This isn’t uncommon. Joblessness increases the risk of suicide.

And yesterday, the New York Times ran an article about companies that discriminate against the unemployed.

As recruiters, our routine actions can be a direct blow to the emotional health of hundreds — even thousands — of people we’ll never meet. Our inaction, our silence, our casual attitudes, can add to someone’s set of worries. Our decisions impact families. Lives.

Stop. Think. Before dismissing entire categories of people. Our economy, this job market — they are complex. Simplistic thinking (e.g., “all the good ones are working”) doesn’t hold up. “Unemployed” is an easy filter to apply. Just like “years of experience.” Only junior recruiters and rookie managers rely on such criteria to assess talent.

Real recruiters and real managers ask:

• Has this person done this job successfully in the past?
• Does this person have the attitude and the will to get the job done?
• Will this person help the company save money, achieve goals, serve customers, or improve products?

I’ve said it before. Unemployment is getting worse because of advancements in technology and improvements in worker productivity. Companies experiencing record revenue and profit growth are laying off workers by the thousands. We are going to continue to see perfectly good workers among the ranks of the unemployed. As recruiters, we can’t do much about the shrinking number of available positions. But we can ensure that the process is fair, transparent, and respectful.

We can remember that our work directly impacts the lives — and livelihoods — of real people.

1. Operational Excellence: best price with lowest inconvenience
2. Product Leadership: innovation that delivers the best product
3. Customer Intimacy: deep customer relationships for customized results

The book is full of great (albeit a bit dated) examples of companies that “choose their customers and narrow their focus.” A few modern examples of my own: Apple comes to mind as a Product Leader. Customers expect the folks in Cupertino to turn out innovative products. They will pay more for the privilege of being the first with an i-anything. Wal-Mart is the long-standing example of operational excellence; Amazon is the Internet equivalent. Customers expect the best price, convenience and speed. Starbucks is great example of customer intimacy. Half-pump skinny extra hot vanilla latte? Not a problem for the Starbucks baristas.

The Disciplines Applied to Recruiting Leadership

Each time I approach a new recruiting challenge, or am asked to lead a new team, I interview the “customer” – the hiring managers (or their leaders). (And by the way I’ll be talking sourcing leadership in Florida.) It’s become habit to understand what they’re after – a fast, low cost process, the best talent in the marketplace or something else altogether. Of course, many managers will reflexively declare that they want a fast, low cost process and the best talent. As a recruiting leader, you would be foolish to promise both. Yes. Foolish.

If your customer is indeed looking for the very best talent in the marketplace you simply cannot promise to deliver the goods quickly and cheaply and remain credible. I’ll let you in on a secret: life is much easier if you declare a discipline and deliver predictable value.

Operational Excellence and Recruiting

Many recruiting organizations strive to achieve operational excellence; delivering the right talent just in time. In the right environment operational excellence — where time is substituted for cost — is achievable. Efficiently run retail, customer service or college recruiting organizations come to mind.

• Keys to success: Efficiency, standardization, predictability and metrics
• Structure: Command and control management, centralized, highly trained process-driven recruiters
• Sourcing: Active and semi-active candidate sourcing
• Technology: ATS aligned with recruiting workflow, online assessments, mobile and remote technology

Product Leadership Recruiting

Recruiters in Silicon Valley likely recognize this model. Startups and hot tech companies are competing for the best engineers. A superstar software developer can make or break a company or product. It is important to distinguish between hiring the best talent possible and hiring the best candidate. Hiring the best talent possible involves understanding the entire talent landscape, identifying by name and accomplishment the top talent, and using a variety of persuasive techniques to get the talent to move. Product leadership recruiting is required when only the best in a particular field – the award winners, the Ivy League graduates, the high achievers – will produce necessary results for the company’s success.

• Keys to success: Creativity, aggressiveness, decisiveness
• Structure: Organic, ad-hoc teams, senior recruiting talent in all jobs
• Sourcing: Passive candidate sourcing, research, and competitive intelligence
• Technology: Social media, CRM, knowledge sharing and information/data harnessing

The Trap of Customer Intimacy

Many recruiting organizations, patchworked together over time, take on the characteristics of a customer intimate organization, by default. Customer intimate recruiting teams are viewed as client-driven, prone to create a new solution for every recruiting challenge, collaborative, and relationship-driven. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, unless one of the other two models is what your hiring managers really crave.

• Keys to success: Collaboration, problem-solving, relationship-building
• Structure: Flexible teams, functionally-aligned or decentralized, strong A-Z recruiter
• Sourcing: Passive or active candidate sourcing as needed; ever-evolving
• Technology: ATS with strong talent management integration, surveys and feedback, strong internal communication tools

If you run a recruiting organization for a mid- or large company, it’s likely that you have recruiting teams (or recruiters) that fall into all three categories. The authors of the book make compelling arguments for having each team declare the value it provides, focus its efforts and communicate and deliver that value consistently. The biggest mistake, as I see it, is trying to be all things to all clients. It is much better to declare your value than struggle to deliver something you’re ill equipped to deliver.

Imagine articulating these scenarios with your leadership:

• “Our process is fast, efficient and we’re great at hiring field technicians, but we don’t have the in-house talent to recruit a CTO, so we’re going to engage an executive search firm.”
• “We focus on building a pipeline of top software engineers; we outsource our customer service hiring to a reputable RPO firm.”
• Each function is assigned a senior-level recruiter who works closely with managers and HR to fill each position as it opens. It’s not the fastest process, but hiring managers feel supported.”

Is this a more realistic approach to leading an internal recruiting function? Do recruiting leaders have the luxury of determining their focus and strategy? Would companies find a value discipline approach to prioritizing recruiting resources acceptable? What do you think? Could the Value Disciplines be applied in your organization?

In pursuit of a gang of home invaders, Charlie the math genius instructs his FBI agent brother to get him “tons of data” about the people of Los Angles. The brother, a math Luddite, wants to know why he needs more — not less — data to find the criminals. Charlie explains that he’s built an algorithm that can filter through all of the social connections in Los Angeles. The more data he has, the more likely he is to find the pattern that will identify the robbers. Or something like that. I’m more like Don, the tough brother.

What struck me is that Charlie’s television math describes our expectations of social media when applied to recruiting.

Social media exposes recruiters to “tons of data” about the relationships of potential candidates: relationships to other people, relationships to companies, relationships to skills or functions, relationships to people, places, and things that may have no immediate bearing on their role as a candidate, but might give us clues about how to find more prospects to recruit.

Despite access to an unprecedented amount of social data, most recruiting organizations have yet to report overwhelming success at social recruiting. Why is this? Is it because social recruiting is merely early-adopter hype?

I don’t think so. I think social recruiting represents a potential breakthrough for our industry. We have a way to go, however, before we see more than anecdotal, one-off success. Two factors, in particular, must be solved, before social recruiting (the use of social media to attract and recruit employees) becomes widely adopted.

The first factor is scale. Social recruiting works when practiced on a small scale. Of course it does. For example, a recruiter searches Twitter to find engineers discussing Agile software development lifecycle models. She finds a dozen or so likely suspects. She does further research by reading their blogs, and checking their LinkedIn profiles. Note the amount of data available to her. She narrows her focus to five prospects, based on what she learns. She follows these five Twitter users, and eventually develops a relationship with them. At some point, she feels comfortable enough to present her opportunity. Two of the five are interested.

Successful social recruiting? You bet. Scalable? Not for most organizations. This type of recruiting is not predictable or efficient. The recruiter might have spent hours researching her candidates, only to find that, while the prospects were appropriate for her position, they weren’t interested. The time and methods used to “develop relationships” are unpredictable and difficult to repeat with a large number of prospects. While this example is not the only method of social recruiting, it does serve to illustrate why many talent leaders are wary of social recruiting. Results cannot be mass produced.

And, because speed is critical in our business, we’re interested in recruiting methods that yield fast, predictable results.

The other factor that inhibits social recruiting success is nuance. In the example above, the recruiter is looking for very specific experience. When she proactively searches for these experts, she is able to find prospects. Social recruiting efforts based on posting, or advertising (such as posting positions on Facebook or Twitter), have not, to date, been nuanced enough to be any more effective than traditional job boards. In fact, because these tools were not built with recruiting in mind, most of these postings are even less targeted than postings on traditional job boards.

As I have (painfully) learned, job postings, in their traditional sense, are most effective when broadcast to as large a population as possible. Just like Charlie’s algorithm, posting a job on a big job board exposes the job to a large number of applicants, from which recruiters can cull the few relevant results. Posting jobs on social media sites is not efficient enough or differentiated enough from existing job posting methods to declare success.

Moreover, “building relationships” with prospects who don’t fit your need can be overwhelmingly time and resource consuming.

Taken individually, each of the popular social networking tools lack one or more of the elements required for large-scale social recruiting:

• Candidate segmentation — The ability to mine the social tools to find prospects who fit a narrowly defined set of skills or parameters is critical for effective recruiting.
• 1:many messaging — Allow employers to broadcast timely information about the company to a large audience.
• Socially based relationship development — The ability to share information, status updates, links, and other media and engage in 2-way communication — work-related or not — is important to the relationship development process.
• Finally, 1:1 messaging is necessary as relationships evolve; the ability to communicate privately with individuals is critical.

Keep at it

Social recruiting faces the challenge of producing big-scale, nuanced results. I think back to the early days of “social recruiting” — when the term was brand new. Early adopters (myself included) had high hopes that access to such plentiful and rich data would yield perfectly matched candidates. I believed the big numbers ensured that soon everyone would participate in social media in one form or another (that seems to continue to be the case); exposing us to anyone and everyone we might want to hire. Social media penetration in the U.S. is at an all-time high, but we can only handle so much of this powerful fire hose of information.

The truth is, we still haven’t figured out how to automate and personalize the recruiting experience simultaneously. My hope is that social recruiting revolutionizes the industry by making the process more efficient while providing a personalized, positive experience for each candidate.

We have a bit of work to do before social recruiting fulfills its promise. Recruiting technology vendors must invest in the problems of scale and nuance. In my opinion, even newer technologies must be built to leverage the data. Better algorithms. The use of artificial intelligence, data mining, and simulation methods. In the meantime, I applaud the brave recruiters who see the possibility of social recruiting and continue to experiment and report back on how to put all of this relationship data to work.

Essentially, Brightkite, like its competitors in the location-based social networking space, allows users to tell others where they are, using real-time geolocating technology. Why, I wondered, would I want to know where my online (or even real-life) friends were at every minute of the day?

Turns out my colleague was a year ahead of his time.

Like a half million other users, I am addicted to Foursquare. I check-in everywhere I go. I accumulate points and badges. I want to become mayor of something. My Foursquare updates are pushed out to my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Why, my friends want to know. Why share such minutia?

And what is the hoopla around location-based apps like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, and Whrll? Why are we suddenly hearing about stalwarts of the web — Google, Facebook, and Yelp–– rushing to include check-in ability to their services? Why is this important? And how does it relate to recruiting?

Why am I so enthusiastic? Right now, primarily, because it’s fun. It’s like a game, getting more points than my friends (there is a leader board, updated weekly), collecting badges, becoming mayor or toppling the mayor of an establishment. There are also tangible benefits. Mayors sometimes get free stuff; checking in sometimes activates special coupons for Foursquare users. Then there are the networking possibilities. More than once, I have checked in somewhere, to learn that a friend or colleague was nearby, leading to an impromptu meeting.

Why all the hoopla? What’s new about this? To marketers, location-based social networking represents a new way to reach customers, right at the point of purchase or action. Consider these examples of how location-based services are creeping into our digital lives to become indispensible tools:

• Municipalities have opened transportation data to support new apps that track bus and train services, real-time
• Real estate apps make it easy to instantly determine what properties are for sale in the area and direct buyers to open houses, real time
• Big consumer brands have launched campaigns that allow users to check-in at grocery aisles to receive product discounts or contribute to charitable organizations, real-time

To application developers, location-based social networking provides a layer of very compelling data. Time-stamped location-based data has the potential to reveal very specific, predictive information about actionable patterns and behavior. For example, think about ice cream retailers. What if they were able to offer coupons to customers based on location/temperature and behavioral patterns? More specifically, if an ice creamery knew that customers purchase less ice cream when temperatures fall five degrees, they could distribute coupons just as temperatures dip, just as customers walk past the ice cream shop, thus increasing sales, just-in-time.

Predictive pattern recognition, hyper-local promotions, real-time response. What does this have to do with recruiting? Truth is, I don’t quite know yet. I do know that it is important, and a precursor to new recruiting technologies. As the advertising industry goes, so goes recruiting (think of the move from print to online, search engine marketing, and the use of video). Certainly there will be creative applications of location-based marketing in college recruiting and event recruiting.

Location-based social networking is yet another sign that we have entered the mobile age.

It’s likely that these tools will soon be integrated into prominent social networking applications, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Checking in will become second nature, like following or linking. For many, the benefits of participation will outweigh the concerns about privacy, and creative employers will think of ways of using these services to attract and impress jobseekers. The question is, who will be the first to incorporate location-based technologies into the recruiting process? Who will be the mayor of talent acquisition?

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments.

Tweetie ($2.99). Do you keep your network informed via Twitter? Tweetie makes communicating via Twitter easy and fast. Tweetie provides all of the functionality of the twitter.com website, such as saved searches, inline web browsing, and the ability to manage followers. In addition, Tweetie supports navigation between multiple Twitter accounts, easy retweeting, automatic URL shortening, and uploading Twitpic pictures. I find Tweetie easy to use when tweeting from conferences. There are other, free, Twitter-for-iPhone apps, such as Twitterific, but I find that the additional features of Tweetie make it worth the small investment.

SearchOnTheGo ($9.99). SOTG is the first iPhone app written especially for recruiters by recruiters! SOTG turns your keywords into a full-blown Boolean search string. SOTG automatically generates search strings for resume searches, blog searches, PDF and Excel file formats, and more. SOTG will also execute web profile searches and public LinkedIn profile searches. After executing the search on the iPhone, users can save the search, email the search, or review results real time. Pretty nifty, especially if you dislike writing Boolean strings. Currently, SOTG returns only Google results. I would love to see other search engines included in future versions.

LinkedIn (free). Can’t live without LinkedIn? Then make sure you download the iPhone companion. The mobile version provides basic LinkedIn functionality — search, status updates, invites and more — for recruiters on the go. When meeting someone in person, try linking in instantly, instead of exchanging business cards. I am especially impressed with the Address Book Integration, which uploads contact info to the iPhone in one click. Unfortunately, there is no ability to receive or manage LinkedIn Groups information.

AgileMobile ($9.99). It was not until I joined Yahoo! that I became a big fan of instant messaging. Used properly, IM can improve the speed and quality of communication. Phone calls and emails are best for initial outreach, but nothing beats IM for quick confirmations and clarifications. AgileMobile is an all-in-one instant messaging service for mobile phones. Agile allows instant chat-on-the-go with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, and GoogleTalk. This kind of agnostic service is great for recruiters, who can communicate with candidates or colleagues regardless of IM service provider. AgileMobile also enables voice chat and media sharing.

Interview Pro (1.99). Technically, Interview Pro is an application developed for jobseekers. And a pretty clever one at that. This app provides a list of “50 of the most common behavioral interview questions.” Each question is accompanied by an answer that helps candidates navigate the interviewer’s intent and expectations. The questions are divided into categories such as “Team Dynamics,” “Planning,” and “Success Factors.” The interview questions are not all “behavioral” and the app does not come with instructions for the interviewer (such as how and when to drill down to get complete answers). With a few modifications, however, an application like this could be very useful to recruiters and hiring managers. Imagine if your hiring managers were able to download a custom interview guide. Never fear: the makers of Search on the Go tell me that they are working on just such an app.

beamMe (free or $1.99 for subscription updates). Finally, I can feel comfortable leaving the house without business cards! beamMe allows users to exchange vCards by inputting an email address, mobile phone #, or @Twitter id. The recipient is directed to a secure website, where he or she can download a vCard (including a photo or logo, and links to URL or Twitter id). Genius! The only downside is the subscription scheme; so far the free version works well for me. I’m not sure I want to be billed $2/month to continue to receive product upgrades.

There you have it. The future is here!