The war for technical talent is so intense that a handful of firms like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Apple, Twitter, and Zynga have shifted to a powerful but rare recruiting sub-strategy known as acqui-hiring. It involves established firms acquiring startup firms not for their products (only Facebook admits it) but instead primarily to capture an entire team of talented engineers and designers at once.
Marissa Mayer
If in the past after reading about an announcement of an acquisition you’ve wondered to yourself why a technical giant was bothering to buy a startup with no profit, a seemingly unrelated product, and a product that was in a completely different field, now you know why. The strategy has recently received some added publicity because Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer recently announced that she was going to adopt the strategy used by her former employer Google, a king of acqui-hires. Mark Zuckerberg has boasted that “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people” (“Engineers are worth half a million to one million” — V Smith).
Acqui-hiring (acquisition hiring) is in direct contrast to most traditional corporate hiring, which simply doesn’t work when you are recruiting innovators who prefer startups over what they consider to be onerous “corporate jobs.”
The Benefits of an Acqui-hire Strategy keep reading…
If you work in an office, you realize that many times the Christmas season can be a less hectic and even a slack period. In most cases everyone, including recruiters, gear down and change their work patterns for the holidays. But if you’re a corporate recruiting leader, December should be viewed instead as a golden opportunity. It is a prime recruiting month (along with January and June) because many employed prospects have free time to consider a new job due to their own reduced workloads.
The end of the year is also a time where many individuals are reevaluating their current work and life situation and planning for the future. You may be skeptical but in this article I provide more than 20 reasons why corporate recruiting leaders should actually ramp up recruiting during the holiday season.
The Top 20 Reasons Why December Is a Powerful Time to Recruit keep reading…
If you are a recruiting leader, I would like to introduce you to a concept that many are not familiar with, which is “whole career employment.” The premise of this hiring and workforce planning model is that instead of the traditional expectation that employees will work at a firm continuously from their hire date until they retire, leaders need to plan for the eventuality when top employees may come and go from your firm several times throughout their whole career.
This new model is necessary because it fits both the changing loyalty levels and expectations of workers and the evolving way that work is done. The average tenure of the American worker at a single firm is just over four years and Americans may hold between 5 and 10 jobs throughout their career. This process of hiring, losing and bringing back employees requires a hiring model that is more flexible and sophisticated than most firms currently have.
A whole career model is a hiring and workforce planning strategy that focuses on the reduced loyalty and retention levels among top performing employees. Instead of focusing on hiring a top person only one single time, it plans on targeting them for rehire at several different points throughout their entire career. Smart firms will plan to recruit and hire the very best back into regular or contingent jobs at points in their career when we need them and when they are willing and able to work for us in some capacity. The goal is to get as much high-quality work from top performers whenever they are available throughout their career.
Lifelong Employment Is Coming to an End keep reading…
a Google sandwich bar
Whether you follow politics or not, there are many important lessons that leaders in talent management and HR can learn from the recent presidential election.
Before you dismiss the relevance of this learning opportunity out of hand, spend a few minutes to consider the following lessons from the election that may be valuable to leaders in HR and talent management.
4 Key Lessons for HR and Talent Management Leaders keep reading…
Well-designed corporate referral programs can produce amazing results. Unfortunately, those results are often reduced by failing to maximize the number and type of motivators that drive employees to make high-quality referrals. In some organizations, 30% of the employees make all of the referrals, with the other 70% of employees being inactive. I have found that data-driven referral programs have a much higher response rate because instead of assuming that program administrators know how to motivate, they instead use data to identify the most effective motivators.
If you are a recruiting leader and you want to increase the quality of referrals and push the volume to near 50% of all hires, this article highlights the best practices in the area of employee rewards and motivation.
Motivating Employees to Make Quality Referrals keep reading…
If you are going to be strategic, you must be forward looking. Obviously forward-looking people stay aware of current trends. I’ve written extensively on recruiting trends, but the definition of “a trend” means that a significant group of firms have already implemented the practice. And that means that if you merely identify and copy current trends, by the time your firm implements them, you will have fallen behind the benchmark firms that would have continued to develop new approaches. If you are tired of simply playing catch-up and you want to “get ahead” of your talent competition, you need to move beyond current trends and instead identify “next year’s” upcoming practices long before they gain wide acceptance.
If you want to prepare for what’s next on the horizon, here is my list of “next year’s recruiting headlines” or “next practices” that will soon be adopted by leading edge firms. Don’t be surprised if you’re not familiar with some of these “next practices” because they are seldom written about and they are even less frequently implemented.
A List of the Top 20 Recruiting Headlines That You Can Expect to Read Next Year keep reading…
Employee referrals provide the highest quality and the highest volume of hires, but you won’t receive as high a level of results if you don’t minimize roadblocks to referrals. Requiring a current resume for employee referrals is a major “under-the-radar” detriment to reaching the goal of having referrals exceed 50% of all hires. Requiring a resume to start a referral process might not seem like a big deal (because the resume is “the currency” of recruiting) but it can be. Although “active candidates” all have current resumes, employed people who are not actively looking (some people call them passives) don’t have an updated resume available and they may have little interest in creating one.
Requiring an updated resume in order to move forward slows down and occasionally stops employee referral efforts. Consider an alternative approach, which is offering an option to employees, so that all they must submit is a prospect’s name and contact information in order to begin the referral process. This approach is known as a “name-only” referral.
Why Requiring a Resume Creates a Roadblock keep reading…
It’s not the big that eat the small. It’s the fast that eat the slow! --Author Jason Jennings
If the rate of change inside your firm is slower than the rate of change occurring outside your firm, your end is in sight. --Jack Welch’s philosophy
Even the most optimistic business leaders have begun to realize that the incredible business turbulence that we have been undergoing for the last decade isn’t going to end. In fact, turbulence, volatility, and continuous rapid change are likely to become the “new normal.” Recently an excellent research study by the leading consulting firm BCG effectively identified and then quantified this high level of turbulence. A summary of some of their key findings include:
- Turbulence strikes more often than in the past — More than ½ of the most turbulent quarters over the past 30 years have been in the past decade.
- Turbulence has increased in intensity – Volatility in revenue growth, in revenue ranking, and in operating margins have all more than doubled since the 1960s.
- Turbulence today persists much longer than in preceding periods – The average duration of periods of high turbulence has quadrupled over the past three decades.
- Turbulence in key business results – key business areas including revenue growth, profitability, and industry rank have all shown triple-digit percentage increases over the last few decades.
The Goal Is to Become an “Adaptive Firm” and Function keep reading…
Corporate recruiting is a field where there are distinct and measurable differences between the average and elite functions. In short, what that means is that “elite” recruiting functions (defined as the top 1%) produce superior results and act in ways that are totally different from the average function.
I am frequently asked during corporate presentations to cite the difference between “good and great” recruiting functions. Well, as a former chief talent officer and someone who has spent years devoted to identifying what makes the handful of elite recruiting functions unique, I’ve come up with an assessment tool. It is a checklist that can be used by recruiting leaders as a self-assessment tool in order to determine how they compare “side-by-side” to the few firms that have reached this elite status. The 40 defining characteristics are broken into seven distinct categories and they are listed in a numbered format for easy scanning.
The 40 Defining Characteristics of an “Elite Recruiting Function” in 2012 keep reading…
NASA artist - black hole
There is probably no more misleading statement in corporate recruiting than “we will keep your application on file for six months.” While such a statement may be factually true, the reality is that at most corporations, hell will likely freeze over before anyone will review that application again.
Not only is this misstatement damaging to the candidate experience, but it may also mean that the corporation is missing out on a great opportunity. And that opportunity is to rapidly share exceptional “not hired” finalists with hiring managers located in other areas of the corporation so that a higher percentage of these highly qualified candidates can be hired. The best solution to this problem is a “top 100 candidates sharing list” based on a social media model.
It’s a sad but common corporate occurrence in recruiting. Your employer brand and recruiting process have worked wonderfully and you get an abundance of highly qualified applicants for a key opening. However, after you make your selection, even though the remaining finalists are outstanding and are interested in your firm, nothing happens to them and they disappear into your “ATS black hole” database.
Instead, what should happen is that these top candidates should be marked as “recruiting opportunities” and then proactively shared with other managers from one end of the corporation to the other. This candidate-sharing problem is so frustrating but pervasive that it consistently appears on my list of “major talent management problems without a workable solution.” Nearly every corporate talent manager is aware of this lack of top candidate sharing, but almost no one has found an effective solution. But fortunately, now that we have learned about the tremendous effectiveness of using social media approaches for sharing information, it now makes sense to revisit this problem and to design a proactive social-media-based candidate sharing process to finally solve the problem.
Examples of the Candidate Sharing Problem keep reading…
Nearly every firm that I have worked with that captures data on the quality of their hires learns that employee referrals produce both the highest volume and the highest quality of hire from any source.
However, the results of referral programs can almost always be dramatically improved when referral program managers become fully aware that a significant percentage of the referrals that are received under most programs would have to be designated as “low-quality.” Low-quality referrals can be broken into three groups:
- Bottom performer referrals — Those referrals submitted by your low-performing employees (who might not know or be able to influence top performers to become referrals).
- Referrals motivated by money – employees who are primarily motivated by money may submit a high volume of low-quality referrals.
- “They found me” referrals — People who your employees barely know who became referrals because they approached and asked your employee to make them a referral. I call them “they found me” referrals because your employee did not seek them out.
This last group, the “they found me” referrals, is the most significant type of referral to reduce because, according to my research, it can exceed 36% of all referrals. Imagine how much more powerful the results from the overall referral program would be if all three of these types of low-quality referrals could be eliminated, so that they didn’t clutter your referral system.
The Best Referrals Are the “I Find You” Type of Colleague Referral keep reading…
If you’re going to be an effective recruiter, you need to continually change your mix of recruiting tools in order to stay ahead of the competition. Adopting new tools is critical because once any tool is used by everyone, it loses its effectiveness. In part one of this article, I provided a list of bold sourcing, referral, event, and college recruiting tools. In the second part, I continue the toolkit with advanced recruiting tools for the most aggressive recruiters, and bold closing tools for getting difficult to land candidates to say “yes.”
Advanced recruiting tools and approaches keep reading…
The competition for recruiting top talent is already intense in certain industries and is soon to grow in many others. In this highly competitive environment, you can’t expect to fill your quota, no less recruit the highest quality candidates who you desire, without having a superior recruiting toolkit.
If you are currently dissatisfied with your recruiting results, you must adopt a more aggressive approach and begin to “push the limits” beyond the use of traditional recruiting tools. If you are a bold recruiter and you want to try something aggressive, I’ve compiled a long list of bold high-impact recruiting tools for you to consider. Each one has proven to produce results. The toolkit is broken into five categories, including sourcing, referrals, recruiting at events, college, and advanced recruiting tools. keep reading…
When you are battling for talent in a highly competitive environment, you are likely to encounter more than your share of failures. In fact, because underperformance in recruiting is so common, I am constantly surprised when corporate recruiting leaders have no formal process for identifying specifically why their current recruiting efforts don’t produce their desired level of results. The formal method for identifying the factors that cause a process to fail is known as “failure analysis.” But unfortunately, even though it is used throughout business, failure analysis is seldom applied to the recruiting process.
I was recently reminded of the need for failure analysis while researching the extensive recruiting problems of oil and gas firms in the booming area around Alberta, Canada. I’ll be presenting my recruiting solutions at the Talent Hub Conference, Metropolitan Centre in Calgary, on Wednesday, September 19, 2012. But if you’re not involved in the petroleum industry, don’t worry because the same failure identification and prospect research processes can and should be used in any industry. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “prospect research” it is a form of market research which involves the use of surveys and interviews to identify what worked and what didn’t work during the recruiting process and precisely what factors attract and turn off top prospects.
Prospect Market Research Is Required keep reading…
Within most corporate HR functions, the atmosphere is simply too politically charged to even consider raising this powerful question:“Which HR function ranks No. 1 with the highest impact on two critical business success measures — revenue growth and profit margins?” Well, the data is in, and we now definitively know that the answer is … recruiting is the most impactful HR function!
In my many years of working with corporations, I have come across only a handful of HR leaders who have taken the time to quantify the business impacts of recruiting (Google and Apple are the best). But if you shift industries and look at the sports and entertainment industries, you will find that it is well established that recruiting is the most impactful people management function.
In pro basketball for example, you could take an average individual player and attempt to develop them over time into a “LeBron James.” However, if you wanted immediate results with a low risk of failure, you would simply recruit LeBron away from his current team. But fortunately, in the corporate world there has now been a breakthrough global study conducted by the Boston Consulting Group that reveals the relative value produced by each of the different HR functions.
From the Best to the Worst
If you’re curious as to whether a particular HR function produces a high or low business impact, this section will reveal their ranking. keep reading…
The Hilton in Istanbul
In part 1 of this article, I highlighted my top 10 recently implemented bold and outrageous practices in HR and talent management.
The goal is not to recommend these practices, but instead to more clearly define the leading edge of current practice.
In this part 2, I will highlight 13 additional practices that define the leading and “bleeding edge” of HR. If your goal is to “push the envelope” in talent management, this list can give you an idea of where the average ends and the truly bold practices begin.
Although every firm cannot directly adopt the practices listed here (some are reprehensible), I find during my corporate presentations that merely becoming aware of these bleeding-edge practices can create great energy and a strong desire for individual HR functions to do more and be bolder.
Additional “Bold and Outrageous” HR and Talent Management Practices
Here are my selections for the remaining top recently implemented bold approaches that define the bleeding edge of HR practices. keep reading…
In the corporate world, HR leaders are frequently considered some of the most conservative and risk-averse. Running HR in a conservative manner might have served your company well in the 1990s, but unfortunately it may be inappropriate and even damaging today. This fast-changing and highly competitive business world has caused senior executives to now expect innovation not just in their product lines but also in all of their business processes.
As a result, it’s time for HR leaders to realize that in a battle to attract and retain top talent and innovators, your firm has to act differently with superior talent management approaches if your firm is to develop and maintain a competitive advantage in the talent marketplace. In fact, from an employer branding perspective, your firm needs to do a few unique things in HR if it is to stand out as a great place to work.
As a professor, I am fortunate to have the time to track and give corporate presentations on the array of leading and “bleeding-edge” programs that a handful of firms have had the courage to implement. Almost by definition, bold HR programs are new, controversial, and full of risk, so don’t be surprised when you don’t agree with many of the listed approaches. I suggest that you compare them to your own programs in that functional area in order to see if perhaps your firm is being too conservative and is falling behind the leading edge.
The Top 10 Bold and Outrageous HR and Talent Management Practices keep reading…
It’s pure genius. The approach that I call “Compelling Job Titling” involves giving a job a compelling title, and because it costs virtually nothing, it may have the highest ROI of any single recruiting and retention tool.
That may sound like an outrageous statement but consider the example of “the genius bar” at Apple’s retail stores. From all accounts, the job itself is not particularly unique (you simply help resolve customer product problems) but with the job, you get the official company bestowed title of “genius.” Simply by giving this job a compelling name, Apple has been flooded with applicants and once in the job, geniuses stay longer than the average Apple retail employee. And the best part is that these powerful recruiting and retention results from providing exciting job titles come at no cost to the company. Currently popular compelling job titles include Jedi, Rockstar (used for over 2,000 jobs) and Ninja (used for over 8,000 jobs).
The Power of the “Genius” Title keep reading…
I nominate the calculating of “cost per hire” as the single most pointless and damaging exercise in recruiting. Even though the cost per hire metric is widely used, that certainly doesn’t mean that it adds value, and it may in fact actually hurt the recruiting function. Years ago when I was a chief talent officer, I even went so far as to ban the calculation of cost per hire.
photo credit: David Ramons
I did this because cost per hire had the negative effect of causing our recruiters to shift their focus toward cost reduction and away from our real job, which was to produce high-performing hires. If you’re going to be a strategic recruiting leader, you need to stop thinking like an accountant (who focuses on transactional costs) and instead act strategically and focus on the more important and higher value business and revenue impacts that great recruiting can produce. If you were the CEO of the Miami Heat and you were hiring LeBron James, you would consider the cost of the recruiting transaction to be insignificant compared to the economic value that he produced (winning a championship).
A Long List of the Reasons Why You Should Stop Worrying About the Transactional Cost of a Hire keep reading…
Many are surprised to learn that in growing corporations, recruiting can have the highest revenue impact of all of the HR functions. That is a powerful statement and it is also the premise of a presentation that I will make in September at the always-groundbreaking ERE national recruiting conference. We all know that in both the sports and the entertainment fields, there is a tremendous financial impact as a result of hiring top talent like LeBron James or George Clooney. Although the same significant financial impact also occurs in the corporate world, recruiting leaders have almost universally failed to focus on generating that revenue impact.
CEOs are laser focused on revenue growth keep reading…
