as the best predictor of on-the-job success. Where’s the research that suggests that past behavior is superior to past performance? As a case in point, I conducted a virtual performance-based interview and assessment comparing Obama vs. McCain before the 2008 election using our 10-Factor Talent Scorecard. If you check it out, the predictions were right on the mark. Using behavior as the criteria, the predictions would have been lopsided.
3. Why is the criteria used to promote someone from within more predictive than hiring someone from the outside? It seems logical that the methodology companies used to promote those who are successful, which is based on their performance, should be applied to those hired from the outside. If so, this would mean emphasizing a track record of past performance doing comparable work in comparable situations combined with the person successfully taking on bigger roles with less experience. This seems like it would be a better predictor than using behaviors and KSAs.
4. BEI misses the forest for the trees. The big goal here is to maximize quality of hire, not conduct accurate assessments. While a professional interview and accurate assessment is part of this, more important is having a pool of highly qualified prospects who are willing to go through the assessment process and accept a fair offer of employment if given. This requires great sourcing, great recruiting skills, and strong negotiation skills, plus managers who are strong leaders who can attract top people to work on their team. I haven’t seen any science that looks at hiring from this end-to-end perspective.
5. If no one is in the forest, can you hear a tree fall? This is a pretty weak analogy, but the point is if no one uses the BEI properly, how can you consider it useful? Most managers find it too clinical, candidates can practice ahead of time, and the best candidates are turned off by it. Plus lack of enforcement and uniformity weakens the pretty weak predictive value even further.
6. The guidance on making the assessment seems to be limited. What’s a good answer? I’ve looked at dozens of BEI rating sheets and each one is relatively subjective. Statistical process control techniques would suggest that wide variances on any factor are indicative of a process that’s out of control. SPC is a valid scientific technique used in six sigma, but seems to be ignored by those in the I/O psychology community.
7. Where is the scientific evidence that companies that use BEI outperform their peers? Wouldn’t this be the big Kahuna? In Jim Collin’s Good to Great, there is no indication that BEI was why they hired stronger people. Could it be that there is something else, other than accurate assessments, that drive quality of hire?
8. There are other techniques that could increase accuracy and improve quality of hire. In Hire With Your Head, I make a strong case that a mashup consisting of a list of pre-hire performance objectives, a few in-depth performance-based interviewing questions, an evidence-based ranking system, strong recruiting and sourcing skills, plus involved hiring managers is the key to maximizing quality of hire. Why don’t the I/O psychologists seek out better techniques, rather than relying on outdated less-reliable methods? One way would be to model all of the managers who consistently hire great people and use this as the framework of a new and better process.
9. BEI is counterproductive by eliminating the top half from consideration. Since the BEI process assumes the person has 100% or more of the experience required, it eliminates those high-potential people who get more done with less experience from consideration. The best people are looking for a career move involving job stretch, learning, and growth. By forcing everyone through the same funnel, some of the best people voluntarily opt out early, since they find the process demeaning, clinical, and one-directional. By inadvertent default then, the only people considered are those with all of the basic qualifications and those looking for a lateral transfer — aka, the bottom-half.
10. The BEI is logically flawed. A correlation between two factors doesn’t mean that one is the cause of the other. For example, just because someone has all of the qualifications and behaviors, doesn’t mean the person will be a top performer, even if all top performers have the same qualifications and behaviors. This is similar to the logical “asserting the consequent” argument. Clearly we’d all agree that there is a high correlation between the number of troops required to win a big battle, but having more troops in the field doesn’t mean they’re going to cause the size of the battle. While having the behaviors might necessary, it’s certainly not sufficient. The relationship between the manager might be a problem. The person might not be motivated to do the work, even if competent. The person might not fit with the team, or company culture, or might not want to work with less-than-current technology. These factors, among others, represents the 75% not covered by the BEI.

Now all of this might be the ramblings of an old-line recruiter who has been in the field too long. On the other hand, maybe the scientists never had to close a top performer for a troubled company with limited funding, and then guarantee the person would actually deliver top-notch performance for at least a year. Maybe they should try to do this and then modify their science accordingly. If they do, I suspect they’ll come to the same conclusion that BEI doesn’t improve quality of hire, and in many cases actually causes it to decline.

Among those in the ERE Expo audience was a recruiter from another tax firm, Crowe Horwath, a company name that also doesn’t roll off the tongue like Coke, Pizza Hut, Nike, and Google. Also in the audience was a defense contractor in San Diego without the name-brand of Northrop Grumman.

Gotkin’s company has to compete with the biggest four accounting firms for talent. (McGladrey’s the fifth or sixth biggest.) Here’s a rundown of suggestions not only from Gotkin, but from others in the crowd. Yeah, some aren’t new, but they’re good reminders that other recruiters who aren’t working for Google have the same challenges.

• Do things differently from competitors. Best practices are all fine and good, but they’re not always the answer. Companies should be creative enough to find their own novel ways of getting attention.
• Use interns. At McGladrey, they’ve made good bloggers. One did a series of six candid posts that delved into the goods and bads of her gig, including the mistakes she made and what she learned.
• Be more flexible than big companies. “We can typically respond more quickly” than big firms, Gotkin says. Smaller and mid-size companies should take advantage of their (hopefully) lower amount of bureaucracy compared to larger competitors.
• Play up what you do well. Imagine a basketball team with no one over 6’7” trying to compete with an opponent with two 7-footers at the power forward and center spots. The shorter team will try to win with quickness, rather than trying to out-jump the pogo sticks on the other team. Similarly, Gotkin tells recruits they can get a broader range of skills, more quickly, than they can at the bigger firms.
• Don’t waste money on the wrong things. If your problem is resume volume, spend your time and energy on getting more people interested in your company. If your problem, on the other hand, is the quality of resumes, offer incentives (such as skewing employee referral bonuses toward actual hires, not just names of potential employees) to improve resume quality. Make sure you’re spending your dollars and time where they’re needed.
• Don’t assume that spending more money on outside vendors is necessarily better than using your own brains on staff. Gotkin said his company hammered out a referral campaign in a couple of hours of brainstorming. “We didn’t need to hire an expensive ad agency to figure it out.”
• Use social media. OK: this is nothing new, Gotkin says. He jokes that people could spend most of their time just attending conferences about social media. But, he says, there’s still the perception that social media recruiting is a time-suck. He says you’d be surprised how much you can do, and in “not as much time you can think.” McGladrey is into blogging, among other things, but also podcasts, using an in-house studio, which are marketed through his blog posts. “We do it all internally and it costs us nothing. Not a dime.” Gotkin’s blog posts take him maybe 1/2 an hour. He thinks of the blog as  a “virtual brochure, updated often, with dynamic content.” Along these lines: The defense contractor mentioned earlier is jazzed about TweetMyJobs. “If I don’t do it, I’m left behind,” says the defense recruiter, referring particularly to younger employees. “This is what they’re using now.”
• Don’t stress out about attracting people who aren’t for you. If you work at McGladrey, your clients will be mid-size companies, and as mentioned earlier, you’ll get to work closely with them pretty rapidly. If your goal is to be servicing the biggest companies in America, traveling like nuts, a McGladrey job may not be for you.
• Open your house. At his previous job, at MITRE, Gotkin said the company used its own facilities to bring in 150-200 candidates, and would get 20-25 hires out of it. The costs included cookies, finger food, and drinks. “Other than that, the expenses were minimal,” he says. Job fairs cost $2,000 – $4,000, Gotkin says, and of course involved not just MITRE but its competitors, too. Meeting people in person helped overcome the weaknesses of resumes (they can make poorer candidates seem better, and better candidates seem poorer). Candidates referred by employees  provided the plurality of open-house attendees.