by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

Becoming a leading-edge recruiter is an admirable goal few corporate recruiters strive to achieve. Not only must a leading-edge recruiter routinely demonstrate a marked increase in positive business impact over other recruiters, but they must consistently monitor trends, devise new approaches, benchmark against emerging practices, and constantly fight with colleagues often resistant to trying something new.

Historically, staying on top of trends and new approaches was relatively easy, as there were only a few companies isolated in a few narrow geographies that one needed to watch. The War for Talent in 1997 certainly drew a lot of attention to the practices of technology firms in “silicon hubs” like California’s Silicon Valley (home to Google, Cisco, Intuit, Facebook, Twitter, and HP) or Seattle, Washington’s, Silicon Forest (home to Microsoft and Amazon), but up until a few years ago there was no formal process to identify where leading-edge practices were emerging and who was developing them.

ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards and articles by global strategy advisors like Kevin Wheeler and ourselves, who have advised and studied the practices of companies in more than 40 nations, are helping leading-edge recruiters focus their attention where evolution is occurring.

The Hotbeds of Evolution and Innovation are Shifting

No one can argue that rapid growth of the technology sector in 1997 left many technology companies desperate for talent, and that desperation drove many charged with recruiting for such organizations to both collaborate and innovate new practices to help close gaps in supply and demand. While not cheap, importing labor and shifting work to geographies where the supply of labor exceeded the demand has been the dominant approach.

For more than a decade such solutions have helped allocate work across an emerging global talent market, but now many of the geographies that picked up work are also struggling to source qualified talent to staff available projects. While China and India may have a surplus of unemployed/underemployed people, they too have a shortage of skilled professional labor.

As global economic growth focuses on Asia, desperation of firms in Asia to keep pace with the demand for talent is driving more and more talent management focus on excellence in execution, collaboration, evolution, and innovation.

With smaller company sizes, nations like Australia and New Zealand are earning a reputation as being home to progressive companies willing to try new practices. Nations like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, to name only a few, are channeling state investment dollars into industry-sector-focused universities and research parks that elevate public/private collaboration to new levels.

However, nowhere can one find as much focus on recruiting leadership than in India and China. Twelve years ago production standards in both nations were subpar, work ethics were questionable, and infrastructure was lacking, but today both nations have firms that excel in world-class engineering design, international trade, offshoring, and manufacturing. Over the course of those 12 years, firms in India and China have not only studied and adopted Western talent management practices, they have improved upon them if not in design, most certainly in execution.

Examples of Progressive Recruiting and Talent Management Practices

While ERE readers will need to wait until March to learn about which companies won a recruiting excellence award (with finalists announced soon), what follows are a few practices becoming common among leading employers in India based on our work and a review of the ERE Award Applications. Mentally compare this list of practices to those that are currently in operation at your organization.

General Recruiting Practices

• Prioritization of key jobs and skills. Recruiting resources focuses on the most critical 40%.
• Pre-need hiring. Talent pools mapped and individuals assessed prior to requisition opening.
• Tight integration with sales/operations to drive workforce planning. Recruiting leaders often sit side by side with sales and operations leaders during development meetings to coordinate workforce planning efforts.

Employee Referral Program Practices

• Dedicated referral teams employing a proactive referral strategy in which recruiters personally solicit the names of the very best from the very best employees and managers. (In one organization this approach produced 47% of all hires, garnered a 66% employee participation rate, and consistently produced the highest quality hires, all with a cost-per-hire 20% lower than other hiring channels.)
• Employee referral processes that target corporate alumni in order to boomerang them back. (This approach often produces better results than any other alumni recruitment effort.)
• Onsite referral fairs that allow referred candidates to receive on-the-spot interviews and/or offers.
• Online referral status tracking that provides feedback on status and alerts when a referral’s status changes.
• Established referral targets for individual managers and teams.
• Required pre-assessment of referrals by referring employee. To eliminate poor quality referrals many programs require that employees pre-assess their referral and share the assessment as part of the submission process.
• Service-level agreements that guarantee feedback to the referring employee within 72 hours of submission and help-desk response to inquiries within eight hours.

Metrics and Business-case-related Practices

• Advanced statistical analysis processes including six sigma assessment, value chain analysis, and force field analysis for assessing and improving recruiting process performance.
• Quantification of the direct-dollar impact of new hiring processes on corporate revenues. (In one example, the organization identified that reducing time-to-fill in revenue-generating positions by 40% could increase revenue by millions of dollars.)
• Development of “hiring accuracy” metrics that assesses and quantify hiring success/failure rates.
• Distributed real-time recruiter productivity measures. (One organization found that simply measuring and reporting productivity increased it 70% in one year.)

Recruitment Marketing and Branding Related Practices

• Development of in-house recruitment marketing teams capable of supporting frequent communication design/delivery channel changes.
• Using search engine optimization techniques to measurably increase visibility of jobs and brand messaging online.

College-recruiting-related Practices

• Using ambassador programs to build relationships with top students and faculty.
• Adoption of CRM approaches that let recruiters communicate frequently with students via text messages about events in the students’ lives, such as “best of luck” messages during final exams.
• Development of robust campus performance assessment processes and metrics.
• Use of contests, quizzes, and projects to excite top students and more accurately assess them.
• Engagement of market intelligence data to identify employee value propositions that better engage students.
• Online professional training courses covering topics that improve the quality of potential candidates and attract top students to participate in the application process.
• Leverage alumni to give tech talks, classroom lectures, and on-campus workshops.
• Curriculum guidance. Many organizations work closely with academic leaders and key faculty to align curriculum with industrial need, ensuring that courses focus on practical knowledge and skill development that is immediately relevant.

Training and Development Practices

• Extensive focus on deep enterprise training, development, and leadership preparation. (One organization has built the world’s largest leadership and development training center, exceeding in size GE’s famous Crotonville facility. The 270-acre, $60-million plush facility has a hotel, food center, employee care center, theater, and research facility.)
• Overseas residential training programs. Recent grads are frequently provided an opportunity to work internationally for a period of several months prior to accepting a stationary role in their home country.

Are You Leading or Lagging?

I hope you agree that this list represents some pretty progressive practices and strategies. While India’s leadership position is certainly open to debate, there can be no doubt that staffing challenges in India and China are forcing leading firms like Infosys, Tata, Aricent, Reliance, and Wipro to focus on execution and innovation. Some might argue that lack of government regulation and lower cost of labor enable them to do things you couldn’t do in the U.S. or Western Europe, to which my response is simple: it’s not the job of a leader to whine about what they can’t do, but rather to find a way to do what they need to do.

Not all organizations in India are on the leading edge when it comes to talent management and even those that are have areas that need improvement. The point is that if you want to be on the leading edge you need to be aware of other organizations on the edge, and that moving forward more and more of the firms you need to monitor will be in India, China, and other Asian nations.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking recruiting is a conservative profession. If you’re a “defensive type,” super patriot, or resist being data-driven, you will likely dismiss our contention that the U.S. is/has slipped into second place with regard to recruiting leadership. If, however, you are open-minded, I suggest that you revisit this list of practices and use it to help determine where your firm needs to be if it’s going to seriously compete for talent in the emerging global labor market. Companies in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and China have already started recruiting top scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and finance professionals from leading corporations in the U.S. and Western Europe. The battle is heating up. Are you more prepared to fight or give up?

We are looking for professionals who are unhappy/angry with the status quo, and who are willing to confront barriers and “find a way” to help us lead our industry. If you’ve got passion for your profession, well-thought-out ideas about a better way, and are angry with antiquated approaches that no longer work, submit your anger statement to our career website at www.getthehelloutofmyway.com. -Fictitious website

This might sound like an outrageous idea on the surface, but I’m recommending that as part of your recruiting strategy you target hiring “angry people.”

I’m not talking about grumpy people who kick puppy dogs or scream at slow changing traffic lights, but rather people with “professional anger.” Recruiting professionals who are angry with “the way things are currently done” and who have a track record of overcoming resistance and making quantum improvements can help your organization break free from the status quo and innovate.

It’s About More than Passion

Many firms already target passionate people who love their work, but passion by itself doesn’t always breed discontent for things that are no longer working as they should. Individuals who are professionally angry are often not only passionate, but also possess a relentless drive to innovate around practices and approaches that no longer accomplish what the organization needs done. They differ from rebels who often resist authority, and have a track record of successfully overcoming resistance to change and barriers to execution. If they can be faulted for anything, it’s that they are often unhappy even when they succeed because they are relentless about doing things better. While sometimes difficult to deal with, organizations should stop trying to change or fix such individuals and instead consider them as corporate assets and celebrate how they drive innovation.

Examples of Angry Leaders

There are many notable angry people in the business world, including:

• Steve Jobs, who gets angry over mediocre products.
• Jack Welch, who built a great company in part based on his anger towards bureaucracy and boundary builders.
• James Dyson, who was so angry at his own vacuum cleaners design that he endured through more than 5,000 design revisions before he was satisfied with it.
• Tiger Woods, who gets frustrated with himself whenever he lets the competition get to close.
• Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, who gets angry at mediocre customer service.
• Tom Peters, an angry strategy consultant frustrated with the slow rate of change in management. Incidentally, Tom is by far the strongest and most vocal advocate for hiring and retaining angry people. He recommends that you seek out leaders who are “Angry people! [angry with the status quo].”

The Benefits of Hiring Angry People

There are many reasons why you should hire, retain, and listen to angry people. While generalizations are just that, for the most part professionally angry people are:

• Self-motivated — they don’t need a lot of pep talks in order to get excited. They are perpetually excited about winning, and then winning again.
• Frank talkers — there’s little hesitation when they see something wrong and they won’t pull punches or lie to you. If you want direct “Simon Cowell” type feedback, they deliver.
• Relentless about searching for answers — even if they don’t devise innovations needed on their own, their drive leads them to seek out solutions from others wherever they may reside.
• Driven to best the competition — they are not satisfied with merely meeting goals or being the best within the firm; they focus on developing solutions that are superior to every other firm in the industry.
• Able to overcome barriers — while many may be tolerant of delays and roadblocks, these individuals expect to push through these barriers. Their approach can be characterized as “we must get this done, we must find a way.”
• Able to learn from mistakes — angry people are most always risk-takers, so they invariably make mistakes. Fortunately, they don’t let their mistakes slow them down, and they learn rapidly from each error.
• Undervalued — angry professionals may be periodically unemployed as a result of their frustration with managers or vice versa. However, most are employed but relatively easy to recruit away because so many managers either under-appreciate their value or tire of having to tell them to be patient. Tony Fadell, the science engineer behind the iPod, is an excellent example. Unable to garner funding to build a hard-disc based music player on his own, Tony joined Real Networks only to leave for Apple weeks later.

Angry People Are Easy to Find

In most cases, individuals with professional anger are easy to find. Of course these individuals don’t list anger on their resume, but you can find them through a variety of traditional and nontraditional recruiting channels, including:

• Employee referrals — your employees probably already know individuals with professional anger and will identify them for you if encouraged to do. Make courting such individuals a high priority in your referral program and clearly describe what characteristics you’re looking for (i.e. a vocal proponent, a track record of pushing through barriers, someone who is not totally satisfied after achieving success, someone who’s never complacent, and an outside-the-box thinker with extremely high expectations, etc.)
• Ask your own angry people — go directly to your own angry employees and ask them where you would find other people like them. Ask them what they read and watch, where they can be found on the Internet, and what events both social and professional they frequent. Then ask them to be an “angry professional talent scout.”
• Social networks — encourage your own angry employees to make it quite visible on their social network profiles that they are angry professionals. Encourage them to form network groups that angry professionals can join, and leverage network contacts to attract these individuals.
• Forums and chat rooms — if you post a problem or situation on a professional forum or chat site highlighting your deep frustration, you can be assured that others with a similar frustration level will comment.
• Blogs — many angry professionals find the need to vent their anger and a significant number of them do that venting through blog postings. Have your recruiters and employees let you know whenever they read an angry blog covering your industry or functional area.
• Vendors — ask your vendors and consultants who frequently visit other firms to provide you with names. Also ask temps who are working for you (but who have also worked in other firms) to supply you with names.
• Corporate alumni — encourage those in your alumni network (former employees) to be on the lookout for the best angry professionals.
• Videos — YouTube videos containing impassioned comments or even rants will often garner responses from similar-thinking individuals.
• Speakers and writers — encourage your employees to let you know whenever they encounter a column or a speech from an angry professional in the functional area where you’re recruiting.
• Assessing them during the interview — it will take some well-scripted probing questions to get references to reveal that an individual is professionally angry. You should also ask candidates during the interview “what professional situations have made them angry?” Another option during the interview is to give them a verbal simulation that covers situations where they might become frustrated and ask them, “what steps they would take to overcome the barriers?”
• Where you won’t find them — their awareness of the high likelihood of a slow or no response as a result of applying online via your website almost guarantees that they will avoid it. They might have a similar level of suspicion about large job boards and career events.

Potential Issues to Be Aware of

There are obviously risks associated with hiring and managing angry professionals, but if you target the right ones, you’ll find that they have an extremely positive ROI. Obviously, during the candidate assessment process you need to make sure that their anger is restricted to professional issues and that they can reasonably control their anger. You should also make sure that they have the capability of working through barriers and those resistant to change while not causing total chaos. Finally, after they are hired, they need to be placed with a manager and a team that knows how to effectively harness and direct professional anger.

Final Thoughts

I should come clean with the fact that I love working with angry people because in part, I am myself an angry person. I admit it and I’m proud of it. I am angry at people who change at the “speed of rock.” I am angry at people who “whine” and try to instantly sabotage new ideas with phrases like “we tried that and it didn’t work” or “that will never work because … blah blah.”

I’m not against also hiring “Ned Flanders,” librarians, and accountants in addition to complacent “vanilla” people, but there is a need for a small percentage of employees who foster and drive innovation. Yes, they may be pushy and less tolerant, but their high expectations and relentless demand for excellence are an absolute requirement if you want to dominate your industry. If you yourself want to become an angry professional, never be satisfied, believe that you can overcome the impossible, and continually push for faster, cheaper, and better in everything you do!

Two months later, Tiger still is still as skilled, but due to some turmoil in his private life, the number of opportunities available to him has dwindled and less well-known firms that he would never have considered could be his only suitors.

Tiger has a history of “snapping back” from major obstacles, like major knee surgery last year, so there should be little doubt he will return to the game in top form. That said, this is not an article about hiring golfers!

The focus of this article is advanced recruiting and Tiger Woods provides a great example to illustrate a recruiting strategy that you might not be aware of. It is variation of off-cycle recruiting that I call “recruit down, but not out stars.”

A Rare Opportunity to Recruit a Star

Recruiting down but not out stars during a short down period in their life provides a firm with a rare opportunity to hire a top performer when competition is not as intense. At first glance, this might seem like a high risk approach, but the rebound rate of stars is actually quite high. Examples abound: in sports you have Brett Favre, Drew Brees, and Kobe Bryant; in entertainment you have Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and David Letterman, and in the corporate world Steve Jobs is a great example. The key with this approach is to determine when a bump in the road is just that and not something more, and to make your move when they are on their way back but before too many notice.

Advantages of Hiring the Down but not Out

Before you reject this strategy out of hand, consider some of the key benefits of pursuing this approach for a percentage of your hires:

• You land a star — you get a recognized star with superior capabilities and a long track record (with only one short interruption) of producing superior results.
• Easy to recruit — because you’re recruiting these individuals when there is little demand for them, it doesn’t take a sophisticated recruiting process or a great hiring manager to capture them.
• Lesser firms have a chance — because the individual’s choices are limited during this brief period of time, they will likely consider work, firms, and industries that they would’ve previously brushed aside. They may even have empathy and therefore consider firms that have also gone through a recent downturn.
• No repeat downturns — you will find that these individuals, because they are smart and they hate failure, will learn from their downturn, and in almost all cases, will never make the same mistake again in their career.
• A loyal employee — although there are no guarantees, it is unlikely that the stars will forget the fact that you helped them when no one else would. They are likely to return the favor by working extremely hard and by staying longer at your firm than you might expect.
• Low cost — although I don’t recommend that you purposely lowball them, it is highly likely that they will work for much less guaranteed compensation than they were previously paid.
• Speed — because they are likely to be currently under or unemployed, they can make a job acceptance decision rapidly and start right away.
• Now’s a great time — because of the down economy, currently, there is literally an abundance of down but not out stars. In addition, many executives are currently unwilling to take risks on these individuals, which means that there is little competition for them.
• Learning opportunity — in addition to their superior on-the-job performance, these individuals are knowledgeable and well-connected. Hiring them will allow your firm and its employees to benefit from their knowledge and connections.
• Visibility — even though these individuals might not be highly respected at the moment, they are still well-known, and as a result, people will take note when they join your organization. When they return to high status, your firm will get additional positive employer brand and product visibility.
• Additional customers — recruiting someone with a great track record and a loyal following will likely also help you land some new customers.

Action Steps to Implementing a “Down but-not-Out” Recruiting Strategy

Define “down but not out”

Start by clearly defining the type of individuals you are targeting. Make sure that the individual has an exceptional record of performance and that whatever bumped them from their perch is most likely only a short bump in the road.

Identify unacceptable transgressions

Clearly spell out what transgressions or errors are unacceptable, such as theft, repeated substance abuse, felonies, etc. Also identify acceptable causes of career downturn, such as business closure, unfair competition, being caught by a manager in the process of looking for another job, or budget freezes that led to talent stagnation. As in Tiger’s case, the cause may be personal problems, i.e. a family breakup as a result of the economic crisis that might have little or no long-term impact on their work.

Conduct a comprehensive assessment

Obviously you need to begin with a detailed professional reference check, but those executing the check should revise evaluation criteria so that “down but not out” stars are not blackballed. I further recommend that during your interviews, you also make sure that they understand what they did wrong, that they regret it, and that they show what steps they are taking to ensure it will never be repeated.

How to “identify” them

Remember that these individuals are stars, so they are well known and well connected in their industry or function. In addition, their individual downturn may also have been publicized, so they are not difficult to identify. The most effective sourcing tools for finding these individuals are employee referrals and social networking. I recommend that you specifically ask your managers and employees to be on the lookout for these types of individuals. Educate your employees to look specifically for individuals who are leaving consulting, have been part of a recent project/product failure, or who worked at firms that have completely shut down.

Additional sources include professional events, “boomeranging” corporate alumni who experienced their own downturn, outplacement firms, and executive recruiters (who over the years may have established a personal relationship with them.) If your firm has already cataloged or inventoried the desirable talent in your industry, use Google alerts and searches to keep track of them.

Initial screening process

Even if you don’t implement a formal process to proactively seek out these down but not out individuals, make sure that your screening process at the very least is capable of identifying them, should they apply at your firm. Work with your resume screeners to ensure that their resumes are not rejected solely because of recent issues.

Onboarding

There is a high probability that these individuals will need some special treatment during onboarding. If they’re currently depressed for example, counseling or coaching might be necessary. Their coworkers might need to be provided with the true story about what happened to them, in order to squelch or prevent rumors. The hiring manager might need to spend more time with them in order to help them understand how your company’s management approach and culture varies from what they’re accustomed to.

Yes, There Are Risks Involved

Let me be clear: all recruiting strategies that focus on top performers will have a high failure rate, so don’t be frightened away because there are risks associated with this approach. Some of the key risks that you need to develop a plan to assess and mitigate include:

• Bad PR — hiring an individual when they’re down may, in the short-term, generate some bad press. It may also cause some of your customers to re-think their relationship with your firm. You will likely also encounter internal criticism from managers and employees.
• Legal issues — you need to make sure that the transgression that led to their downfall will not expose your firm to legal issues.
• Another error — don’t forget to calculate the probability and the related costs if they slide backwards and repeat the same transgression (especially if the cause was substance-abuse).
• Slower assimilation — it may take time for the individual to snap back or to acclimate to a less prestigious firm that moves at a slower speed.
• Resistance — some employees may argue that you should not be rewarding bad behavior. Such employees should be made aware that the risks and the pressures associated with being a top performer cause almost all “stars” to eventually fail at least once. Managers should be reminded that the cause of their turmoil may be personal issues, and as a result, privacy and legal constraints limit their consideration in the hiring decision.

Final Thoughts

This article was published in January 2010. If you’re reading immediately upon publication, you will likely think that it would be crazy to hire Tiger Woods when every other firm is clearly distancing themselves from him, but mark my words, by June Tiger will be bouncing back and everyone will be courting him. His case will most likely mirror that of Kobe Bryant, who rebounded quickly from a similar transgression.

Down but not out stars are not limited to sports and entertainment. They can be found in every industry and within every function. Fortunately during these tough economic times, there are significantly more of them available than during any time in recent memory. If you want to do something bold and strategic in recruiting and you have limited budget and resources, consider recruiting the Tiger Woods of your industry. It’s easy, cheap, and it can have an immediate and measurable strategic impact.

by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

On January 13, 2010, nearly 800 ere.net community members converged online to participate in a webinar (embedded at the bottom of this article) discussing the trends Dr. Sullivan predicted will impact the talent acquisition profession in 2010. Over the course of that webinar a number of questions were raised, each of which is addressed here.

Q1. Your trends article highlighted what is likely to happen during 2010, but you can you go further and tell us what are the top 10 overall actions steps that you would recommend for corporate recruiting leaders take?

To summarize, we would recommend the following actions in 2010:

1. Plan for a turnaround — assume that a turnaround will begin mid-year, but also look internally for indicators of when your organization is likely to rebound. Next, build an “explode-out-of-the-box” plan so that you are prepared to act quickly when the turnaround begins.
2. Develop an agile plan — assume that there will be simultaneous growth and shrinkage within your organization. Plan for job growth in some departments, but also assume that additional cost reductions in other departments will be needed. Prepare a plan that includes agility and flexibility in all programs.
3. Prepare action step outlines — it’s not necessary to complete a detailed written plan for every possibility, but you should prepare an action outline highlighting the key steps that you would take for the most likely upcoming events. Develop these steps using if-then scenarios (i.e. if this happens, then we will take these actions or steps).
4. Prioritize jobs — because you will be operating with limited resources, focus your recruiting resources on the most important jobs. Start by prioritizing revenue-generating jobs, mission-critical jobs, and jobs in rapid growth business units.
5. Prioritize tools — an increase in the competition for top candidates will require you to shift away from active candidate tools and instead concentrate on the tools designed to attract and land employed top performers (passives). Focus on reinvigorating the employee referral program, recruiting at professional events, boomerangs, and mobile platform recruiting tools.
6. Social media tools — this category of tools require special attention because it is still evolving. The key is to manage the social media initiative and to take advantage of the time of your employees when they are on social network sites. Also, broaden your perspective beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter and use other social and internet mechanisms like videos, wikis, talent communities, and online forums.
7. Integrate contingent labor — the most effective strategy for rapidly increasing or decreasing labor capability is the use of contingent labor. Identify the jobs where contingent labor is appropriate; then set a contingent labor percentage target that is equivalent to your projected maximum labor cost-cutting targets.
8. Dollarize recruiting impacts — work with the CFO’s office to build your business case and to dollarize the impact on corporate revenues that can be attributed to delayed or poor hiring.
9. Speed up internal movement — moving internal talent to where they can do the most good often costs less and has a more immediate impact than external hiring. The internal movement process at most organizations must be updated and targeted, so that the needed talent is more rapidly guided into the right jobs. (Improving Internal Movement article.)
10. Retention and blocking — expect your turnover rates to increase by as much as 50%, as the job market opens up. Start by identifying what excites those most likely to leave and then develop a corporate-wide blocking strategy to make it more difficult for recruiters to poach away your top talent.

Q2. What role will contingency recruiting play as we approach a recovery?

Because market volatility is likely to be a characteristic that defines the business environment for months and years to come, organizations must develop a process that guarantees flexible labor costs. If you count all types of labor in use today, contingent labor already exceeds 30% of the workforce in many organizations. The key is to integrate contingent labor management so that labor solutions that look at labor holistically can be presented to managers. Contingent labor should also allow you to rapidly increase labor capabilities that may only be needed during short growth spurts.

Q3. Managing all labor via one function is a topic that has been discussed in my organization for several years, but no action has ever been taken. Can you tell me more about how other organizations have gone about establishing a holistic talent acquisition function that oversees recruiting, contingent vendor management, outsourced vendor management, and consultant engagement?

Understanding the total labor picture is a dictate that has been emerging for several years, particularly in high-tech industries. Organizations like Microsoft, Valero Energy, and Qualcomm come to mind as benchmark firms. Developing a holistic approach generally entails putting all related functions under one leader, developing a methodology to determine in which jobs contingent labor works best, and including contingent labor in broader talent management activities like workforce planning, redeployment, and knowledge development and capture. The key to convincing executives to reorganize is to make the business case demonstrating the increased productivity and labor savings that could result from an integrated process.

Q4. What are some of the best ways to market to passive candidates to increase predisposition to working at your company?

The underlying premise here is that top performers who already have a job are not likely to entertain just any potential job opportunity. “Employed top performers with choices” (passives) have a significantly higher threshold that must be reached before they will consider a company or a new job. The starting point is to identify the job-switch decision factors that would peak their interest. Unfortunately, the attractors used to lure active job seekers (pay, security, and benefits) rarely impress these individuals. Factors more likely to work include working with an industry star or a great manager, exciting job challenges, access to new technologies, exciting learning opportunities, and a chance to lead.

You can identify job switch criteria using three basic approaches:

• ask prospects individually to list their decision factors.
• ask your own top-performing employees in similar jobs to list their job switch factors.
• ask newly hired top performers during onboarding to list the decision factors they used.

The job switch factors identified should then permeate your branding and employment marketing communications and be reinforced during every interaction with potential hires.

Q5. Several industry pundits have predicted that 2010 will be the year that sourcing as a profession dies and becomes a $10/hr job. Do you agree with those pundits, and if not, how do you see the role of the professional sourcer changing/evolving?

No I don’t. There will always be a role for top quality niche sourcers. The role of sourcing will certainly change, so that corporate sourcers evolve into network managers. Instead of doing transactional sourcing, they will use the time of others and focus their time on educating and helping employees and others to more effectively use their social networks. Having thousands of individuals source for you (crowdsourcing) is a powerful and cost-effective tool.

Q6. What do you see as the best use of third party recruiters as this market rebounds?

The ROI of third party recruiters is greatest when organizations need to shift rapidly into entirely new areas or geographic regions where recruiter and employee networks are less likely to be as developed.

Q7. What was the 2009 turnover % and what is the expected 2010 employee turnover? My organization saw no significant change in turnover. Were we an exception?

The current economic downturn has not impacted all sectors in the same way. While some industries were negatively impacted, others grew tremendously. However, numerous studies show that a majority (75%) of employees in nearly all industries are dissatisfied and open to new opportunities. No change in your turnover rate could be an indication of strong employer desirability or lack of alternate opportunities.

Regardless, targeted retention efforts that include employer branding, pre-identification of who is at risk, and redesign of jobs to make them more challenging, rewarding and flexible will be needed throughout the recovery. (Retention Strategy article.)

Q8. Could you detail different blocking strategies?

There are four categories of blocking strategies that prevent external recruiters from poaching your best employees:

• Blocking contact or access — limit access to contact information, train gatekeepers to identify inbound recruiting calls, and block known recruiter phone numbers and e-mail.
• Information gathering approaches — identify who is recruiting and what methods they are using by using poaching incident logs, post-exit interviews, and debriefing during new hire orientation.
• Training and awareness — train employees on what to expect and how to act when a recruiter calls, and continually drive awareness among employees about why your organization’s jobs are superior.
• Metrics and rewards — measure and distribute ranked turnover metrics in order to embarrass managers with high turnover. Institute manager rewards for low turnover among top performers in key jobs.

(Read more on blocking strategies.)

Q9. Haven’t heard of Green Recruiting. What does that refer to?

Green recruiting is the general term for employer branding and marketing efforts that emphasize an organization’s greenness or sustainability initiatives as a key selling tool. Highlighting greenness is important because it is often ranked in the top half of potential candidate’s decision criteria. Among college grads it’s even more important. GE, Google, and Timberland are all benchmark firms in this area. (Green Recruiting article.)

Q10. After two years of budget cuts, three-fifths of my non-labor budget is allocated to technology maintenance contracts and long-term tool/service subscriptions, leaving just 20% of my budget to deal with fluctuations in demand. How are other organizations becoming more agile when budget flexibility is almost non-existent?

In a world that requires flexibility, fixed costs are your enemy. The key is to negotiate flexible contracts based on usage, so the costs go down when your usage goes down. Some outsource vendors offer flexible SLAs, so that your firm can reduce costs rapidly when necessary and increase capabilities rapidly when sudden growth requires it.

Q11. How do you use credit card info for recruiting?

It is not really credit card data that recruiters can use, but rather consumer data that is derived from financial transactions and sold as sales leads by marketing services companies like Acxiom. Consumer profiles often include recruiting relevant fields such as employer, profession, location, annual income, etc. While not appropriate for all recruiting functions, sales lead data can be very useful in high-volume staffing environments. (Years ago such data was dismissed because it was often inaccurate, but today most data providers refresh each field at least once a year.)

Q12. Can you elaborate on the growth of ATS alternatives?

As employee referral programs, dedicated sourcing initiatives, and other forms of talent sourcing that introduce non-applicant talent to the organization grow in popularity, organizations need to build data stores on people who have not completed an online application and are not likely to. The online application is well known as a black hole, so insisting that all people who have engaged via social networking, offline networking, and high-touch referral go to your website and apply is like putting talent in a bus moving at 100 MPH on a freeway overpass that has not yet been completed: i.e., certain death.

For this type of talent, many progressive organizations are embracing CRM solutions and collaboration platforms that enable piecing together of non-applicant profiles over time by a defined group. Possible solutions include:

• CRM Platforms — Recruiting-specific CRM platforms are emerging that let organizations capture small bits of information from scalable web forms that can be embedded almost anywhere, including social network profiles and search-engine-optimized landing pages that bring search engine traffic not likely to explore your online career portal. Additional fields can be captured via follow-up interactions that ultimately help you produce a complete profile. Lead segmenting and integrated activity scheduling can help organizations craft specific interaction plans designed to drive conversion of top talent.
• Collaboration Tools — This category of tools includes robust collaboration servers and smaller web services like wikis and blogs. Organizations that use dedicated but dispersed sourcers including third-party partners can use collaborative documents like wiki entries to build searchable profiles of talent of interest to the organization. Every interaction and research find pertaining to an individual being tracked can be documented and shared in real time across the team.
• Social Bookmarking — Special thanks to Michael Specht for sharing this idea during the webinar Q&A. By defining a tagging methodology, organizations can use social bookmarking software to build robust indexes of talent profiles existing across a multitude of internet sites. Employees engaging in benchmarking efforts could bookmark the profiles of those encountered from other organizations, tagging them with their function, management level, specific skill, etc. With an entire organization contributing to the social bookmark index, a crowdsourced directory of labor could be built relatively quickly and cheaply.

These were the top questions that emerged, but we are sure there are more. If you have a question or thought that hasn’t been explored that is related to 2010 trends, share it in a comment, we’d love to hear what’s on your mind.

Many recruiting managers and recruiters blame their inability to find great candidates on a relative shortage of talent; however, the results of a recent balloon-finding contest demonstrate that it may be the tools/approaches recruiters are using that are to blame for efforts not turning up the desired candidate slate. Let me warn you in advance that it might take a few minutes for you to see the connection between a balloon-finding contest and the future of recruiting, but let me assure you there is a connection.

A Contest to Identify the Most Effective “Finding Tool”

This story begins with a famous government agency, DARPA, wanting to test the effectiveness of the available tools/approaches to locate missing objects or individuals, i.e., pieces of downed aircraft, wanted criminals, or missing children. Because this task was so large in scope, it turned to a labor model growing in popularity among progressive organizations: contests!

In this challenge, participants were tasked with finding 10 red weather balloons that were secretly placed in diverse locations throughout the U.S. for just 24-hours. Approaches that were considered by 4,000+ contestants included using satellite/aerial photography, iPhone applications, and Internet-based collaboration and networking tools. Competition was fierce; one team even placed a fake balloon to throw other teams off. Like finding high quality, available talent with a rare skill set, finding 10 weather balloons dispersed across the expanse that is the U.S. in just 24 hours is a herculean task.

You’ll probably be surprised to learn that it took the winning team from MIT a mere 8 hours and 52 minutes to find all 10 balloons, in 10 different states, at a cost of $40,000. These results amazed everyone involved, including the team from MIT, which had only learned about the contest four days before it began.

The Connection Between Finding Balloons and Recruiting

The method used by both DARPA and MIT to solve this challenge is known as crowdsourcing. In this case, DARPA used crowdsourcing to staff its initiative, while the MIT team used crowdsourcing to source information. Crowdsourcing is a term coined for a new form of labor in which tasks that would have traditionally been allocated to an employee are instead allocated to an ad hoc formed, undefined group, or crowd.

It is the labor solution that has been used to build and maintain the powerhouse online encylocpedia, Wikipedia, as well as numerous other corporate projects such as the Netflix Prize. To the surprise of many, this DARPA challenge proved that crowdsourcing is the most effective finding tool on the planet, bar none.

I Use Social Media — So Why Am I Not Getting These Amazing Results?

Social media usage in recruiting is a hot trend, but very few recruiters are producing significant results via their efforts. Online forums are abuzz with recruiters who have tried recruiting via social media and given up, because it simply didn’t work for them. Other recruiters laud the success of their efforts, not in recruiting the masses, but in finding that one great hire who made them a hero among managers. To those who have tried and failed, I argue that the tool didn’t fail, but rather the approach to using the tool.

Simply being active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., is not a solution. Social media recruiting, like all strategic efforts, requires a well-thought-out approach that incorporates the critical success factors that transform an ordinary effort into a world-class solution.

10 Critical Success Factors for Effective “Crowdsourcing”

The following is a list of 10 critical success factors that must be incorporated into crowdsourcing centric recruiting solutions such as social media efforts and employee referral programs for them to reach maximum effectiveness.

1. The Kevin Bacon principle: crowdsourcing and employee referral programs both work because top performers know, trust, and have relationships with other top performers. As the scope of program participation grows larger, the probability of identifying all probable talent increases. The key learning: all organizations should be monitoring the participation rate of relevant parties in crowdsouring initiatives, most notably the participation rate of proven top performers.
2. You must have a plan: if an ad hoc managed effort produces results, it’s purely out of luck! Programs capable of producing predictable and repeatable results require a comprehensive plan and feedback loops that help identify design issues that when positively addressed can improve program effectiveness.
3. Leverage the search work through collaboration: the underlying success principle of any crowdsourcing effort is large-scale collaboration. You can’t reach the critical mass of individuals required for an effective search if you rely exclusively on recruiters. The most effective search efforts marshal the time and contacts of anyone and everyone who can be cajoled into helping, including your entire employee base, their families, alumni, vendors, customers, and anyone else who likes your organization. Collaboration also requires that information flows both ways, so that the crowd doesn’t waste time sourcing information already found. Just like in a scavenger hunt, learning what the other teams have already produced can go a long way at helping any particular team advance.
4. Rewards drive results: you can’t get widespread collaboration without some kind of motivating factor. The MIT approach relies heavily on rewards. The reward schema was an inverted pyramid where 50% of the reward went to the first individual to find the target, then 25% went to the individual who invited that person to participate, and 12.5 % to whoever invited that person, and so on up to a total of $4,000. In any corporate crowdsourcing model, reward individuals outside the corporation who identify top talent or that invite those individuals. The rewards don’t have to be in cash; they could include coffee cards, offers of free services/products, or even donations to charity.
5. A broad range of social media outlets are required: Crowdsourcing works only if you use every type of available social media outlet. In addition to the commonly used LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, every type of communication and collaboration mechanism must be used, including SMS, Internet forums, video sharing sites, meet-up groups, professional associations, etc.
6. Worldwide collaboration is needed: even though the balloons were placed exclusively within the U.S., the MIT effort would not have been successful without extensive international participation. It turns out that globally located individuals could indirectly produce finds by using the segment of their network that was located in the U.S. For a corporate model to work, it must not limit its social networking to sites and individuals located in the same country where the job is.
7. A continuous search approach is superior: although crowdsourcing can produce amazing results in a short time, it is even more effective and less time-consuming if it is a continuous operation. The best sourcing approaches that target top performers always begin looking to identify candidates long before a position becomes open (pre-need sourcing).
8. A relationship is required: although identifying top performers is an important first step, in many cases, you won’t be able to convince them to actually apply for a position without building a relationship first. The most effective relationships are based on learning, benchmarking, and professional growth rather than the promise of a job.
9. The referral program must be expanded and revitalized: in order to be effective, the process for submitting names and narrowing down the submissions to the very best must be easy and responsive. The best approach for crowdsourcing is to use the existing employee referral process, but update it so that it is more effective. Referral program participants should also be encouraged to pre-assess potential referrals based on their competencies but also on their fit to the corporation.
10. Recruiters must be educated: rather than actually doing most of the networking, recruiters must be educated and rewarded for their role in managing the networking process. They must become experts in understanding social media collaboration, so that they can attract more participants, retain the ones they have, and then educate these participants on how to produce better results.

Final Thoughts

The effectiveness of employee referral programs has historically provided some evidence to the value of having a large number of individuals looking; however, the balloon contest should be a wake-up call to all recruiting managers that social media collaboration is literally … the future of sourcing.

Managers should also realize that the DARPA contest proves that you must move beyond the current hodgepodge of uncoordinated social media recruiting efforts toward the more scientific and more inclusive managed crowdsourcing model. Direct sourcing is the future, and crowdsouring is what will make it feasible. Managing effectively, direct sourcing initiatives will produce living databases of talent that can be used for recruiting, competency trending, learning partner identification, benchmarking, and a wealth of other opportunities.

(the article originally described DARPA as “infamous,” which was a mistake; it now says “famous”)

The Return of the War for Talent Means That Power Shifts

The third action area addresses emerging trends related to the likely return of intense competition for top talent globally. Some in HR dislike the phrase “the war for talent,” but their disdain for the word won’t change the fact that competition for top talent is once again becoming intense, and that obtaining your organization’s fair share or better will require a battle plan. While a global economic slowdown decreased the emphasis on talent acquisition, it didn’t eliminate it, and as economic growth ticks back up many organizations in high-growth industries/areas are once again battling talent shortages (albeit not necessarily labor shortages). As the competition for talent increases, the relative power of the recruiting relationship shifts away from the employer and toward the potential candidate. This shift in power and competition requires you to take certain actions.

Action steps for handling the power shift

There are four primary action steps that you should consider when the competition for attracting and retaining talent once again becomes intense for your organization:

1. Jugaad is now required: The intense competition for candidates that occurs in a war for talent, coupled with dramatic and continuous changes in recruiting technologies, now require recruiters to continually innovate. Unfortunately, this expectation for continuous innovation must now be accomplished under the existing do-more-with-less resource realities. Executives must learn how to shift away from the well-funded innovation model and toward a leaner and more immediate approach like jugaad. Jugaad is a phrase popularized by managers in India. It fits the bill precisely because the word means low cost, just-in-time innovation. The recruiting process for recruiters will have to be modified so that recruiters are now selected based on their ability to come up with jugaad innovations. In a broader context, because the organization will need many jugaad-type innovators in many of its various jobs, the overall sourcing and assessment approaches for the firm will need to be updated in order to ensure that these innovators are successfully hired wherever they are needed.
2. Improved candidate experience: As candidates begin to realize that they are now more in the driver’s seat, the talent acquisition function must update its recruiting and interviewing functions so that it becomes more candidate-centric. That means examining and improving the candidate experience, so that more in-demand candidates will engage with the application and screening process and stick with it until a final decision is made.
3. Redesign onboarding: As the power shifts, it is also more likely that you will lose a higher percentage of new hires immediately after they start, because they will immediately walk away from a “first-week” experience that counters that promised. That means that candidate-centricity must be paired with employee-centricity. Your onboarding process should be updated to ensure that a large percentage of new hires successfully reach their minimum level of expected productivity as rapidly as possible.
4. Learn how to counter negative employer branding messages: Employer branding has been an important element of most talent acquisition strategies for many years now, despite a relative lack of understanding in branding science. That said, even those who don’t understand or invest in branding initiatives have seen examples of individuals damaging the image of the organization by posting scathing reviews of their experience online. As expanding technologies and social media make it easier for almost anyone to post a negative comment about working at a firm (that can be seen almost immediately by thousands), employers are rapidly losing control over their own brand image. Tools like Google’s sidewiki and websites like glassdoor.com are making it even easier for candidates researching jobs to find such commentary. Firms needs to develop a process for identifying negative messages and then either countering them or burying them.

New Recruiting Tools Make Direct Sourcing an Emerging Powerhouse

The final group of emerging talent acquisition trends cover the development of new and exciting recruiting tools that render some traditional tools virtually obsolete. (I’ll be the first to concede that for the average recruiter not much changed in 2009 with regard to technologies and approaches used, but being average doesn’t interest me much!) Innovations often appear at the edge of practice areas and don’t tend to impact the masses for some time.

It wasn’t that long ago that fax machines, newspaper ads, large job boards, and in-person job fairs were considered among the primary tools of recruiters. Fast forward just 10 years and even talking about such tools in a leading talent organization triggers an endless stream of jokes. Despite the status quo of the masses, every new year brings new tools and techniques, some of which make it to fad status and some of which fundamentally alter the game.

The key is to be aware of new tools and approaches and to gauge quickly their trajectory. In an intensive care unit, telemetry nurses are a critical resource because they monitor trends and help prevent critical incidents by escalating cases moving one way or the other rapidly. Today many organizations are on the edge, and a talent acquisition function incapable of recruiting the right talent at the right time paired with a talent management function to make effective use of the talent could put the final nail in the organization’s coffin.

A large number of new and relatively inexpensive Internet tools and approaches that allow organizations to adopt new and exciting recruiting strategies are emerging daily. It’s not acceptable to review a new approach and simply dismiss it as not relevant simply because it doesn’t seem feasible for your organization to adopt. Feasibility is a largely driven by design, and design is largely influenced by need. If organizations focus on addressing the need versus using the tool, often times the right solution is available.

Action steps for identifying and adopting new tools and approaches

There are five key action steps related to emerging recruiting tools and approaches:

1. Adopt a direct sourcing strategy: Currently most large corporations use a “you find us” approach that involves broadcasting their job vacancies. Because the resulting candidate pool largely consists of talent that has opted to engage in the process, it may contain a wide array of talent your managers wouldn’t want to hire on their most desperate days. The best talent from a pool of crappy talent is still crappy talent! To remedy the situation, invest significantly in direct sourcing initiatives that help your organization identify, reach out to, engage, and convert only the candidates who you determine are highly desirable. This approach will produce a smaller candidate pool, but it will be comprised of higher quality talent. While it may seem infeasible to direct source via an array of fractured online communities, a number of tools are emerging that unify sourcing channels. As more and more people around the globe embrace Internet services that make them more visible, finding talent will no longer be an issue.
2. Social media: The expanded use of social media is an obvious trend but it will still take some time to develop into an effective sourcing tool. This transition will require the development of source effectiveness metrics and decision criteria to help recruiters understand which of the social media tools they should use, as well as when they work and when they don’t, and why. Recruiting managers will also begin to learn to manage the overall effort but to shift the work of being active on social networks away from recruiters and onto the organization’s employees, i.e. distributed sourcing.
3. Boomerang re-hires: It should be obvious that if you were forced to lay off some of your top performers during the downturn, that you should now begin to keep in touch with them so that when business improves, you can effectively convince the very best ones to rejoin your organization.
4. Shift away from active tools: With the rebounding economy, fewer individuals will be unemployed. A lower number of active job seekers will require corporations to shift away from recruiting tools that are designed primarily to attract active candidates. An increased emphasis must be put on tools that are primarily designed to identify and attract employed individuals not actively seeking a new job.
5. Use the mobile platform: Because data-enabled smart phones are becoming ubiquitous around the globe, I am forecasting that the mobile platform will become the most effective messaging and communications tool in recruiting. If your site isn’t designed to support job seekers and candidates coming from mobile devices, you will lose out on some top talent.

Hot “Should-Be” Topics That Won’t Be

There are a host of topics that should be hot in 2010 that most likely won’t break the surface with regards to popularity. They include:

• Workforce planning and forecasting is something that recruiting leaders frequently talk about but seldom actually do. If you are one of the very few that want to be an exception, look at the model developed by CapitalOne.
• New software offerings (from firms like Orca Eyes) that allow your human resources to be managed more scientifically should be the hottest thing on the planet, but since most human resource leaders don’t understand such tools, they likely won’t be.
• Remote video interviewing is now sophisticated and cheap enough so that it should be used for all but final interviews, but unfortunately manager resistance will limit its comprehensive use.
• Recruiter competencies need to be dramatically updated, and the recruiting function needs to make the commitment to prioritize jobs and refocus its efforts on recruiting innovators and game-changers, but prioritization is a political topic few leaders seem willing to touch.
• Remote work is a great recruiting tool and it provides an amazing amount of productivity and flexibility, unfortunately managers still seem to hold on to their desire to watch their employees work in person.
• Green recruiting and employer branding should be more prevalent than it is.
• Employer referrals and recruiting at professional events should be dramatically updated but in many firms, these under-appreciated tools will continue to languish.

Final Thoughts

If you follow my work, you probably already know that I have a well-established track record of accurately forecasting HR-related trends. Once again, I’m putting my reputation on the line by forecasting each of the trends that I have identified: the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you are a skeptic, I suggest that you make a note on your calendar to revisit this list in 6 or 12 months to assess its accuracy. I also urge you go the next step and set aside some time to have an in-depth discussion with your team about these and other trends that you’ve identified. The key to dramatically improving recruiting results is not just being aware of trends but in developing strategies, plans, and action steps to actually handle these upcoming problems and opportunities.

1. Continued churn of labor (simultaneous hiring/layoffs)
2. Increased use of contingent labor types
3. Increasing demand for proving a business impact in $
4. A return of the War for Talent
5. Increased growth of direct sourcing initiatives
6. Relentless demand for continues innovation (Jugaad)
7. Increased visibility of brand-damaging viral messaging by current/former employees
8. Accelerated obsolescence of recruiting tools/approaches
9. Accelerated obsolescence of apathetic talent
10. Increased importance of formal retention efforts

Now, in Part II, I’d like to turn the attention to highlighting why some of these trends will dominate the conversation, and offer some action steps strategic leaders can take.

2010, A Year of Turmoil and Churn in Business and the Economy

The first group of talent acquisition trends will be driven by shifting economic and business cycles. The development of a global economy and the emergence of an expectation among business leaders and customers for continuous, rapid, and dramatic innovation in both products and processes creates a highly volatile business environment in which market conditions can be highly favorable one month and truly dreadful the following month.

Historically, such growth and contraction cycles lasted years, a characteristic that allowed organizations to react and adjust organizational costs over time. However, the contraction in product lifecycles and macro economic cycles combined with relentless demand for innovation require organizations to be much more agile than ever before and react in days versus months/years.

The current reality creates a situation in which some aspects of the organization may be growing while others are contracting. To keep organizational labor costs in check, many organizations will need to adopt labor strategies that promote agility, i.e. increasing usage of contingent labor types. By increasing usage of contingent workers, organizations will be able to rapidly scale up or scale down labor costs as business needs dictate.

Action Steps for the Churn Problem

There are five action steps to building capability for handling churn. They include:

1. Crafting an agile recruiting strategy: In order to be successful in an up-and-down world, the talent acquisition function needs to develop a recruiting strategy capable of adapting quickly to changing conditions. An agile strategy must allow for both rapid hiring and labor cost containment. It must allocate resources to longer-term strategic approaches while maximizing the effectiveness of short-term solutions.
2. A sophisticated contingent labor strategy: Outsourcing the administration of contingent labor was OK when it represented a relatively minute percentage of the overall workforce and when the vast majority of roles involved contingent labor for static, transactional roles. However, for many organizations today, 1:5 or more workers are contingent and they are doing knowledge work vital to the organization’s success. Ignoring contingent labor is no longer acceptable. Strategic staffing leaders must instead adopt a broad set of approaches that allow them to effectively determine which jobs should involve contingent labor types, and how the organization can maximize the value each contingent resource provides. Processes must be put into place to manage redeployment of contingent labor, knowledge capture and sharing, and development of preferred provider status with top-performing contingent resources.
3. Continuous internal movement: Another area that requires new strategies and tools to adapt to volatility is the internal movement process. Rather than relying on slow internal job application/transfer systems, organizations now must develop the capability to rapidly and continually redeploy and internally “guide” employees and contingent workers toward areas of the business where they can have a higher impact and return.
4. JIT training may be needed: The fourth action step is to develop just-in-time training processes. This is necessary because in a world of continuous change and innovation, skills and knowledge become obsolete at an alarming rate. When your organization begins large-scale hiring, it will inevitably hire workers who have been underemployed or unemployed for a significant period of time. Unfortunately, this probably also means that the skill-sets and the knowledge of these formerly idle individuals will be painfully out of date. You’ll need a just-in-time process for updating skills rapidly and inexpensively.
5. An explode-out-of-the-box plan: In some areas of your business, you might jump from a hiring freeze into a situation of rapid business growth that requires you to ramp-up hiring immediately. It’s impossible to effectively go from a standing start to full speed without a well-thought-out workforce plan and a recruiting plan that allocates the right resources to short-, medium-, and long-term staffing solutions.

“Dollarizing” Your Business Impact Supplants Traditional HR Metrics

The second group of emerging trends focuses on making a convincing argument to executives of the importance of recruiting. Talent acquisition and talent management leaders have struggled with metrics for years. Many corporate executives and managers are still skeptical about the economic value added by many human resource processes.

As a result of the widely recognized and measurable success that has been achieved by other “overhead” functional units, a growing contingent of corporate leaders have lost their tolerance for those that provide only functional metrics. If you want respect, credibility, and increased resources, it’s time to realize that no function is exempt from the new expectation of having to convert all key metrics into their dollar of business or revenue impact. To put it bluntly, if you can’t prove, for example, the added dollar impact of hiring a top performer over an average candidate, you are doomed to face a long future of poor funding and low credibility.

Action Steps for “Dollarizing” The Business Impact of Recruiting

I recommend these three action steps for dollarizing your business impact.

• Demand revenue impacts: The holy grail of CEOs is increasing top line results or revenue. Unfortunately, reporting cost per hire, time to fill, diversity ratios, etc., don’t receive nor do they deserve executive attention because they omit any connection with top organizational goals. The most important action any recruiting leader can take is to work with finance to develop an acceptable framework for converting all metrics reported to executives outside of recruiting into financial impact.
• Learn from others who have made the transition: Many back office functions have garnered more respect in the organization by marketing their impact on the enterprise effectively. Until recruiting leaders can stand up in front of business line leadership and fellow functional leaders and articulate a strong business case using standard business terms for investing in longer-term recruiting solutions, the respect, buy-in, and behavior change needed to support strategic staffing isn’t likely to emerge. Work with the CFO’s office, cost accounting, risk analysis, and supply-chain to identify the techniques that are required in order to convert functional outcomes into business impacts.
• Focus on a few impacts: Rather than bombarding executives with metrics, instead focus on a few. Key impacts that you need to provide include: the ROI of top performers compared to average performers in the same job; the revenue impacts of hiring and retaining innovators; and the performance differential in increased revenue between recruiting external talent compared to talent developed internally. You should also dollarize employee turnover, so that executives immediately see the negative revenue impacts of losing, for example, top performers who go directly to key competitors.

Up next, the final installment of this series will look at a reprisal of the war for talent and the increasing obsolescence of recruiting tools.

Unfortunately, I am forecasting that 2010 will be a year with at least as much turmoil as 2009, but one that will present thought-leading organizations with major opportunities. Many forecasters are predicting that 2010 will be the year social media gains a major footing in the enterprise, and that social media will help drive better ideation and execution throughout every function, but that perspective is too narrow. In 2010, the pace of literally everything will continue to increase, leading to 12 months of insane competition, endless labor churn, and boundless opportunity.

Top 2010 Recruiting Highlights

A year from now, if you were to look back and analyze the headlines of recruiting articles, blogs, and consulting guidance, I predict the following topics will dominate the content collective:

1. Churn: Just as seen in 2009, 2010 will be a year in which organizations both grow and contract simultaneously. Business leaders will become more adept at making surgical labor cuts and investing in labor that brings new capabilities to the table. It will be part of a multi-pronged approach that ultimately improves the agility of the organization.
2. Contingent labor: The writing has been on the wall for some time, but not everybody wants to read it! Volatile market conditions, radical competition, and rapid innovation dictate that organizations be able to flex their labor usage frequently, something traditional employees do not make possible. To further enable agility, 2010 will be the year that even those organizations that have resisted using contingent labor increase it by double-digit rates.
3. Show me the money: I have been predicting this trend for over a decade, but sadly few HR leaders get the point. The requests — scratch that, demands — from senior leaders to demonstrate strategic thinking and impact are present in the boardroom, and 2010 will be the year they trickle out despite efforts by HR leadership to ignore them. Providing tactical functional analytics will no longer cut it. Recruiting leaders will need to step forward and prove business impact presented in Dollars, Euros, or Yen.
4. The return of the War: If you’re involved in global talent acquisition, you already know that despite a global economic downturn, the war for talent never really ended. The truth is that top talent will always be in the minority regardless of market conditions, and that sought-after minority populations have power. Candidate centricity will prove a key battle concept in 2010.
5. Direct sourcing: At the start of this century, direct sourcing efforts contributed less than 5% of the candidates who were ultimately hired, but as a source, direct sourcing has grown year after year. 2010 will be the year that direct sourcing efforts on average produce 1:5 hires, and begin to challenge employee referral programs as the dominate source in leading organizations (although in many strategic talent organizations you could argue that ERPs are actually distributed direct sourcing systems.) The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people –that’s too easy — the real challenge is sorting, categorizing, contacting, and convincing the right talent that you are relevant to their wants and needs.
6. Jugaad is required: The continuous emphasis on innovation in business will spill over into talent acquisition. In 2010 you will see more and more organizations tap strategic leaders from sales, marketing, and operations groups to lead staffing initiatives. They will continue to adapt proven business tools and approaches not developed for/by recruiters for recruiting, without significant resources or budget.
7. Negative employer branding: Whether organizations acknowledge it or not, social media is a force that will impact them for better or for worse. 2010 will be a year in which employees, past and present, really start to influence how organizations are perceived by being more vocal about their experiences. As more and more online communities expose their content to search engines, transparency will abound. Is your glass house shatterproof?
8. Tool obsolescence: Not surprisingly, a large number of tools in the typical recruiter’s tool basket are obsolete and have been for years. Recruiting leaders and practitioners locked in a transactional mindset haven’t been paying much attention to new technologies both inside and outside the recruiting industry that apply to recruiting, and as a result are using tools that are profoundly inefficient. 2010 will be a year in which progressive organizations make such leaps and bounds with new technology that less-progressive organizations will not be able to ignore them. As a result, more tools than ever will push toward retirement.
9. Obsolete talent: Antiquated approaches to training and development coupled with general apathy by the vast majority of the labor force when it comes to keeping skills and knowledge current will lead to staggering levels of labor obsolescence. Jobs will abound, but talent suitable for them will be in short supply. As a result, more and more organizations will be forced to pursue workforce decentralization via remote workers, outsourcing, and offshoring.
10. Retention: Numerous employee surveys indicate that given a stable opportunity, a majority of employees today would jump ship. While the surveys likely exaggerate the percentage of the labor market who can and will make a move, the truth is that some top talent will do so and that the vast majority of organizations are not prepared to mitigate risks caused by rapid and significant turnover. As an ugly turnover tsunami is just around the corner, what’s your plan?

While this list of topics that will dominate recruiting thoughts and actions in 2010 seems overwhelming negative, the reality is that every situation presents two sides: one positive, one negative. Each of these trends to come presents unbelievable opportunity to those recruiting leaders brave enough to break rank and step forward to challenge the status quo.

To learn more about these trends, the factors driving them, and action steps to take, stay tuned for parts II and III of this series. Part II will address trends related to labor churn and monetizing recruiting impact, while part III will focus on the rising war for talent and emerging tools.

It’s December 2009 and it’s the end of the “decade from hell” during which the recruiting and talent management function endured some ugly times. Rather than bemoaning what happened, why not take a few minutes or so and rethink your approach to recruiting. The topic for this particular think-piece is corporate power and why recruiting seems to have so little of it.

Thought-provoking question #1 — Is it true that on the corporate “power scale,” recruiting falls well below where it deserves to be?

My basic premise is that when it comes to power and recognition, the recruiting function should be one of the most important business functions, ranked right up there in importance with finance, product development, and sales, but for some reason, it is funded poorly and often underappreciated.

Fortunately there are a few exceptions; a few stark examples of situations where recruiting is so important that it is classified as a mission-critical business function. Two industries where recruiting is certainly “king” include both college/professional sports and the entertainment industry. It’s obvious to everyone in these industries that if you attract a major recruit like A-Rod, LeBron, or George Clooney, you haven’t just recruited a good employee, but instead you’ve changed the revenue stream of the company for a significant period of time. As a result, sports teams and entertainment moguls put huge resources into recruiting. In direct contrast to corporate recruiting, when their teams or studios are doing poorly, they put even more effort and resources into recruiting top talent.

The point that I want you ponder is that in the corporate world, there’s something in the way that we currently conduct recruiting that puts us well down on the mission-critical scale, in spite of our actual impact on corporate performance. If you agree with this premise, below you will find some points that might explain our relatively weak position in the corporate world.

Thought provoking question #2 — What are the top 10 characteristics that make functions powerful in the corporate world?

It’s possible for a business function to go from powerless to mission-critical merely by changing the way it acts. Supply chain is certainly a great example of that dramatic transition. For years it was known as purchasing, inventory, and transportation and under that overhead approach, the three functions received little attention, recognition, or resources. However, once it began to use technology, metrics, and to demonstrate its dollar impact on corporate revenues, it became a corporate darling and rose to the top of the power scale. The question is, “are there common factors that cause the most powerful corporate functions to receive the lion’s share of corporate resources?” I recommend that you come up with your own list of these “power factors” within your organization. But I am providing you with a list of the top 10 critical “power factors” that I have found to be consistent differentiators between the powerful and the underfunded.

1. Focus on revenue impacts: Process results are reported in dollars, demonstrating their impact on revenue.
2. Show impact on strategic goals: Process goals and results are unambiguously linked directly to strategic business goals.
3. Competitive advantage: Results are directly compared to the results of competitor firms, in order to ensure that your firm retains a competitive advantage.
4. Prioritize: They prioritize their efforts and focus on creating strategic impacts.
5. Proactive: They seek out opportunities rather than waiting and reacting.
6. Metrics: The functions are managed and decisions are made based on numbers and strategic metrics.
7. Manager’s reward: Their results are an important component of executive bonus formulas.
8. Innovation: Their rate of innovation is among the highest in the corporation.
9. Technology focused: They use the latest technology.
10. Reporting: Their actions and their results are reported as an integral part of the standard business and financial reports are read by executives.

Thought provoking question #3 — Does our current conservative approach to recruiting essentially doom us to a weak power status, or are there actions that can be taken to increase our status?

Below you will find a few recommended actions and some thought-provoking questions for each of these 10 power factors.

You must demonstrate revenue impacts: is there any doubt in your mind that recruiting a key innovator, a top salesperson, or a great branding person directly increases corporate revenue? Incidentally, is this impact not just for one year but for many years as the new hire stays with the organization? If we can agree that there is a major business impact as a result of strategic hiring, what exactly is preventing you from working the CFO’s office to convert the impact of recruiting into dollars? Why doesn’t your team calculate the difference in performance between a great and a mediocre hire in the same position, in order to make the business case that demonstrates the tremendous revenue lost as a result of weak hiring processes. Have you calculated the correlation between excellence in hiring and improved workforce productivity and business results?

Tying recruiting goals to business goals is essential: most recruiting functions rely on tactical goals like reducing cost per hire and monitoring the number of positions filled. Does it make sense that such narrow and functional goals would appear insignificant to senior executives? Their goals are to increase sales, improve market share, increase customer satisfaction, and to innovate in the product area. Does it make sense to work with the people who set the overall strategic business goals to ensure that everyone sees the direct connection between what recruiting does and those goals? What is keeping you from converting your goals, so that they directly match those of the business? For example, let’s look at the business goal of increasing sales. Is it possible to demonstrate how great hiring in the sales function can directly increase sales? Well, if that’s possible, why not change your recruiting goal so that the strategic impact is clearer? Does the goal of “hire 75 people” resonate the same to senior executives as this goal: “increase sales performance by 12% by hiring 17 top-performing salespeople away from key competitors”?

Focus on beating your competitors: it’s no secret that most recruiting functions are inward-focused, while most executives are laser-focused on aggressively crushing their competitors. Would your power position improve if you demonstrated to executives how you were also extremely competitive and as a result, you directly monitored and then aggressively countered the recruiting strategies and actions of your major competitors? What are the barriers that are preventing you from demonstrating that your company’s sales, product development, and innovation rates are measurably superior to your competitors’ because your recruiting practices are superior to your competitors’? Why don’t you conduct a competitive analysis on a regular basis to see where what you do is inferior to what they do? And shifting back to the sales example, why haven’t you demonstrated how aggressive recruiting on your part can hurt the sales of your competitors? Do you purposely target the best salespeople at your competitors? In head-to-head competition over top sales candidates, what percentage do you win?

Prioritize and focus on high-impact areas: just like sports teams, all powerful functions prioritize their customers and their services in order to put their limited resources to where they can have the most business impact. Football teams focus on hiring quarterbacks, and movie producers focus on landing one or two marquee stars. In direct contrast, most recruiting functions treat all positions and hiring managers the same. They process requisitions based solely on the date of the requisition. Executives already prioritize products and business units; what is preventing you from doing the same? Would you gain more respect and increase your business impact if you instead identified the most critical business units and jobs? If you focused your hiring on revenue-generating positions, would you increase revenue? Does it really make sense to put your best recruiters on low-impact jobs and commodity business units?

Shift from reactive to proactive: most recruiting efforts can only be classified as reactive, meaning that you react only when a recruiting requisition opens up. But wouldn’t your power position improve if you shifted to the more desirable proactive mode? What if you shifted recruiting to a continuous “pre-need” mode, where you proactively seek out available talent rather than hoping that it might be conveniently available at the exact time when you have a position open? If you understand the superior approach of a we-find-them capability compared to posting jobs and hoping that the best will find you, have you considered a most-wanted list where you continually target top industry people throughout the year and react quickly when they are available? What’s keeping you from alerting your managers when top talent becomes available? Maybe you should study and learn from sports teams, where they purposely increase their focus on recruiting when performance is down?

Metrics: not a single one of the most powerful business functions make decisions based on emotions or past practice. From finance, to IT, to marketing and supply chain, they all rely heavily on “decision metrics” to continually improve. Most recruiting departments failed to generate a single metric in important areas such as:

What is your continuous improvement rate in recruiting?

What is your failure rate in hiring?

What are the critical success factors in world-class recruiting?

As a result, maybe the time has come to stop listening to HR metrics people (who almost universally “don’t get it”) and instead to begin to talk to business metrics experts. Why is it that it after all the work you’ve put into designing metrics, no one pays attention to them — because they’re all historic and they don’t help with actual daily decision-making?

Managers need to be rewarded for great hiring: like it or not, managers have learned over time to laser-focus on the things that are measured, reported, and rewarded. Even though HR controls compensation and performance appraisals, most managers are not rewarded significantly for great people-management. If people are your “most important asset,” why aren’t managers measured and rewarded for effectively using that asset? Yes it’s a tough battle, but if promotions, raises, and bonuses were tied directly to people results, wouldn’t managers then come to you for help in improving these areas?

Innovation must permeate the function: the most powerful functions innovate continually and at an amazing rate. Rather than waiting for funding before they innovate, they instead innovate first in order to get more funding and recognition. Is it true that within HR, cutting costs and avoiding errors is more beneficial to your career than risk-taking and industry-leading innovation? Is using Facebook really innovation? What is the rate of innovation within recruiting? When was the last time that a business function came to recruiting in order to learn about effective innovation processes? Are you guaranteeing continuous innovation by recruiting continuous learners on your recruiting staff, and do you have formal processes for identifying the “next practices” in talent management before everyone else adopts them?

Being technology-driven is essential: the most powerful functions love technology because technology is essential for speed, globalization, innovation, and improved decision-making. Do your recruiters misuse or avoid technology because they are too closely tied to tradition? Does buying an ATS system and using only a few of the features qualify as being technology-driven? Why don’t you use technology in interviewing, assessment, employer branding, and onboarding? Does your technology allow you to do 100% remote hiring, or can you prove that your technology increases the quality of your hires?

Your results must be reported to all: visibility is essential for obtaining and maintaining power. If recruiting results are reported only to HR, your results, no matter how spectacular they may be, are likely to remain a well-kept secret. Have you worked with the CIO and the CFO to ensure that your results are embedded in standard financial reports? Are managers with poor recruiting results embarrassed to see their name at the bottom of a ranked performance list? Can your executives and managers see each month how excellent recruiting results correlate directly with excellent business results? When recently hired individuals are recognized for outstanding business accomplishments, do you step forward and remind everyone that it was your process that made it all possible? Finally, what actions must you take in order to ensure that recruiting metrics receive the same visibility and recognition as inventory, time to market, and market share metrics?

Some Final Questions To Ponder

If your brain isn’t already spinning with thoughts, ideas, and questions, here are some additional questions to further stimulate your thinking.

• Do you vary your recruiting approach and strategy between different business units that are in completely different growth modes stages in their business cycle?
• Do you have a plan that would allow you to dominate your industry in talent management?
• Do you let individual hiring managers use their short-term perspective to decide what competencies your organization will have? Or instead, do you make an effort to educate senior managers about the future competencies that are needed throughout the corporation?
• Does your lack of integration make the hiring process a hodgepodge of disconnected events, rather than a seamless process?
• Why is the only “solution” that you offer hiring new employees? Why not offer options including substituting technology for people, hiring contingent workers, and getting ideas from non-employees through contests?
• Have you quantified the negative impact on product sales from mistreating applicants who may also be current or future customers? Does your candidate experience equal your customer experience on the product side?
• Have you analyzed why within HR, OD, leadership development, and succession planning received more emphasis and recognition than recruiting?
• Do you even have a forecasting capability within recruiting? Do you have a plan for when the economy suddenly improves? Is your recruiting process agile, so that you can meet the diverse recruiting needs of the different regions around the world?
• Do you identify and track the many bad and negative things that appear in social networks and on the Internet about what it’s like to work at your firm? Have you demonstrated the impact that a great employer brand has on your firm’s stock price?

Final Thoughts

The key success measure of any “think piece” is that it makes you uncomfortable with the status quo. This particular article focused on the disparity between the power that we should have compared to how little power we do have, and it should have encouraged you to think about action steps for recruiting to gain its rightful place among the corporate power elite. Maybe action steps on how to improve your relative power should be a topic at your monthly or annual meeting. Finally, you should also notice that the approach that I’m recommending is based not on whining or demanding recognition but instead on how to act differently in order to influence senior management. The goal is for them to finally recognize what we already know, that nothing improves the performance of an organization faster than hiring a significant number of top-performing innovators into key positions!

Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but as it falls at the end of the year, it is an opportune time to take a minute and to thank those who have helped you throughout the year. While executive recruiters used to get huge paychecks and bonuses, corporate recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as under-appreciated.

Hiring managers, often busy trying to meet end-of-year deadlines, rarely find the time to send out a well-written thank you or take you to lunch to express their gratitude for all the work that you’ve done on their behalf.

New hires are acclimating to their job, which more often than not isn’t exactly what they thought it would be, so thanks are not on the top of their minds.

Every year come December, I start to envision what it would be like in a perfect world where the efforts of corporate recruiters were recognized with a real thank you. Recruiters may not get as many “thank yous” as they deserve, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that recruiters have a profound impact on people’s work and private lives.

A “thank you note” from a grateful new hire…

I just wanted you to know that you are my hero!

The Christmas season is an ideal time for me as a new employee to say thanks to the people who helped me get this new job in this competitive job market. Specifically, I want to thank you, “my recruiter” for:

• My self-confidence: the way you treated me during the hiring process built up my confidence. My daily life is better because you helped to remind me of my many strengths and capabilities.

• My job: I have a great job and a paycheck during a time when many well-qualified individuals don’t. I owe you big time because you recognized my unique talents and guided me through the complicated hiring process. I am no longer under-appreciated by my former firm, or worse, unemployed. Both my family and I are happier and more secure, thanks to your hard work and trust in my ability. Our house will be secure and there will be lots under the Christmas tree because of you.

• You were the face of the company: applying for a job is a lonely task that is full of uncertainty, but you were my first and primary contact. Rather than being an adversary, you treated me like someone who was “special” (maybe you treat everyone that way, but honestly, I felt like I was the only applicant for the job). You were always there when I had a question, and you skillfully calmed me down so that I could perform at my best during the hiring process.

• Finding me: thank you for finding my name in the boundless confines that make up the Internet. Your ability to search out details about me and learn about my interests from dozens of sources was exceptional.

• You built a relationship: I got to know you through Facebook and Twitter, which made it easier for us to share the truth with each other. If it were not for that social network relationship and your strong convincing skills, I’m not sure I would have ever taken the time to apply for a job that seemed so different than what I was used to.

• Identifying my capabilities: even though you might have been faced with hundreds of resumes of people applying for my job, you kept mine at the top of the pile. I now realize that I should have spent more time improving my resume, so that my skills and experience came through more clearly, but your superior sorting skills found traits, experience, and potential that others might have overlooked.

• Coaching me: thanks for helping me through the hiring and interview process so that my strongest attributes came through for all to see. Even though my interview skills were a little rusty, you were my champion and coach.

• The candidate experience: I have certainly been through numerous other interview processes in my career, but none seem to be as closely tailored to my needs. I never felt like I was being grilled, and before every step of the process you explained exactly what I should expect. Even if I wouldn’t have gotten the job, I would’ve remembered the positive way that I was treated and I would’ve become an even more enthusiastic customer of your firm.

• Answering my concerns: you probably knew that I was nervous and uncertain after the final interview. Your honesty and openness convinced me that you did your best to ensure that the offer I received was highly competitive and fair.

• Helping me get acclimated: you could easily have moved on after I accepted your firm’s offer, but instead you remained available when I had questions. When you showed up and welcomed me on my first day and made sure that I got up to speed rapidly, you once again proved that you were more interested in my success than in just filling a job.

I also wanted you to know that because of your professionalism and the information you provided me about the firm, I now go out of my way to tell colleagues at other firms that this firm is a great place to work, in no small part because of you and the way you treat applicants and employees. I hope to make several employee referrals during the next year as a result of the information you provided and the way you treated me. Thanks again for all that you’ve done; I’m proud to be your coworker!

* * * * * * * * * *

A “thank you note” from a grateful hiring manager …

I just wanted you to know how much you impacted my business success!

The end of the year is an ideal time for me to say thanks to the people who allowed both my team and I to be among the most productive and innovative within our organization. Specifically, I want to thank you, my recruiter, for all that you do to make me successful as a manager, including …

• Understanding the processes: in the past, I’ve been guilty of procrastinating when it comes to recruiting, mostly because I found the process to be confusing. However, I want to thank you for taking the time to help me understand the complex requisition, recruiting, and hiring processes. With your coaching and guidance I have successfully avoided hiring delays and legal issues without having to read endless recruiting policies and manuals. You help me understand why some of the steps that I thought were bureaucratic actually helped to contribute to a higher quality hire.

• Sourcing: thanks for consistently identifying so many top candidates. Without your advice, I would probably still be running newspaper want ads. Thanks for educating me about the new approaches to recruiting, including social networks, blogs, and direct sourcing using Boolean search strings. Without them, I would have missed most of the best and brightest candidates who you sourced. The percentage of qualified candidates that you presented to me was so high that I could have picked up a resume when blindfolded and still ended up with a superstar.

• Being so responsive: thanks for your responsiveness. Even though you have a huge requisition load and a dozen hiring managers to service, you consistently found a way to respond rapidly to my questions and calls.

• Tolerance: thanks for your tolerance and understanding during the many times when I let you down. That includes when I wasn’t available for interviews and for the countless times that I took forever to sort through the resumes you sent me. I now know that you can’t do your job effectively unless I as a hiring manager do my part.

• Position descriptions: thanks for your help in improving the position descriptions that I create. I realize that without your coaching and advice, many of these descriptions would be so dull and off the mark that I would have never attracted a single top candidate.

• Innovators and game-changers: my team is now one of the most innovative in the industry in no small part as a result of you. Many thanks for demonstrating to me the large business impact that innovators can have over average hires. Without the numerous tips on how to successfully hire these hard-to-understand innovators, I might have settled for average hires.

• Global capability: even though over 50% of my business came from overseas, I found myself lost when it came to recruiting talent from around the world. I never would have understood the complexities and the keys to success without your guidance and advice. My team now has broad global capabilities as a result of your hiring expertise.

• Follow-up: thanks for following up after my hires were completed, in order to ensure that the new employee started off at full speed. Your continuous coaching and help also resulted in lower new-hire turnover rates. You could have stopped helping immediately after they said yes to our offer, but fortunately for all, you didn’t.

• Curbing my enthusiasm: thanks for subtly, but effectively, pointing out the weaknesses in many of the candidates who I was enamored with. Sometimes I got so emotionally involved with a candidate that I couldn’t see their weaknesses without your help.

• Metrics: you have successfully demonstrated to me the cost of a bad hire and the tremendous value add of a great hire. As a result, I am now no longer willing to settle for the mediocre level of talent that I used to hire before you began helping me.

• Diversity: without your help, my team could never be as diverse and inclusive as it is today. The high degree of diversity among my team allows it to be more creative and to identify problems and opportunities from multiple perspectives. This diversity also helps my team understand the needs of our diverse customers, which further improves our products and services.

• Help with the generations: thanks for coaching me about the differences between the many different generations that candidates come from. You helped me understand their different needs and what was necessary in order to land and keep them on my team.

• Closing: thanks for your help in understanding what it takes to “sell” so many top candidates. Fortunately, with your coaching and guidance, we have been able to land so many exceptional candidates that I could never have sold on my own with my limited sales knowledge and abilities.

• Employment brand: I now realize that without the strong external image and employment brand that you and your colleagues have helped to build, few top candidates would seek out our firm. I just wanted you to know that I am continually approached at conferences and events by top talent whoare already excited about and sold on our firm. Our firm is a talent magnet as a result of your branding efforts, and as a result of your convincing, I now try to spread the word myself through my blog (which you helped me with) and my Facebook connections.

• My business results: Thank you for the impact you’ve had on my business results, the recognition, bonuses, and the promotions that I have received as a direct result of your competencies in hiring. Your advice and occasional cajoling have resulted in enough great hires to almost guarantee the success of my team. The people who you have identified and helped me hire have such exceptional capabilities that I routinely exceed my business goals with embarrassingly little effort.

I also wanted to apologize for all the times during the last year that I might not have taken hiring as seriously as I should have. Thanks to your efforts, I now realize that in business, just like in sports, even a mediocre manager can succeed when they are provided with a recruiter and a hiring process that continually provides exceptional talent. I now confidently enter into new business and product areas knowing you will somehow find and land the exceptional talent I require in that field. Thanks again for making me look good.

Final Thoughts

During turbulent economic times, it’s easy to become disillusioned as a recruiter. Even though a few think of recruiters as little more than “requisition jockeys,” you and I know that the work we do makes a huge difference. If we get it right, we change people’s lives and our company’s results for the better.

However, if we get it wrong, we also realize that we can hurt not only candidates but also our organization’s shareholders. So, even if you don’t receive a single thank-you card like the ones illustrated above, take a step back as the year comes to a close and applaud yourself for a job well done.

Happy holidays and once again, thank you for making a difference!

I did not say that strategy is not important, or that delivering a strategic impact is not important, but rather implied that how most organizations are approaching talent strategy today is out of touch with the times.

As the general business environment has become more turbulent, and technology combined with consumer demand has driven significant shortening of most product lifecycles, the complexities of delivering really strategic impact through talent management have ballooned. While competency management systems, career path planning, and multi-year development cycles may have made sense decades ago, that simply is not the case today.

Organizational agility is something the majority of human resource functions are not designed to enable or support. In fact, most traditional HR systems, including those in talent acquisition, hinder agility by imposing rigid control structures with process cycles that take months and even years to execute.

You can’t hit a moving target that changes location unpredictably every six months using processes that take 18 months to execute!

In this installment, I expand beyond the six capabilities of agile talent management introduced in Part I by talking about the critical elements of such a strategy.

However, before launching into the elements, let’s first take a look at a few examples of agile talent management in action.

Examples of Agile Talent Management

A key characteristic of organizational agility is the ability to rapidly shift idle resources. Like most airlines, Southwest Airlines was affected significantly by the most recent downturn in the U.S. economy. While competitors were busy slashing payrolls, Southwest instead cut back on hiring and temporally redeployed idle recruiters (more than 80 of them) into other areas of the business where work needed to get done, in line with the recruiter’s abilities. The shift enabled Southwest to maintain access to the talent it would need when hiring demand ticked up and simultaneously enabled the organization to catch up on project work elsewhere that added value in the current economic state.

Along similar lines, Corning once used idle recruiters to manage the outplacement of surplus employees in place of a third-party vendor. The refocusing of resources again preserved access to a resource Corning would need months later as new opportunities emerged that required staffing increases.

While using idle recruiters to accomplish work elsewhere in the organization was a new trend this downturn, it by no means is a stellar example of organizational agility.

Enterprise-wide efforts that are emerging include:

• Temporary redeployment of top performers into development roles where the primary mandate is knowledge-sharing and collaborative solution development to emerging issues (Numerous companies)
• Creation of flexible talent pools that grant temporary project-based access to top talent by managers without budget or need for permanent hires (Coors)
• Business unit/team prioritization schemas that enable simultaneous investment/cost-containment efforts across the enterprise (HP)
• Counter-cyclical process execution, i.e. taking advantage of economic cycles by executing growth-mode processes during downturns and vice versa (Slide-College Hiring)
• Redefinition of labor needs to allow for extensive use of contingent and alternative labor types that aide real time increases/decreases in labor cost (Google)

The unifying themes in all of these different examples is that firms need a strategy that allows them to respond rapidly with a customized solution, whenever something in the business environment changes.

Critical Elements of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

Some individuals think that an agile talent management strategy is little more than a focus on using contingent labor whenever and wherever possible, but that is much too narrow of a view. An agile talent management strategy is really more about making a bevy of talent management solutions available to the enterprise that enables organizational flexibility in a timeframe consistent with evolving business lifecycles.

An agile talent management strategy differs from a traditional talent management strategy in many ways:

• A broader range of more specific goals, including:
  — To increase the overall labor productivity and ROI
  — To increase the capacity of the workforce
  — To increase the capability of the workforce
  — To improve rates of innovation and adaptation
  — To provide a competitive advantage through labor deployment
• An acceptance of a need for alternative paths: an agile strategy must predict a possible range of paths possible and offer relevant solutions regardless of whatever path environmental conditions dictate taking.
• Core business strategy integration: to ensure that talent management solutions are truly relative versus reactive, talent management planning must become a component of core business strategy development versus being cascaded from it.
• Data-driven decision making: one of the most difficult elements to enable is diverging from past practice. In an agile talent management strategy, decisions are made much more quickly using all available data and facts, and then reevaluated frequently rather than following a path dictated by tradition.
• Intra-enterprise prioritization: to maximize labor ROI, an agile talent management strategy focuses resources on the highest impact business units, jobs, regions, individuals, and critical skills. This is a direct contrast to most strategies that advocate equal treatment across the enterprise and make customization or delivery of one-size-fits-one solutions nearly impossible.
• Holistic focus: unlike the majority of talent-management strategies that focus solely on permanent employees, an agile strategy looks at coordinating talent management activities across all segments of the labor force, including numerous alternative labor types such as part-time workers, seasonal workers, outsource service providers, contract labor, strategic partner labor, and project-based deployment of retirees/interns/alumni/customers.
• Aggressive perspective: An agile talent management strategy doesn’t aim at enabling organizational survival, it aims at total domination of the industry by employing talent management tools and approaches that provide the organization significant influence over the talent marketplace.
• Consistently revised business case: as a result of a dynamns/business environment, the business case for talent management activities must be consistently revised. However, due to better alignment of deliverables with business need that proves a consistent positive impact, many agile strategies seek multi-cycle funding to enable greater resource usage flexibility.
• Extensive use of existing proven business tools/approaches: another major break from traditional talent management strategy is an increased focus on using non-HR tools and approaches to support talent management activities. Agile strategies borrow concepts often related to inventory management, quality control, adaptive manufacturing, CRM, and supply chain management. It is from these models that we get talent management terms such as “talent pipeline” and “talent inventory.”
• Comprehensive planning: delivering organizational agility requires that every activity that influences the organization’s ability to execute business strategy, including every talent management activity, incorporate a need for enabling agility into tactical and operational planning. To ensure that roadblocks to agility to do not occur, all plans should be analyzed using if/then scenarios prior to approval.

While not elements of the strategy itself, executing an agile talent management strategy requires two management practices that are not found in many organizations. Those practices include:

• Extensive use of recognition and rewards for delivering agility
• An organizational preference for agile individuals

Without management practices that focus on these two things, executing an agile strategy is nearly impossible.

Factors Influencing Talent Management Strategy Shifts

Many factors affect an organization’s ability to be successful, but when it comes to talent management the five key factors that should trigger a possible change in strategy include:

• Changing internal business needs: need to cut labor costs, need to rapidly add talent or to change skills, need to meet expanding business goals, need to accelerate product development, or a need to increase the rate of innovation.
• Changes in external economic factors: when external economic factors like the unemployment rate, interest rates, or labor quality change.
• Changes in the relative “power” of talent: changes in the supply and demand of labor. As talent becomes more powerful, organizations must become more talent-centric.
• As talent interests change: whenever what talent expects or demands in a job or work environment changes, so must the talent management approach change.
• Changes in a competitor’s talent management strategy: unlike most traditional talent management strategies, an agile strategy must monitor and react to the talent-management-related actions of organizations you compete with for talent.

Talent Management Functions That Must Be Agile

As mentioned previously, all talent management activities need to allow for agility, but those most likely to shift as a result of a change in the factors highlighted above include:

sourcing/recruiting approaches
emphasis on development/training
rate of internal movement and redeployment
use of rewards and motivators
scope of retention/blocking strategies
contingent labor utilization ratios
emphasis on innovation
leverage of external resources for ideation/innovation
change in skill/competency profiles
release of surplus/poor performers
employment branding
candidate experience
new-hire/transfer onboarding

Benchmark Firms

Firms that have adopted some aspects of the agile talent management include:

Capital One

The U.S. military

Valero Energy

Microsoft

Southwest Airlines

City of Sunnyvale, CA

Google Slide

Final Thoughts

Like it or not, many of the old stalwarts of business strategy such as long-term forecasting, continuous improvement, long-range planning, and best practice benchmarking may already be on their way to becoming obsolete in this new, dynamns/environment.

Even if the world of business were to slowdown, you would still have to ask yourself, “is it ever a bad thing to be too agile and nimble?” In fact, it may be that agility, along with continuous learning, might turn out to be the two primary competencies for both successful individuals and thriving businesses in the future.

It’s been up and down like a yo-yo for the last decade, a fact that led Time to declare the first decade of the new century “the decade from hell” in a recent cover story. If you work in talent management or HR, this yo-yo pattern certainly isn’t news to you. Surprisingly enough, it’s times like these that present the best opportunity to become more strategic as more managers open their minds to alternative solutions to improve productivity, save money, and move their organizations forward.

This article is intended to get you to rethink your current talent management strategy and to change it so that it better fits turbulent economic conditions and trends that are most likely to stick around for awhile.

Times Change; Strategy Isn’t What it Used to Be

As a professor of management in a college of business, I must remain knowledgeable on economic trends and the strategies organizations can leverage to survive and, in many cases, thrive during various economic situations. While some might argue that a PhD is needed to understand the complexities of the global economy, it doesn’t take a great deal of education to realize that for as long as man has recorded details on trade, there have been oscillating cycles of growth and decline.

If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember the recessions of 1970, 1975, and 1983, followed by growth spurts in 1977 and 1984. Despite blips here and there, the U.S. economy and Western economies in general have grown at a relatively stable rate for some time.

However, if you look at the deviations in growth, you would note that since 1983, the cycles of economic growth and decline have become much shorter and for the most part less severe.

The economy of today is turbulent, and will continue to be for sometime as more and more feedback becomes available in real-time enabling organizations (including governments and corporations) to adjust their economic activities more quickly. Instead of investing in growth for three years and containing costs for four, organizations will more likely find themselves growing for one quarter, contracting for two, growing for three, contracting for one, etc.

Prior to 1983, developing an effective HR strategy wasn’t easy, but economic conditions did allow for making plans three, five, and in some really rare cases 10 years out. There was no need to change the HR or talent management strategy. All you needed was a strategy with three modes: a growth mode, a “freeze” mode, and a layoff mode to match the three corresponding economic cycles. Organizations were much less complex decades ago, often operating in narrowly defined regions and businesses with similar cycles. When economic decline occurred, it hit the entire organization uniformly, meaning that if pay cuts were called for, everyone was impacted. Economic trends have changed, organizations have changed, and how organizations develop talent management strategy must change too.

Thriving on Chaos

Economists prefer to label this new turbulent economic environment as a “dynamic economy,” but the old Tom Peters catchphrase, “thriving on chaos,” might be a better description.

No matter what you call it, leaders are beginning to realize that the speed of change is increasing at a breathtaking rate. Products that used to have a lifecycle of five years might now only be viable for a few months. New ideas, products, or benchmark business processes that in the past could be protected for decades, are now copied, stolen, and possibly even rendered obsolete within weeks.

Workers who used to be loyal and want to work at a company for life have been replaced with a new generation that might consider three years at a single firm to be the equivalent of a lifetime commitment.

Some areas of knowledge are doubling in a year, rendering many skilled workers struggling to remain relevant or become obsolete within years of being educated. It may not sound like reality, but if you step back and take all the change around you, you would realize very quickly that the old way of doing talent management no longer fits.

Characteristics of a Chaotic Business and Economic Environment

This dynamic business and economic environment has four defining characteristics:

• A blinding speed of change: everything changes so fast that the things that worked well last year will not work at all next year.
• Dynamic of almost-impossible-to-predict change: rather than things evolving in a predictable way, so many options are now available in nearly every aspect of being that the direction of change has become irregular and almost impossible to predict. Plans or forecasts that deal with cycles greater than 18 months have no chance of being accurate.
• Inconsistent/non-uniform change: rather than things changing in the same way at the same time across the entire organization, some parts of the business and some regions are going up while others are going down.
• Obsolescence demands complete replacement: while in the past we could often refine or update existing products and processes to keep them viable, the new environment requires that most be shelved and completely replaced with a different approach. Routinely making obsolete your own products requires a level of innovation and speed that that must be classified as several levels above the historical continuous improvement model. Can you imagine one of your teenage children even considering using a perfectly operational reconditioned mobile phone that is two years old? In this new world, we don’t fix things. We replace them with the latest model.

Six Capabilities of Any Agile Strategy or Approach

Whenever you’re faced with a situation where the speed of change makes accurate forecasting and planning virtually impossible, there is only one feasible approach that can guarantee success. That approach is known as agility. Agility is a term that has been used by CEOs for years, but it’s now time that we embrace it in talent management and HR.

Agility calls for six major capabilities, including:

1. Moving fast: reacting almost immediately to problems and opportunities.
2. Accurate movement: moving fast isn’t enough; you also have to routinely hit your target while moving fast.
3. Simultaneous movement: rather than waiting for one action to be completed before starting another, many actions must occur simultaneously (multitasking).
4. Many directions: rather than moving in a single direction, agility means moving in many directions, probably at the same time.
5. This and that: traditionally if you aimed for one goal (i.e. low costs) you would assume that another “counter goal” (i.e. high quality) would have to be sacrificed. When you are agile, you expect to reach both goals, even though they might be on opposite ends of what was traditionally considered to be possible.
6. No new resources: traditionally, in order to do more, you needed more resources, but agility calls for using your resources more effectively with less waste and idle time.

In fact, much like playing the carnival game “whack-a-mole,” being agile means more than just moving fast. It means in order to be successful, you must move fast, hit hard, and accurately but also while dealing with lots of uncertainty!

The Definition of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

An agile talent management strategy is a strategy that is designed to increase the overall productivity and capabilities of the workforce by rapidly shifting, in a coordinated manner, talent management approaches, tools, and resources in response to the dynamic economy, a changing talent marketplace, and the changing needs of your major business units.

It abandons an emphasis on the one-size-fits-all model in use by many organizations in favor of a one-size-fits-one model. It generally requires a significant increase in the use of contingent workers and alternative labor types. In executing an agile talent management strategy, organizations will need to be prepared to rapidly shift resources between talent management processes including recruiting, retention, development, redeployment and releasing “surplus” talent, as business needs fluctuate.

Up Next Week

Next week’s installment will include an example of agile talent management, a list of common elements that comprise an agile talent management strategy, and further discussion of the factors forcing organizations to embrace a more agile approach.

Free Webcast: Crafting an Agile Talent Management Strategy in the Age of Talent

Taleo has graciously sponsored a free webinar featuring Dr. John Sullivan discussing a number of factors related to crafting an agile talent management strategy in an age when talent is gaining power. If interested, check out upcoming air dates and register to attend here.

Too many managers and administrators-turned-recruiters ask binary questions that make it easy for candidates to guess the most desirable answer. For example, they may describe their group’s team dynamic and ask if it is the type of environment that the candidate finds suitable. Fortunately, there is an alternative type of question format known as “forced choice” that can be used by those in recruiting to garner a much more precise and insightful candidate perspective on cultural issues.

The Problems with Binary Questions in Interviews

Many of the questions asked during interviews can easily be classified as binary or yes/no, true/false questions. While they may be posed in an open-ended fashion, it is clear from the phrasing and tonal inflection what response is desired.

In other cases, the questions probe the existence of behavioral characteristics that any candidate would need to be an idiot to deny.

Examples of obvious “yes” questions:

• Are you a team player?
• Do you work well under pressure?
• Do you share our company’s values?

Unless you are interviewing Homer Simpson, questions like those listed here will result in fairly predictable responses. By asking a question that allows a simple yes or no answer to be provided, you make it way too easy for the candidate to misrepresent themselves and to give the answer that they think you really want.

Consider Forced-Choice Questions

If you wanted to obtain a more precise answer to an important “fit” or preference question, shift to a forced-choice question format. This format requires the candidate to rank a series of possible responses in order of desirability.

Example:

How many hours of overtime would you be willing to work on a routine basis? (Please place a “C” next to those options you are comfortable with, a “T” next to those options you could tolerate, and a “U” next to those option unacceptable.

__ 0 hours per week

__ 3 hours per week

__ 5 hours per week

__ 7 hours per week

__ 9 hours per week

__ 11 hours per week

__ 15+ hours per week

By phrasing the question this way, you require the candidate to provide more precise insight into their real perspectives.

Using Forced-Choice Questions

Forced choice questions can be used throughout the assessment process but are best employed to either knock out candidates or determine a group for inclusion in further assessment activities early on in the assessment process. They can be used in online surveys following the application, during pre-screening activities executed by phone or survey, and during formal interviews. They work great in high-volume hiring environments to limit time spent on interviewing candidates who will not operate well in the environment or culture provided.

Five Sample Forced-Choice Questions

The following sample questions were designed for use in a high-volume retail environment. They cover a variety of job-related parameters.

1. Please rank the following activities in the order in which you desire to focus on them.

(Goal: to identify the activities the candidate prefers to focus on to see if they match the actual mix of job duties.)

__ Working as a cashier

__ Maintaining front-of-store inventory (stocking)

__ Preparing merchandise displays

__ Servicing customer inquiries

__ Maintaining store cleanliness (janitorial)

__ Processing new inventory (warehouse)

__ Loss prevention (customer monitoring)

2. Please rank the following possible work situations in the order in which you desire them.

(Goal: to identify whether the candidate prefers to work in a role where they are isolated and influence decisions solely or as part of a larger consensus.)

____ Assignment to isolated tasks that allow you 100% control over your performance

____ Assignment to tasks that require a small team where others may influence your performance but that would provide more social interaction

____ Assignment to tasks that require cooperation and coordination of numerous other employees influencing your ability to perform but maximizing social interaction

3. Please rate the following skills required based on your level of expertise using a rating scale of 5-Strong Mastery to 1-No Mastery.

(Goal: to identify if the candidates’ strongest technical skills and knowledge areas match the job requirements.)

__ Telephone communications

__ Cash register operations

__ Dealing with customer complaints

__ Managing time

__ Preparing and displaying inventory

__ Managing others

4. Please rate the following management scenarios based on their desirability to you using a rating scale of 1 (highly desirable) to 5 (less desirable).

(Goal: to identify whether the management style that they are the most productive under is similar to the style used by store management.)

__ Manager closely monitors assigned work activities and provides frequent feedback

__ Manager assigns tasks and allows independent work, periodically checking on progress and providing direction/feedback

__ Manager assigns tasks and trusts that they will be executed according to standards, but does not monitor progress or provide feedback until shift is completed

__ Manager does not assign tasks directly, but rather provides a list of things to accomplish, allowing employees on shift to self-delegate and check off completion

__ Manager works alongside employees completed necessary tasks providing instruction and feedback on performance as time permits

5. Please rank the following possible forms of communication managers may use to discuss your performance with you in order of desirability.

(Goal: to identify whether the communication approach desired is used by store management.)

__ I prefer direct face-to-face feedback in a public setting only when needed

__ I prefer direct face-to-face feedback in a private setting only when needed

__ I prefer feedback via written note only when needed

__ I prefer feedback via email only when needed

__ I prefer routine feedback offered during informal face-to-face meetings

__ I prefer routine feedback via formally documented written communications

Advantages of This Format

As you can tell from this very simple retail example, forced-choice questions enable managers and recruiters to quickly screen candidates based on their ability to operate in the environment or culture that will be provided, versus the perfect scenario often described.

Beyond more detailed insight, forced-choice questions provide the following advantages:

• They force candidates to deliberate more on their perspective.
• They make comparison of candidates much easier and less subjective.
• They help aide selection of candidates more apt to thrive in the actual work environment that will be provided.
• They prevent candidates from dodging tough questions and from offering up easy canned responses.

Final Thoughts

The entire process of interviewing has many weaknesses and inherent flaws that may lead to bad hiring decisions. In fact, one study by Leadership IQ found that the typical assessment process was only 19% successful in identifying candidates who went on to become undeniable performers.

Minimizing the number of binary questions and substituting forced-choice questions is the smart way to improve accuracy. In addition, many forced-choice questions can be implemented during pre-screening activities that could save you lots of time and money assessing candidates who are not an appropriate fit for the job or manager!

If you would like to learn more about pre-interview questionnaires in general, see my previous article entitled A Pre-Interview Questionnaire for Improving Candidate Screening.

Last week

This week my attention turns to why the recruiting function cannot — and should not — be the primary executor of social media activities, as well as tips for getting the rest of the organization to help out.

A List of Reasons Why Recruiters Can’t or Shouldn’t Do It All

There are a variety reasons why recruiters shouldn’t be expected to handle most of the day-to-day aspects of social media recruiting and communications.

Some of them include:

• The volume is unmanageable — given the normal recruiting load, if you need as few as 10 prospects in order to generate a single hire, the total number of contacts and the number of messages that a single recruiter would need to generate a trusted social relationship would quickly become unmanageable. Having the communications load spread across many employees makes the required volume more manageable.
• Less available time — because recruiters are already stressed and overworked, unless they are released from their regular recruiting duties, they will have very few hours available to lurk on social networks. In direct contrast, many of your employees are likely to be already spending dozens of hours each week on such sites, some of it outside of work hours (thus making it free). By using this already committed time, you can multiply your impact by leveraging the time spent by your employees.
• Recruiters are less authentic — most candidates don’t find recruiters to be as authentic or credible as those that work in the department where the job is open, because recruiters don’t actually do the job. In addition, everyone knows that recruiters are salespeople and have been known to oversell positions.
• A recruiter’s job-specific knowledge is limited — the very best prospects will seek specific information about a job. They will ask questions that the average recruiter just can’t adequately or convincingly answer because they don’t actually work in that job. Employees working in that team are well versed in the jargon and they know more about both the good and bad points of the actual job, the manager, and the work team.
• Recruiters provide a limited learning opportunity — employed individuals who are not actively seeking a job need to justify to themselves and to their boss the time they put into any external professional relationship. One of the justifications for external relationships is the potential to benchmark and learn, in order to do your current job better. Obviously there are more opportunities to learn and to improve when you network with a peer, compared to when you network with a recruiter.
• Social media efforts must be customized — recruiters can certainly over time learn how to use social networks and social media. Unfortunately, not all professions have equal access to social media or use social media in the same matter. In most cases, a one-size-fits-all approach will have a limited success because the approach that works on Twitter won’t work as effectively on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Because professionals in every job family also approach social networking differently, it may take someone in each individual field to know the best social media approach for that job family.
• Videos show the passion — videos and pictures are an important way of communicating on social networks. Unfortunately, no recruiter would have the time to create recruiting videos or to take compelling worksite pictures for each individual job opening. In contrast, individuals working in the field would be much more willing to frequently create and post work-related videos. Even though individuals who work in the job might make less professional videos or pictures, they are likely to be more compelling and authentic.
• Capturing competitive intelligence — although some recruiters understand their role as competitive-intelligence gatherers, many recruiters wouldn’t know what to do with valuable business information if they were to run across it. In contrast, your employees and managers who are well-versed in their fields will know what competitive intelligence questions to ask and what to do with any critical usable competitive intelligence information that they might obtain while social networking.

Tips on Getting Employees Involved

It’s generally not too difficult to get employees to begin social networking or to modify their current social media behavior if you clearly demonstrate to them the impact and the contribution that they can have. Unfortunately, once they agree to participate, the only option that most employees have to learn is through trial and error, which is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating!

Some of the action steps I recommend to help get employees involved and productive include:

• Ask them — ask your employees to help the firm in identifying potential candidates, in building relationships, and in strengthening the company’s employer brand image online.
• Educate them — make them aware of how their participation can be beneficial both to them and to the company’s recruiting effort. Let them know the range of actions and the minimum and the maximum amount of time you want them to contribute each month. You should also educate their managers so that they also see the unique value that they can contribute without distracting from their current job duties. Also provide your employees with examples and stories that illustrate the factors that make your firm a great place to work at.
• Leverage other business units — coordinate the social media recruiting effort with other business functions that are already advanced major social media users like marketing, product branding, and customer service. Not only can this help to avoid spreading conflicting messaging, but also ensure that all learning relating to effectively using social media is shared.
• Provide profile templates — every social network requires you to provide a profile of yourself. Rather than making each employee learn on their own the best ways to become visible on social media, instead provide them with tools to guide them. Start with “fill-in” templates of effective profiles that are individually designed for each major site that they can use to get started. Also provide side-by-side samples of great, average, and poor profiles so they can actually see the different factors that differentiate a great one from a weak profile.
• Provide contact-building approaches — because every different social media site has different capabilities for identifying and making new “friends,” educate your employees about the most effective approaches on each site. Educate them about how to use surveys, post questions, join and form groups, etc. Also help them with sample “first-contact” templates and successful approaches for overcoming resistance. Employees might also have to be educated about the different approaches that are required to contact and recruit in-demand currently employed individuals vs. the approaches that work effectively for active job seekers.
• Tell them where the best prospects can be found — don’t force them to learn the most populated social media sites and groups for their particular job family through trial and error. Instead, use your recruiters and external vendors to identify the sites where the best in each individual job family can be found. Continually update them as the popularity of different sites change and don’t forget to include live networking events (i.e., university alumni, professional association, and social club and community events) as part of your recruiting strategy.
• Offer coaching help — compile an experts directory and webpage, so that your employees can seek out and get effective coaching and advice when they run into a problem or an opportunity. External coaches and other vendor services can help both employees and recruiters remain on the leading edge of social media recruiting practices. Develop a process to regularly provide tips to your employees (for example, how they can link the various social media sites together (i.e., Twitter with LinkedIn with Facebook), so that they minimize the number of times they need to shift between the various sites).
• Use other technology tools and channels — empower your employees to use each of the wide variety of technologies and communications channels that perspective candidates might use. This might include the mobile phone platform, video sites like YouTube, online forums, texting, blogging, RSS feeds, etc.
• Global opportunities — don’t forget to educate your employees about the unique social media sites (and how to operate on them) that are popular in other regions or countries where your firm is heavily recruiting.
• Ask them to notify you when they come across negative messages — it’s quite likely that your employees will be among the first to come across negative or brand damaging messages about your firm. Encourage them to notify the manager of employer branding whenever they encounter negative messaging.
• Inform recruiting when others try to recruit them — encourage employees to help the firm learn how competitors are using social networks to recruit. Ask employees to contact central recruiting whenever they are approached in a recruiting context on social network sites. This has two purposes. The first is so that your firm can learn from the approaches of others. The second is that the retention function can use this information to develop blocking strategies to counter their social networking recruiting moves.

Focus Your Contribution

If you shift the burden of most day-to-day recruiting communications on social network and media sites to your employees, clearly define the remaining strategic role of your recruiters. Briefly, some of the social media related activities that should remain the responsibility of recruiting include:

• Prioritizing jobs and candidates — recruiting should prioritize key jobs and the ideal candidates, so that your employees will know where to best focus their recruiting related efforts. Employees should also be educated as to which professions and what types of candidates are not likely to be as active on social networking sites.
• Posting job openings — the posting of open jobs on the most appropriate social media sites should remain a centralized activity. Employees should also be encouraged to repost openings on unique sites that only they might be aware of.
• Employer brand image — recruiting should maintain control and ownership over developing, managing, and measuring employer brand strength and in identifying and countering negative messages. Recruiting should also monitor employer rating sites like glassdoor.com and Vault in order to identify and then effectively bury or counter negative messages on these critical sites.
• Search engine optimization — corporate efforts to increase your firm’s visibility on search engine results should remain centralized.
• Developing metrics and the business case — the recruiting function should own social media metrics and the process of building the business case. They should also periodically audit efforts using mystery shoppers, feedback loops, and best-practice sharing processes in order to continually improve social media results.
• Technologies related to social networking and social media — recruiting leaders should identify and assess emerging technologies, software, and vendor services.
• Converting prospects into hires — although employees will play a major role in identifying and building relationships with prospects, recruiters should still handle the remaining aspects of the recruiting process that lead to conversion.

Final Thoughts

In my experience, it’s hard to find a single major corporation where the executives and managers are not excited about the prospects of social media recruiting. There are many benefits associated with implementing an effective social media recruiting strategy. Unfortunately, a majority of organizations are progressing without selecting a strategy and are painfully learning through trial and error.

If you want to fast-forward your learning, you need to adopt an employee-centric strategy today.

The sheer volume of potential directions to follow is confusing, daunting, and at times, just plain overwhelming. While some organizations have stuck a stick in the sand and are pushing forward with a defined approach, the majority of efforts currently underway will fail for one key reason: they rely solely upon a small handful of individuals attempting to maintain visibility in a sea of content growing exponentially.

Relying upon a social media coordinator, online brand ambassador, or a team of recruiters dedicating only a portion of their desk time to social media initiatives dooms such efforts to stumble and underperform. Such efforts produce corporate fan pages on Facebook, where the only comments ever visible are sanitized “PR” posts and boring job announcements! (I actually viewed one such page last week where the only wall post visible was a notice from the organization’s legal department advising visitors to the page not to post negative comments!)

Delivering an engaging, interactive, authentic, and personalized experience requires a scale of participation that the limited resources of the recruiting function simply cannot provide. The alternate approach, the one most likely to drive success, is an employee-centric approach that relies on your employees to build and manage relationships and the recruiting resources to coordinate, influence, and support their efforts.

The 12 Most Common Social Media Strategies

Most recruiting managers fail to think strategically when they develop their approach to social media recruiting. In fact, if you want to test someone’s depth of knowledge of social media recruiting, simply ask them to list the range of strategies that corporations can pursue. Most recruiting leaders will respond that they either don’t know enough about social media yet, or ramble off how they are adapting historical marketing efforts for delivery via social media.

As a corporate advisor, I’ve seen what a lot of organizations are up to, including initiatives already live and others currently in development. To help frame the discussion about this topic moving forward, I’d like to categorize the efforts into the following strategy categories:

Limited Scope Strategies

• The “laissez-faire” social media recruiting strategy — a do-nothing strategy where efforts are not managed or coordinated.
• Reference-checking strategy — a strategy that employs social media solely as another source of information during the reference-checking process.
• Post-and-pray strategy — a strategy that leverages social media as nothing more than another channel to broadcast employment opportunities to.
• Employer brand management strategy — a strategy that focuses on using social media to evaluate and influence the perception of the organization as an employer by distributing content about the employee experience via social media channels.
• Hybrid strategy — A hybrid strategy recognizes a need for different approaches to drive different types of activity supporting unique aspects of the organization. It uses components of nearly all strategies presented here.

Broad Scope Strategies

• Centralized social media recruiting strategy — a common strategy that employs recruiters as the sole agents of the organization and relies upon them to carry out full-spectrum activities including direct sourcing, relationship recruiting, employment marketing, employer brand assessment, and employer branding.
• The employee-centric recruiting strategy — a powerful “full spectrum” approach that exponentially increases the visibility of the organization in social media by using all employees as the agents under the direction/influence of the recruiting organization. (This strategy is the primary focus of this article.)
• The “talent community” strategy — a variation of the employee-centric strategy that has a longer-term focus on building communities and relationships based primarily on professional learning.
• Outsourced management strategy — A strategy that employs a third party such as a marketing or PR firm to manage a significant portion of the effort.

Organizational Strategies

• Banned social media strategy — a strategy that seeks to minimize the impact of social media for better or worse by blocking or severely restricting access to social media throughout the organization.
• Social media committee strategy — this strategy recognizes that where social media is concerned, the needs and wants of numerous organizational stakeholders may cross and seeks to coordinate efforts and more effectively marshal resources.
• Distributed social media strategy — a strategy that provides organizational guidelines on social media usage, but that permits units/groups within the organization to plan, develop, and execute initiatives without oversight.

Organize Your Employee “Army”

Few would argue against the fact that implementing a program to manage and increase the organization’s presence on social media is a hot topic among managers and executives. While the most advanced work is being done in customer service functions, marketing, product development, and HR leaders nearly everywhere are at the very least exploring the possibility of using this new channel of communication.

The majority of early efforts by recruiting leaders struggled to produce meaningful and measurable results, but from experimentation comes innovation and learning.

The primary driver of failure among early adopters wasn’t lack of interest or individual effort, but rather lack of scale!

Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships! It’s the same principle that makes employee referrals the No. 1 source of hire at most firms. Both programs rely on harnessing or leveraging other people’s time (OPT) to contribute to recruiting results. Because the ratio of employees to recruiters is extremely lopsided, using employee’s time results in a quantum increase in network size, visibility, and professional relationships that can drive future recruiting successes.

The added benefit: employees are better able to communicate in ways and on topics more valuable to their peers, which makes it easier for them to build successful relationships.

Microsoft’s industry-leading long-term community-building approach, which relies heavily on employee efforts (highlighting employee blogs, displaying ERP advertisement on employee profile pages, etc.), illustrates the direction that recruiting managers should take. Large firms like Google already rely heavily on their employees, and smaller firms have resorted to this employee-centric or employee-centered approach because they simply don’t have a significant recruiting team.

Before you waste a lot of time and effort and become frustrated, shift your recruiters away from doing most social networking and instead toward orchestrating and managing it. Organize your employees, managers, corporate alumni, and even your vendors to become an “army” of social media brand builders and recruiters.

A Close Tie-in With the Employee Referral Program Is Required

The foundation of any social media effort that is employee-centric must be a seamless tie-in with a world-class employee referral program. Without a direct connection, the majority of great prospects your employees identify will never make it into your recruiting process. Nothing frustrates your employees more than putting maximum effort into identifying a superstar who is interested in your firm and then finding out that the organization that asked for their help failed to follow up.

The handoff from employee to recruiter must be smooth and seamless so that the candidate isn’t “dropped” or doesn’t feel like they have been transferred from a caring and highly interested employee to an uncaring recruiter or recruiting process from hell.

To ensure that the back office is ready for your social media effort, audit your referral process for major flaws and ensure that social network referrals are processed in a way consistent with social network users’ expectations. The employee referral process should also be modified to allow employees to provide online profiles in lieu of traditional resumes when they’re not available. You might also add a feature that offers a small reward to network contacts who refer highly desirable names to one of your employees who are part of their network.

Up next week, I’ll discuss why recruiters cannot and should not be on the front lines of your social media army, and offer some tips on how to engage employees in your effort.

The Yankees are perennial winners (many call them a dynasty) not because of their superior equipment, IT processes, or their financial or marketing prowess, but rather their extraordinary recruiting and talent management strategy.

Discover How to Learn From Other Industries

If you are a corporate recruiter, you might think that it’s silly to learn lessons or emulate practices from professional sports, but you would be wrong. Ignoring the many valuable lessons the sports industry provides could cost your organization millions! While sports analogies are not loved by all in HR, it’s hard to find a CEO who doesn’t like them or who has not used them in their memoires.

All leading organizations strive to learn and improve by benchmarking against other organizations in and outside their industry.

The New York Yankees, like Sony, Disney, Apple, the Los Angeles Lakers, and GE (NBC), are a corporation that produces an entertainment product. They book revenue by selling a wide range of products and services that extend far beyond the playing field. As a corporation, the Yankees operate under the watchful eye of shareholders, unions, customers, and regulators.

In my experience, the key resistance factor that keeps corporate recruiting leaders from applying sports lessons is not whether they would work, but rather a lack of courage or aggressiveness.

The most common excuse offered is that the scale of recruiting solutions employed by professional sports simple doesn’t align with that possible in your typical organization. While it is true that even the smallest Fortune 500 company dwarfs the Yankees with regard to employee count, most organizations are organized into organizational units much more on par, making the application of approaches at the unit level more than feasible.

If you expect to generate a quantum increases in performance, seek out successful practices in places where few others would think to look. Then, you must have the courage to adopt some approaches that, at least initially, will make some in HR cringe.

16 Lessons That Corporate Recruiting Leaders Can Learn From the Yankees

Listed below are numerous recruiting and talent-management approaches used by perennially successful sports franchises. These ideas are relevant and have been applied by leading talent management organizations:

1. Make the business case for great recruiting — the Yankees have built the strongest business case for great recruiting anywhere! Almost everyone agrees they have an abundance of extraordinary talent in literally every position. They routinely have the highest player salary expense of any MLB team. But the team owners are willing to pay such extravagant amounts because player personnel executives have successfully made the business case demonstrating a huge ROI in attracting the very best players. Although it’s expensive to recruit and retain top talent, the Yankees have calculated that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, they have learned a valuable lesson which is that the most costly mistake that a team can make is to “save money” by placing an average player in a key position.
2. Recruit top talent away from competitors — while many teams try to build their talent pool by recruiting and developing entry-level talent, the Yankees have learned the value of tracking and then recruiting away the top talent from other firms. Rather than seeking out “hidden talent,” they instead continuously identify obvious top performers on other teams and directly recruit them away (we call it poaching). Direct poaching has an added advantage in that it helps your team immediately, while simultaneously hurting your competitor.
3. Stars attract other stars — The Yankees have learned that working alongside other star players and having a significant chance at winning a championship are at least as important as money is in attracting top performers. Corporations should also focus on attracting noteworthy talent because they are a key attraction factor for top performers with many career choices. Firms should also publicly boast about their successes so that they build up their external image as a winner and an industry leader.
4. Prioritize your positions — an important lesson to learn is that all positions do not have an equal impact. In reality that means that a starting pitcher or the cleanup hitter might be five times more impactful on the team’s winning percentage than a right fielder, a first baseman, or the batboy. Corporations need to realize that if they can’t recruit the best for every position, they need to focus recruiting resources on the 20% or less of that can be classified as high-impact openings.
5. Prioritize individuals — a related lesson to learn is that top performers need to be prioritized and treated differently. Top performers might produce five times more than the average player, so as a result, they are given more playing time, are put in critical games, and sometimes they are even shifted into the most critical positions. For corporate recruiting leaders, this means that first of all they need to focus their recruiting resources on top-performing departments and managers. It also means that they must shift their best recruiters to priority candidates and also to change their recruiting approach and temperament dramatically when they encounter a star candidate. It’s a mistake for corporate HR to even attempt to treat all employees the same.
6. Identify their decision criteria — in sports, the relative bargaining power of top talent is immense. If you don’t realize upfront that the power has shifted toward them, you won’t win many recruiting battles. The Yankees have learned that it’s not enough to simply plan to attract the very best, you need to institute a sales approach where you identify and then meet each of the factors that cause the top player to accept a job. It’s equally important for corporations to stop acting arrogantly, as if they possess all of the power in the hiring relationship. At least for talent that is in high demand, they need to realize that the candidate is the one who holds most of the power. This requires corporations to develop a more candidate-friendly recruiting experience and in addition, a formal process to identify and then to completely meet each one of a top performer’s job acceptance criteria.
7. Global recruiting is required — if you look at the significant percentage of Yankee players who come from Japan, the Caribbean, and Latin and South America, you would realize almost immediately that it’s a mistake to recruit exclusively in your backyard. Corporate recruiting leaders must learn they can’t just recruit locally; maybe as much as 50% of your talent must be global.
8. Recruit team players — over the long run, you can not win unless everyone works together. In addition to raw performance, every individual must demonstrate the capability of working alongside with and developing others on the team.
9. Hire them, so your competitor can’t — rather than hiring just enough to fill your needs, follow the Yankee approach, which is to occasionally hire top talent just to prevent your competitors from having it. The goal is to get an “unfair” talent market share.
10. Recruit rather than train — no one would even attempt to argue that Alex Rodriguez became a star as a result of classroom training offered by the Yankees. In fact, rather than taking the risky approach of relying on training to develop skills, the Yankees almost exclusively recruits individuals who are already fully trained, proven performers who only need minimal guidance and coaching in order to excel.
11. Performance over loyalty — the Yankees are notorious for attracting the best, but they are equally famous for heartlessly dropping those who fail to live up to the required performance levels. The best organizations make it clear to all that they put current performance first and thus they use a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? approach (in lieu of rewarding loyalty or tenure). Assume upfront that a certain percentage of new hires and employees will fail to produce. This approach requires that you have a quality of hire measure and then a strong performance tracking system. In addition, have the courage to admit when you’ve made a hiring mistake so that you can quickly swap your mistakes for new outstanding recruits.
12. Lose your tolerance for hiring mistakes — if there is a differentiator between sports recruiting and corporate recruiting, it would be the fact that in sports, every talent decision is highly visible. Unlike corporations, if you make a significant recruiting or retention mistake, it will be made visible and amplified by countless newspaper headlines, sports talk shows, and bloggers. The visibility of their personnel errors forces them to develop recruiting processes that are significantly more precise and error-free than their corporate counterparts. Becoming more precise, more data-driven, and recognizing failures early on are also excellent goals for corporate recruiting leaders.
13. Continuous workforce planning is needed — even before the Yankees won the World Series this year, they already began the process of workforce planning for next year. The process includes internally identifying surplus or duplicate talent, potential voluntary turnover, and individuals whose performance is declining. External planning requires identifying and courting desirable external talent at other teams for vacancies or to swap for current players in order to improve the overall performance at a particular position.
14. Continuous recruiting is required — even though the down economy has affected revenues at the Yankees, the recruiting effort hasn’t been impacted at all. The lesson to be learned is that recruiting needs to be a continuous process that is independent of the short-term revenue fluctuations. Organizations must adopt a long-term funding model that allows an increase in recruiting when top quality talent is available. The recruiting process for key jobs must also start a year or two ahead of when you actually must-have the talent in order to build relationships and to more accurately assess the talent. If top talent unexpectedly becomes available, you must have a “speed hiring” process so that you can hire it immediately, even if you don’t have an open position.
15. It’s not the location — many corporations argue that they can’t recruit the best because of their physical location. Yes, the Yankees are located in New York, but so are the New York Mets, a team that stinks almost every year. In fact, both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia won sports championships last year in spite of not being located in a most-desirable city. The key lesson is that if you have great players, great managers, and a great product, you can attract the best to any location.
16. Great managers are also needed — the Yankees are equally as willing to recruit great managers because they realize that top talent can only get you close to a championship. They realize that if you want to win continuously, you need a great manager to integrate and manage the egos that many top performers develop.

Final Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that in the sports world, recruiters are treated as heroes? They have huge budgets, and their managers spend a great deal of time and resources on the continuous identification and recruiting of top talent. Everyone on the team knows who recruited Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or A-Rod.

In sharp contrast, the typical corporate recruiter is rarely respected and woefully under-resourced.

I hope that the recent recession has taught every recruiter that getting a significant increase in budget, or respect, will require that you dramatically improve both your business case and your observable and measurable business impact.

You can’t reasonably expect more than a 5% to 10% improvement if you limit your benchmarking and copying to the firms that are similar to yourself. A dramatic improvement in results might require you to examine practices that are dramatically different than your current ones. In short, if you want to have a “major-league impact” you might need to study the recruiting practices of the major leagues!

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

Managers of recruiting functions seem to struggle continuously to obtain more budget and resources.

Most, unfortunately, rely too heavily on building relationships in order to maintain or increase their funding levels. If you’re tired of the up-and-down funding cycle, maybe it’s time to master the science of building an effective business case. It’s sad that recruiting is still struggling to prove what we already intuitively know (i.e., that recruiting top talent into key jobs has a huge dollar impact).

We have one of the largest impacts and ROIs of any function in the corporation, but we fail miserably at presenting it in such a way that a CFO would find it believable.

For a minute, assume the role of a senior executive who has just been handed a business scorecard containing performance numbers in five critical business areas. After looking at the numbers below, would the data make you cringe?

• 70% of users are dissatisfied with the process.
• 50% of customers regret their buying decision.
• 46% turnover among new buyers.
• 46% failure rate of process output selections.
• A mere 19% are unequivocal successes (less than 1:5).

It’s Time to Face the Numbers and Facts…

Almost any senior executive would be alarmed upon learning that users were dissatisfied, failure rates approached 50%, and a significant percentage of your customers regretted their decisions.

Obviously, if the numbers listed above came from an important profit-impact function (supply chain, finance, customer satisfaction), everyone would be screaming for a complete rethinking of the entire process.

Unfortunately, the above metrics represent failure in the recruiting and retention elements of the talent management function. I have encountered no other business function that more completely avoids defining and measuring process failure than talent management.

Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip.

–The Recruiting Roundtable

Talent Management Failure Metrics Are In*

Here are more details on the five numbers provided above.

This data can be taken together as a clear indicator that we might have numerous failures in talent management:

• 70% dissatisfied — 70% of the external customers (applicants) and 28% of the internal customers (hiring managers) indicate they are dissatisfied with the hiring process (Source: Staffing.org).
• 50% customer regret — 50% of the processes users (both managers and new hires) later regret their “buying” decision (Source: The Recruiting Roundtable). In addition, 25% of new hires later regret taking their new job within one year (Source: Challenger, Gray)
• 46% turnover — 46% of new hires leave their jobs within the first year (Source: eBullpen, LLC) and 50% of current employees are actively seeking or are planning to seek a new job (Source: Deloitte).
• 46% failure rate — 46% of U.S. new hires must be classified as failures within their first 18 months (fired, pressured to quit, required disciplinary action, etc.) (Source: Leadership IQ). In addition, 58% of the highest-priority hires, new executives hired from the outside, fail in their new position within 18 months (Source: Michael Watkins).
• Only a 19% success rate — only one out of five of the process output can be classified as unequivocal successes (Source: Leadership IQ).

Some additional data points to consider include:

• 66% regret hiring decisions — Nearly two-thirds of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions (Source: DDI)
• 50% new executive turnover — nearly half of new executive hires quit or are fired within the first 18 months at a new employer (Source: Corporate Leadership Council).
• Newly promoted executives don’t do much better (40% of newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting a new job (Source: Manchester, Inc).
• Less than 50% are qualified — a majority of managers surveyed (59%) believe that less than half of all candidates they interviewed were qualified (Source: eBullpen, LLC).
• 65% lie on resumes — the key data source that we rely on to source and narrow down applicants contains untrue information more than half the time (Source: The Risk Advisory Group )
• Resume-sorting failures — Of all the “perfect resumes” sent out by mystery shopper candidates, only 12% were actually scheduled for interviews (Source: Hodes’ Healthcare).
• Bottom performers produce less — hiring and retaining below or even average performers have real opportunity costs because top performers can increase productivity, revenue, and profit by between 40% and 67% over average performers (Source: McKinsey & Co.).

* Note: I have purposely chosen publicly available sources that cite these research results. To find the material, you may use a simple Google search, but please don’t contact me for detailed references.

The samples in each case varied, but what if they were an indication of how poorly your organization’s talent-management function was performing?

Only 30% of organizations measure quality of hire, and only a handful specifically define and measure recruiting process failure. It’s time to adopt a business process management approach; start to measure successes and failures in the same way that other business processes already do.

Plan B, of course, is to ignore this warning and to continue to assume that existing processes are either error-free or on par with the Six Sigma standards of production, quality control, and customer service.

My Goal Is to Get You to Pay Attention

You can conjure up arguments about the validity of the research done by outside consulting firms, but that’s not the point. The key learning is to take a moment and ask yourself these key questions:

1. Have you clearly defined what “hiring failure” is? What failure rate is acceptable?
2. Can a process be properly designed so that so many that are involved in it do not have remorse or regrets about their decisions?
3. Is it ever acceptable to have a process where the dissatisfaction rates exceed 25%?
4. Has the time finally come where you bite the bullet and calculate the quality of hire, failure rates, and the ROI of your function?
5. Is it time to move beyond simply calculating output metrics (i.e., 22% are dissatisfied) and in addition to begin to use metrics to identify why your failures occur?

After viewing these research numbers, I hope you’ll agree it is time to rethink most talent management processes and metrics.

Do not concern yourself with the accuracy of any particular external study; their primary value is simply to stimulate you to do your own research within your own firm to find out if these problems and failures identified by others are currently occurring.

Action Steps to Consider

There are a handful of firms (DaVita quickly comes to mind) that have adopted a business process approach to their recruiting function where they clearly define and target failure.

If you’re interested in adopting this approach, here are some action steps to consider.

• Clearly define failure — include top candidates you failed to identify or attract; top candidates who dropped out early; the quality of candidates you didn’t hire; offer turndowns; good hires but bad initial placements; poor-performing new hires; legal costs; delayed time to initial productivity; dissatisfied or disillusioned candidates; frustrated hiring managers; and early turnover among new hires.
• Adopt a business process management approach — work with experts in supply chain, CRM, Six Sigma, etc., to learn about business process improvement tools and approaches.
• Shift to data-based decision-making — shift away from the approach where you assume that things are working; instead, rely on hard data to meet decisions and to continually improve every key process.
• Mystery shoppers — use mystery shoppers to identify process problems.
• Change your assessment approach — a significant portion of recruiting process errors occur because of an over-reliance on subjective tools like interviewing. A superior approach is to increase the use of validated skill assessment tools and to ask candidates to solve real problems.
• Conduct failure analysis — whenever you have a major process failure, use a failure analysis/root-cause identification approach to move beyond symptoms and to identify the real underlying causes of the failure.
• Assume failure — even when the process is made more objective, there will still be significant number of failures. Accept that fact and develop a process that allows you to identify those failures early and to minimize your losses.
• Calculate the cost of each error — work with the CFO’s office to calculate the costs and the business impacts of all major errors.
• Assume that all sub- processes are suspect — assume that bad hiring decisions are a result of poor design features in a multitude of sub-processes including job descriptions, resume sorting, interviews, reference checking, hiring manager monitoring, and onboarding.

Final Thoughts

Throughout my career, whenever I have had the opportunity, I ask recruiting and talent management leaders a simple, straightforward question:

If you hired 100 people, what percentage would turn out to be failures?

Not surprisingly, 99% of the time all I get in return is a blank look. In direct contrast, if I ask the same question on failure rates to those who lead other business functions like supply chain, production, sales, customer service center, etc., I get an immediate numerical response coupled with the costs associated with each increased percentage point of errors. It is my hope that the data referenced in this article will cause you to increase your focus on identifying failures and failure rates in each of your major sub-processes.

Despite many successes, it’s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image.

The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived.

It was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now.

While it is still possible to heavily influence perception with well-managed efforts, significant growth in social media, peer-to-peer content publishing, and online rating services have shifted a majority of the power away from the corporate employer brand manager to the masses. The shift in power renders all but the most strategic and well-executed efforts virtually ineffective.

To those who actively engage and publish their story, their perception is reality, even if the experiences that led them to their perception are not common. Their points of view are often emotionally charged, personal, and therefore, significantly more trusted as fact by those you need to influence than corporate, generic dribble.

Odds are, the people most influencing your employer brand are people you have never met.

Other People Now Own Your Employer Brand Image

Control provides comfort to senior talent management executives, and for years, they have been comfortable. No matter how much the employee experience differed from the overly positive perspective they sold to candidates and organizational stakeholders, they could get away with pushing out their message.

While many product brand marketers learned long ago that if the experience with the product didn’t match the brand positioning, consumers would revolt, few in HR were paying attention. Many HR leaders may ignore or discount the facts, but the truth is that a fundamental shift has occurred, and like it or not, the years of putting forward a brand identity not tied to reality are over. Some organizations have been successful in silencing organizational critics through threat of legal action, but the majority of attempts backfire, ultimately making the criticisms even more visible.

The New Owners of Employer Brands

The new owners are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance. The array of contributors grows more complex daily, and the most prominent groups of brand influencers include:

• Bloggers – blogs have been around for quite some time, and while it used to hold true that only 1:100 people active online were contributing original content, a vast array of new online services has significantly reduced that ratio. Today, thousands of independent-minded individuals are posting comments about their day at work, their boss from hell, the idiot that just got hired, the stupidity of HR actions, the lunacy of senior leadership, and all those little liability secrets corporate security would like to keep buried. They communicate without fear and without purpose. Psychological studies have shown that we are nearly three times more likely to consume negative information than positive information (there is a reason the nightly news focuses on the negative), which means that we are significantly more likely to share the bad stories versus the good ones. We are also prone to exaggeration and sensationalizing, but rarely does that fact get considered when folks are reading peer-produced commentary about life at XYZ Corp.
• Social media users – Social media isn’t a regional thing, it isn’t an economic thing, and it isn’t a political thing. It is, however, a technology concept that is enabling a fundamental shift in how people learn and communicate. From sites like Facebook and MySpace in the United States to QZone in China or Hyves in the Netherlands, millions of people are sharing the details of their daily lives with friends, family, coworkers, and virtual strangers. In minutes, users can spread facts, rumors, pictures, or innuendos to thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Negative videos like “Comcast sucks” that would have in the past been seen by only a handful of close friends are now seen by millions. Social media users can exert phenomenal pressure by using the grapevine to highlight stories many organizations would rather people not hear about.
• People active on Twitter – Twitter deserves special attention among the social media outlets because it is so instantaneous. Just as political events in Iran were instantly Tweeted about, so are the negative experiences of your employees, and even your customers. Individuals being laid off can now provide a “blow-by-blow” account of the badly handled termination process and share their pain instantly with thousands.
• Texters on mobile phones – these individuals utilize this omnipresent 24/7 channel to both receive and send news about your firm, its employees, and your practices.
• Commercial websites – there are numerous “what your employees are saying” sites like Vault, the forums at Indeed, or glassdoor.com, that specialize in sharing messages about what it’s like to work at a firm with individuals considering employment. While most make some attempt to validate that the comment contributors have worked or currently work for the organizations in questions, not all do. Prominent firms like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Starbucks have been targeted by unfriendly “anti-firm” websites that exist merely to spread a combination of real, half-truths, and untruths about the firms.
• Industry and profession-specific forums – current employees, former employees, investors, and individuals who have merely read about your firm can post questions about what it’s like to work at your firm (or answer them) on numerous and quite active professional association website forums or independent listservers.
• Internet groups – Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow individuals with similar interests to form groups that can help to connect individuals who share common interests and likes/dislikes about your firm.
• Internet show hosts – there are numerous Internet voice and video casts (some associated with traditional media outlets and others that are just independent). These shows frequently include interviews with individuals who, without your knowledge or permission, say both good and bad things about what it’s like to work at your firm. Videoblogger and avid social network user Philip DeFranco demonstrated the power of the approach to take on even the most powerful litigation-bound employer, Wal-Mart, in response to fine print in Wal-Mart’s self-funded insurance plan that allows the employer to cease damage awards received by plan participants.
• Social bookmarking service users – individuals who tag a story with a “Digg” or related online bookmark can proactively increase the visibility of any negative story, whether you like it or not.
• Search engine managers – these individuals differ in that they probably don’t have a particular bias toward or against business or any particular firm; however, the design of search algorithms influence what type of messages about your firm that others can readily see.

Individuals who are likely to be the most active in shaping your employer brand on these communications channels include:

• Current employees – hundreds or even thousands of your employees who sometimes innocently and sometimes purposely post Tweets or wall postings provide insight into what it’s like to work at your firm. Even something as innocuous as a LinkedIn profile might lead some to make assumptions about your firm as an employer.
• Former employees – you may have thought they liked you, but what they say after they leave is more likely the reality. From disgruntled alumni to employees recently laid off, the information collective is alive with former employees recounting their experience.
• Vendors – those current and former vendors who have had both a positive and negative business relationship with your firm can now easily spread their perceptions and experiences over the Internet to anyone that will listen.
• Anti-business types – individuals who are looking for opportunities to blame corporations for a variety of economic and environmental problems are quite active on the Internet. Some are actually quite effective in not just spreading Internet messages but also in creating mass letter-writing campaigns and even actual face-to-face meetings or protests.

Peer-Produced Content Is More Credible

If you were to fact-check most blogs, Tweets, or YouTube videos, most would be considered fallacious. Yet survey after survey shows that most individuals in general (and net-generation individuals in particular) believe peer-produced content over traditional news or print media content.

You can bemoan this fact all you want, but statements on your corporate website, in your employment ads, or in press releases will almost always be viewed as less credible than a comment from a blogger who is passing along an innuendo that might have no basis in fact.

Messages from Others Are Extremely Hard to Counter

As Internet users become more prolific, the ability of corporations to monitor and respond to every channel is significantly diminished. If several hundred people outside the organization are producing content, like it or not, there is little your small team can do to match that scale (short of building a brand army of employees inside the organization to push positive commentary).

Responding to negative commentary online isn’t a good idea, as your response makes the original content both more visible and more charged.

Final Thoughts

Given the bleak picture and the almost daily erosion of control over your brand image, you might consider just giving up, but I urge you not to make that mistake.

While you no longer control your employer brand, you can become more aware of your actual brand — especially the negative comments being posted about your firm. Learn to use tools like search engine alerts, blog search sites, and Twitter archive searches. Use search engine optimization techniques to ensure the content you want to be most visible becomes most visible, and work to hide negative comments.

Smart brand managers can use employees who are active on the Internet to increase the number of positive brand messengers. Develop plans to influence key opinion leaders by making more authentic and candid (read: less perfect) stories and examples available to them. I’ll cover the approaches you can use to proactively influence your brand in coming articles.

If you have corporate experience operating an employment branding function, I solicit your additions on this loss of brand control topic. Also, if you have questions you would like answered on corporate employer branding, you are encouraged to post them in response to this article.

In many organizations, the subject of prioritizing positions and people is a highly political one. While many accept that certain roles may exert greater impact on the organization, treating people in those roles differently is a challenging and often avoided activity.

If your organization is looking for truly strategic HR, delivering highly targeted or personalized retention solutions is essential.

Category III: Targeted or Personalized Approaches

This last category, in contrast to the all-employee approach, focuses retention efforts on high-priority individuals and jobs. Once prioritized, it then personalizes or customizes treatment to fit the individual needs of the targeted employee. The primary success measures for this category are turnover rates among targeted individuals and the average time-to-fill high-priority roles voluntarily vacated.

This category of retention strategies often has the highest ROI because it allocates manager time and retention resources to only a small percentage of employees.

Potential Problems with “Targeted” Strategies

Treating all employees the same is an approach that quells the masses but upsets top performers and key innovators who routinely deliver elevated contributions.

Historically, many organizations have opted to upset as few as possible, settling for highly stable organizations versus highly productive ones. Highly targeted strategies will reduce turnover among the targeted group but may actually cause momentary spikes in turnover among bottom and average performers, but is that a bad thing?

15) Regional customization strategy

• Goals of the strategy – improve retention rates throughout dispersed organizations by varying retention approaches based on the unique problems and needs of each region.
• Prioritization process – regions with high turnover rates and those with unique turnover causes.
• Identifying turnover causes – relies on local employee surveys, local exit interviews, and manager experience to identify local turnover causes.
• Treatments for countering turnover causes – offerings depend on which levers work best in each region. However, best practices and common problems are shared across regions.
• Benefits/weaknesses – because turnover rates vary significantly in different countries and regions, resources and treatments are targeted for maximum impact. Problems occur in organizations that prefer headquarter control, have weak metrics, and a one-size-fits-all management strategy.

16) Personalized retention offerings to prioritized employees

• Goals of the strategy – this strategy has the highest potential ROI of all strategies because it uses fewer resources and concentrates them where they can have the highest impact. After prioritizing retention targets, this strategy then personalizes retention treatments to meet or exceed the individual needs of targeted employees.
• Prioritization process – a corporate-wide prioritization effort is undertaken to determine which individuals would hurt the firm the most financially by leaving (i.e., top performers, innovators, those who occupy mission-critical roles, those who could significantly help competitors).
• Identifying turnover causes – because only a smaller percentage of your employee population is targeted, prioritized individuals can be interviewed or surveyed before they even consider leaving to identify what frustrates and motivates them. Should a targeted individual quit, a delayed but more accurate post-exit interview can be used for this small group to identify the real reasons for their leaving.
• Treatments for countering turnover causes – prioritized employees are surveyed to determine what is possible within the firm: what they would want more or less of to be more productive and less likely to leave. Treatments could include coaching, mentors, greater compensation, and stretch assignments for skill development.
• Benefits/weaknesses – focusing retention efforts on high-priority employees allows limited resources to be targeted and to maximize their impact. The process of prioritizing and identifying individual retention issues and treatments requires some HR time and expertise. Prioritizing and its associated “special treatment” of targeted individuals may also create some us-vs.-them animosity.

17) Flextime/flexplace strategy

• Goals of the strategy – increases retention rates through flextime and remote work with a significant impact on both retention and productivity.
• Prioritization process – key employees are identified and those in jobs amenable to flexible work are offered flexible work options with metrics for tracking their productivity.
• Identifying turnover causes – relies on interviewing or surveying targeted employees to identify those who find this flex option a positive retention factor.
• Treatments for countering turnover causes – work offerings include flexible scheduling of work hours and location up to 100% remote work.
• Benefits/weaknesses – because most firms don’t offer flexible options, key people are less likely to consider moving to other firms without them. The flexibility can reduce commute stress and costs, strengthen the family, reduce the firm’s real estate costs, and in addition, increase productivity (firms like Best Buy have realized up to 35% more productivity). Managing remote workers requires effective flex-work processes and managers who can manage their workers without needing to physically watch over them. Not all workers find this option desirable.

Less Frequently Used Strategies

Although not as widely used, these targeted strategies are among the most powerful:

• Free-time strategy – made famous by Google’s 20% Time, it provides employees in designated job families the opportunity to select their own projects during a percentage of the work week. In addition to retention, it can also have productivity and innovation impacts.
• Challenge/exposure strategy – this approach increases the opportunities for targeted employees to be challenged with exciting stretch projects and rotations. Employees interested in increasing their exposure in front of executives are also provided with an exposure plan to increase their visibility.
• Right job placement – the most restrictive of all strategies, it focuses on a handful of high-value employees. Each of these individuals is continually placed in their ideal job with an ideal manager, level of innovation, teammates, motivators, etc.
• Show them their impact – this education strategy focuses on improving retention rates of key employees who are unaware of the significant impacts of their work. It proactively “walks them downstream” in order to see the impact of their work by meeting and interacting with users and customers.
• Boomerang strategy – takes a long-term view of employment by assuming that you will lose some top employees. It sets a goal at the time of departure to ensure that employees leave happy. Post exit, the manager and the recruiting function maintain a relationship with key employees and then attempt, over time, to recruit them back to the firm.
• Diversity tailoring – emphasizes the tailoring of retention efforts to the unique needs of your diverse employee population.

Final Thoughts

Whether you believe that an economic recovery is already occurring, just around the corner, or off in the distance, you can not disagree that top talent will always have options. Focusing on retaining capable talent is a better alternative than suffering through a vacancy and spending resources to replace someone you could have kept.

The longer organizations postpone formalizing a retention strategy and adequately resourcing it to drive results, the greater the chance they will lose valuable resources.

It is my hope that by taking a step back and by viewing this complete list of potential retention strategies, you can better see the limitations of some strategies and realize greater opportunities for the future, when turnover rates explode.