If you’re a recruiting leader who subscribes, you’ll get those 10 in the postal mail. For now, here’s one: the traditional career path and all its assumptions (such as that the MBA is the ticket to success, and it’s the only path to the top) will be gone.

We’re already seeing signs that many long-held assumptions about what success looks like are now open to interpretation. Forced to get creative, companies are now reviewing the long-term effects of traditional staffing models. Buying talent from competitors fills jobs quickly, but those people don’t always stay. Fighting for a top MBA grad at the best school may give your company bragging rights, but does the expense associated with managing them (and their expectations) yield a good return on the investment?

While some managers used to be convinced that there was no talent within their own companies, many are now taking a closer look at internal candidates when filling key jobs. Career paths are now often about moving sideways, not always up. As each and every hiring decision is placed under greater scrutiny, hiring managers will become more flexible in finding ways to get work done.

What would once have been an open job that would have involved an in-person pitch from a retained search firm, a parade of candidates, a consensus-driven decision, a nasty attempt to address a counteroffer, and an expensive relocation, might now simply involve a qualified long-term employee working remotely.

Faced with the reality that their jobs might be eliminated despite good performance, employees will be more open to lateral moves and developmental assignments. And companies, desperate to fill key roles, will be willing to give them those opportunities.

Only first names were to be used, and nothing was to be put in writing. Even though I was the head of recruiting and staffing for a large, multi-national company, I was putting my team in serious jeopardy just by having this conversation. Fortunately, the liaison was successful — we were not caught that day, and so far no one has discovered that we met together.

What am I describing? An international spy ring? The sale of competitive intelligence?

No, it was something much more serious. I was talking with a vendor … without a representative from the Procurement department present.

This will doubtless be remembered as a bumpy year for those of us in this profession. While finding talent in a market that has been turned upside-down represents a major challenge, it’s the secondary effects of this economic downturn that will truly test those of us in Talent Acquisition. I recently wrote about the likely increase in “executive referrals” resulting from current economic conditions. Other secondary effects could include anything from a reduced talent pool in the coming years (as families struggle to justify the return-on-investment of a college education), to an almost certain delay in the migration of the Baby Boomers to the Happy Hunting Ground of retirement.

While these effects are years away, there is another implication that you’ve probably already encountered — the increased influence of Procurement and Purchasing departments in the Recruiting function. And with so much renewed emphasis on spending, I predict you’ll see Procurement play an even greater role in the coming months.

No matter which side of the recruiting aisle you sit on (corporate or vendor), you’ve doubtless encountered Procurement departments by now. They’re the group that coordinates RFPs, negotiates prices, and even gets involved in managing vendor “performance.” It’s becoming more and more difficult to spend a single dollar on a product or service without their involvement nowadays. How are people reacting? Some enjoy leaving the “negotiating” to the experts; others feel like involving strangers interferes with trust-based vendor relations that have in many cases been built over a period of years. Regardless of your opinion, however, this model is here to stay.

How did this happen? When companies decided to get “leaner” back in the 1980s, they started buying raw materials more strategically. As a result, they began seeing huge improvements in cost-of-goods-sold as trained professionals scanned the markets for price, managed supply-chains of goods, leveraged the trade-offs between volume and price, and generally took a long-term approach to raw materials purchase. With subsequent enhancements in technology, it became even easier for companies to begin purchasing from a global market.

Another interesting change then began to take place: in addition to purchasing bulk commodities like iron ore and precious metals, Procurement departments began getting involved with large national contracts to purchase office supplies, technology, rental car contracts, and even started establishing preferred airlines for their organizations.

This was nearly always great for the company. It increased efficiency, and drove costs down. The challenge that we’ve all started encountering is that such a cold and impersonal approach can have its limits, particularly when it comes to people. Let me first state that I am completely in favor of running businesses as efficiently as possible. I support the work Procurement does, and sleep better knowing companies are paying the true market price for steel and corn oil. However, a process that was developed to purchase bulk quantities of material, ship it in container vessels, and store it for months until needed has some rather interesting implications for the acquisition of top talent.

Take my secret meeting, for example. I was talking with a trusted vendor with whom I’d worked for years. Things were pretty simple in the past — a company would have an open position, I’d ask my vendor-partner to work on the job, and they’d fill it.

Now, my fairly-straightforward relationship suddenly becomes very complicated. For example, I must first get my trusted vendor on the Approved Vendor list. In the most common scenario, the Master Service Provider determines the bill rate or the mark-up that can be charged (which usually must also cover a 2%-3% fee for them). My trusted vendor might not be able or willing to work at those rates. As such, the “approved vendor list” I ultimately end up with might consist of untried and/or undifferentiated firms who were chosen based on price alone.

The second hurdle is how to efficiently communicate with the third-party vendors who are actually recruiting for my position. Third-party vendors are often prohibited from speaking directly to me by contract; instead I must enter my requirements in the Master Vendor’s system. Questions regarding my position are asked and answered in writing. Third-party vendor phone calls are made to vendor managers, who are then supposed to capture feedback and communicate it back.

My research leads me to conclude these processes often seem cumbersome and arbitrary to vendors. Measures that are important from a traditional procurement perspective (quick turnaround times, low fees, and long contract periods) are not necessarily the same measures that create an environment for finding top niche talent, but vendors are measured only on these key metrics.

Clever vendors know where to pay their tribute. I’ve had my Procurement department inform me that they’d had extensive meetings with a job board, and were about to sign a major contract. Not only did I know nothing of the conversations, but I had rejected this particular tool months before. So why was procurement so anxious to sign? Because they’d negotiated a great rate, of course.

Procurement as a corporate function is here to stay. However, there are a few things you can do to make your relationship thrive.

Figure out who they are: Find out who comprises your Procurement department. Schedule time to meet with key leaders, and engage them before the next RFP. You have more in common with this department than anyone else; after all, you’re responsible for procuring a raw material every bit as important as printer paper. You’re responsible for procuring Talent!

Establish yourself as the decision-maker: Like any service function, Procurement wants to help you. They really do. As we’ve already seen, though, the prime measure of success is cost. And in 10 years of recruiting, I’ve never met a single hiring manager who told me that cost was the most important thing to them, and you probably haven’t either. Ultimately, you own the relationships you have with your vendors. Make sure Procurement understands that you are the decision-maker.

Find a way to work together: With the current emphasis on cost, you’re likely to see Procurement involved in nearly anything that involves paying an invoice. This year they may oversee your temporary labor contract, but next year look for them to become involved with retained searches and career fair giveaways. The point is that they have a job to do, and you do too. Invest in whatever is necessary to ensure you’re sharing information and working together.

Advocate for your customers: While learning to work together will necessarily involve compromise, never forget who you are ultimately there to represent: the job-seeker. Contracts that may seem advantageous to your company because they’ve resulted in huge rate reductions may end up costing you in the long run as vendors choose to simply not work with you, or not to send along their best candidates. I spoke with several vendors as I researched this article who said that they have been in situations where they were “asked” to accept maximum bill rates that were a third less than the amount of some candidates’ actual pay rate! While this looks great on a “vendor scorecard,” it means those companies never even get to see top candidates.

Share successes publicly: Chances are, you can learn a lot from your Procurement colleagues. And they can learn from you. Once you have that first shared victory together, be sure to publicize it. Executives love hearing how the company attracted top talent, but they love hearing how money was saved even more! Setting a public example of how to engage Procurement effectively is a great way to build your own organization’s brand as well.

Some people say good times are just around the corner; others say more bad times are ahead. In either case, companies are sure to continue using Procurement professionals to keep costs down. Learn what these colleagues do, and learn to work with them. If you do, it will mean getting the right talent into your organization at the right price. And that beats secret meetings any day of the week!

Right now, the business climate happens to be a little frightening. Since it looks like things will be like this for a while, I’d like to offer some thoughts on something that you’re certain to encounter in the next few months: a notable increase in executive referrals.

Anyone who spends time here knows that employee referrals are a simply fabulous way of bringing talent into your organization. The benefits are legion: employee referral hires are cheaper, pre-screened, more likely to be successful, increase employee morale, etc. A well-run program that delivers a consistent experience to both the candidate being submitted, and the person doing the submitting, will pay for itself many times over.

Executive referrals are a little different . . .

They come in three general categories. First, are the referrals that are simply sent to, say, the CEO’s office by strangers hoping for a leg up on the hiring process. I find that they usually arrive at my desk in batches, the time and date they were received stamped on the top, and sent along whenever the executive assistant felt like it was time to get them off their desk.

Second are those from an executive who has been brought in to lend some firepower to a referral. These often arrive in e-mail from a senior-level executive, and if you start at the bottom of the e-mail chain, you see that the first note is a “Hey Charlie, remember me?” note to the executive, in which the sender forwards a resume, and asks for help in “getting it to the right person” for consideration. Typically, Charlie does not know the person being referred.

The third scenario is quite different. In this case, the executive is referring someone that they know personally, or have at least met. Sometimes there is an expectation that someone will “reach out to them” for a conversation, or (in some companies) that they will be brought in for an “exploratory” interview. Depending upon your company culture, there can be tremendous pressure to hire these referrals. I once worked for a company where the second-in-command was trying to get a job for the boy who mowed his lawn. He insisted upon accompanying the young man to any interview that he had. Imagine scheduling an interview with a 19-year-old kid for some summer help, and having one of the most powerful people in the company walk into the room along with him!

The reason for this article is that you are about to see Scenario 3 a lot! One and two are easy to manage — I typically draft a polite note to the person being referred, personalize it with their name and the executive involved, and invite the candidate to visit the careers webpage and build a profile. I then forward a copy of that e-mail to the executive involved so he or she knows that follow-up occurred.

Under normal circumstances, Scenario 3 is rare. However, the current tough economic times will make it much more common — if more people are looking for work, and there are fewer jobs, they’re more likely to use an executive connection they might have in order to give them a competitive advantage. These interactions are very tricky.

Years ago I worked in a large recruiting organization that was led by a remarkable leader. After some months, this person appeared to take an interest in my career, and I was chosen for some great developmental assignments. One day, this person approached me, and handed me a resume. It was a resume from her best friend’s son. He was finishing school, and she wanted me to “keep his resume in mind” for future openings.

While this young man was bright, his experience was in an area slightly different than what we typically hired new college grads for. To make a long story short, I eventually did find a job for him in the company. While that might sound like a success, it took time, and things were never quite the same between me and the departmental leader after that. She believed I was a promising recruiter. If that was the case, then why was it so difficult for me to find this young man a job? Clearly, her best friend’s son was a star (in her mind), so the problem must have been with me.

If that was the outcome from actually finding an executive referral a job, imagine what happens if you don’t find them a job! Managing an executive referral is time-consuming, politically risky, and rarely leaves everyone satisfied. One or two per year is a manageable volume (you probably have a resume like that on your desk right now!), but you’re certain to see many more in the coming year. The time to start planning how you’re going to handle these referrals is now.

Here are some tips to help you come away looking like a business partner, instead of the goof who can’t find the CEO’s best friend a job!

Decide Now How You Want the Process to Work and Have Conversations

Your executives may have no idea how often you receive resumes from their colleagues. Schedule time to talk about this, and let them know you’re committed to bringing great talent into the organization. Ask what they’re expectations are regarding the referral of a friend. If you have the opportunity, try to have the conversation with as many executives as possible. Make sure you know what they expect to happen.

On a related note, be sure your HR leadership is included in these conversations. For one thing, they’re an important business partner, and it’s critical that you are both on the same page. Often, the resume in question will go to an HR VP, and then to you. Make sure these referrals don’t become a game of “telephone,” with you sending a polite note while the HR VP promised that an exploratory interview would take place!

Offer Options and Recommendations

After listening to your customers, offer some possible alternatives. Do they really want exploratory interviews? Who will be on the interview schedules? What sort of expectations does that create? In other words, will it make things worse in the long run to have someone in if it turns out that simply by examining the resume it’s evident that there is probably not a place for this person? What if you agree to reach out to the person each month for a status update? What about a process for maintaining a slate of executive referrals, and reviewing their credentials against open jobs at their level? My experience has been that it’s easy for an executive to send over a resume — after all, you’re in charge of Staffing. Why can’t you just hire this person? Helping your customers understand what’s involved in finding a match, managing tight headcounts, and understanding the minutia of work authorization, competencies, and salary expectations is a worthwhile exercise.

Insist Upon Shared Accountability

How often have you received a call or a note from someone in your organization who knows a “great executive recruiter you should really be working with”? Rather often would be my guess. I suspect you’ve been asked to meet with people from executive recruiting firms to “explore ways of working together” and “discuss opportunities for them to help you with your executive hiring.” While I genuinely appreciate the chance to meet new vendor-partners I’ve not met before, often there is an expectation on both the part of the recruiter (”Susan said you’re the one who makes the decisions about executive searches”), and the person who introduced them to you (”George is a great recruiter — after all, he found me!”). Suddenly, you’ve become the person who is “not willing” to give them one of your searches!

In the same way, executive referrals can paint you as the villain. Insist upon some measure of mutual accountability from the person sending the referral. Would they be willing to hire the person into their own department? Would they be willing to network within the company at their level to locate potential opportunities for the person they are referring? Making the placement a shared effort can go a long way in building your credibility as a consultative business partner instead of someone who “finds a place to put people” for senior leaders.

Communicate What You’ve Done

Once you establish a process that everyone agrees upon, make sure you keep the executive who referred the candidate informed. As I look back to my earlier example of my department head’s best friend’s son, I don’t think anyone had any idea how many calls I made, or how many meetings I had with various hiring managers to discuss this young man’s qualifications. It might very well have looked like I didn’t do anything at all to find a job for that candidate. Once you agree to a plan, communicate your activities regularly so the executive knows what actions are being taken.

Report Back Results

Executive referrals are extraordinarily complicated. They require many hours of your time, and take some pretty sophisticated maneuvering within the organization to ensure all parties walk away satisfied. For every hour that you’re shopping a resume around the company, or meeting face-to-face with candidates, that’s an hour you’re not focusing on getting your company through these tough economic times. It’s important for your leadership (and your HR partners) to know how much time this activity requires. It’s also important for them to appreciate the return on investment it generates. If you end up spending 20% of your time on this activity, and it ultimately results in no hires, it’s critical that your customers know this. Often this leads to a mutual appreciation for the resources the activity consumes, and can lead to some new approaches for handling these referrals.

Your executives are well-networked, and can give you access to fabulous talent that you might otherwise miss out on. Executive referrals are an important mechanism for getting this great talent in the door.

This activity is time-consuming, though, and politically charged. It’s also certain to take more and more of our time in 2009. Invest some time into working with your leadership to create a plan that meets everyone’s needs, and you’ll find that this activity can actually become one of the most enjoyable parts of your day.

I’m not sure why, but I’m fascinated by cons and confidence games. When I lived in New Jersey, I loved walking around New York City just south of Times Square because I was always sure to see some tourist happily handing over his vacation money to a Three Card Monte gang.

I’d stand cautiously and observe as a team of experts would masterfully lure a “Vic” to the game, peek into his wallet to figure out how much money he had, let him win a few games, block his wife as she desperately tried to talk some sense into him, and finally go for the big payoff.

It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who actually believes he’s playing a game with any chance of winning! No matter how many times these old ruses are exposed on television, you can always count on a new set of suckers to fall for a well-executed shell game, or some other old carnival leftover.

Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of taking advantage of innocent people, but I have a strange admiration for those who make a living skillfully pulling these tired old cons. The only one that fails to draw much admiration from me is the “bait-and-switch.” It’s really not even a con at all, as it requires absolutely no skill on the part of the perpetrator.

Car dealers used to be famous for this one, advertising a car at an unbelievably low price in the weekend newspaper. Lured by the notion of a fabulous deal, customers would show up at the lot, only to be told that particular car was already sold, but wouldn’t they like to see something even better? As unsophisticated at that old bit of business is, it’s still around.

A few years back I was contacted by a friend who works for a well-known company. They’d been doing some phenomenal work in the area of employment branding and attracting Millennials to the company, two areas of great interest for me.

My friend made small talk for a few minutes and then asked me outright: “Michael, how would you like to run talent acquisition at this company?” I was stunned (and delighted!). This was a phenomenal organization, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

In order to save time, no requisition had been created. Further, so as not to raise the suspicions of the recruiting team, my interview schedule had no title. I came in several days later and met with company leadership. The position was not well-defined, but I was assured that was because I was expected to develop a new talent acquisition process myself. I returned home and waited.

First, my friend called and asked how I liked my visit. I told him I enjoyed it very much. Some weeks later, I was asked to have a follow-up phone call with several more people, which I did. Several weeks later, another set of phone calls were arranged, and finally, a third set. At the end of this process, my friend called back and offered me a position two levels below the one I thought I was interviewing for.

Don’t feel sorry for me! I might as well have been walking around some used car lot with my checkbook looking for the “cream-puff” I saw in the Sunday paper. I’d been the willing victim in a classic bait-and-switch!

As organizations begin to really struggle for talent, they’ve dreamed up all sorts of ways to get job-seekers in the door. Every way, that is, except being clear about their hiring needs.

Some people will do just about anything to attract candidates, even at the cost of losing them in the long run. I could have easily figured out what was happening to me, and you can too if you look at the clues I missed.

Wake Up and Smell the Signs

This is useful information for anyone: whether you’re a corporate recruiter trying to manage a panicky hiring manager, a third-party recruiter trying to figure out what your client really wants, or even if you’re one of the thousands of people who plan to look for a new job in 2008.

• No clear job description. At no point in the interview process was I ever presented with a job description. People can argue back and forth whether they’re sufficient for recruiting a job opening, but I believe they’re definitely necessary. Beware any hiring manager who won’t discuss specific job responsibilities with you, but instead just asks you to “find talent, we’ll put them in the right job once we get them here.” That’s the mark of an organization that doesn’t understand its talent portfolio.
• No title on my interview schedule. More and more recruiters I know are reporting that hiring managers and human resource partners are asking them to leave job titles off of interview schedules. The reasoning goes like this: if someone takes a vacation day or two to come out for an in-person interview, they’ll accept a lesser offer because by then they’ll have fallen hopelessly in love with the company and the hiring manager. By then, the title and salary will no longer mean anything to them. Again, insist on clarity from your hiring partners. If they have an opening for a Director of Marketing, then presumably they’ve done an analysis to determine that a director-level hire is critical to the successful operation of the business. Trying to hire at the manager level means one of two things: either they didn’t scope the job out correctly in the first place, or they want a director but only want to pay for a manager.
• Dragging out the process. People who study behavioral economics love to point out the fact that human beings are fundamentally lazy. Indeed, as the recruiting process draws out, and a job-seeker feels like he or she has already invested opportunity cost into the process, he or she might be willing to take a job they wouldn’t have taken if simply presented with it upfront. I imagine it’s a bit like buying a car or a time-share. Do you really believe it takes hours and hours for a salesperson to come up with the forms and approvals they need to sell you a high-value item like this? Of course it doesn’t. Time is on their side, and the longer you sit in that sales office, the more likely you are to sign the papers just to end the agony!
• Emphasis on “great things to come” instead of the job that’s open. As a recruiter, I’ve spoken to candidates hundreds of times about the up-side to different jobs. Candidates are sometimes disappointed by the salary the company can pay, or wish they’d had a bigger title. It’s a recruiter’s job to help the job-seeker see the whole picture and present a realistic and objective perspective. Recruiters who know their companies well can talk about how past candidates have used a particular role to advance their career, or provide insights on titling within the organization. This is appropriate and ethical. What was interesting about my experience was that the “great things to come” were all anyone talked about! Again, with no job description to work from, it was easy for people to weave an entire world of possibilities with no basis in reality. A related tactic is to belittle someone’s credentials: “Well, you didn’t exactly graduate from Harvard, you know. Also, your company is well-known for title inflation.” Both tactics are used to make someone believe they’re making a move to something of higher relative value.

Matching job seekers with opportunities is hard work, and it requires honesty and authenticity on the part of all participants. Your organization should have a crystal-clear idea of what types of people are successful in it, and it should be honest with those who invest time in your recruiting process.

Hiring managers are learning that talent isn’t so easy to find these days, and good candidates are commanding higher salaries. HR partners are scrambling to figure out why entire departments are walking out the door. Recruiters are being called upon more and more to explain the new realities of the global employment marketplace, and the implications of a multi-generational workforce.

Getting someone to sign an offer letter is no longer a guarantee that they’ll just “stick it out” for a few years. I’ve seen people leave in under a month once they decide that they’ve been had.

(By the way, bait-and-switch is NOT the same as an exploratory interview. They often look similar from the outside, but they couldn’t be more different. I’ll discuss exploratory interviews in another article.)

These are challenging times for those of us in talent acquisition. The temptation to lure candidates into your organization before they have a clear understanding of the job that’s actually open can be powerful.

Does it work? It depends on your outcome. If your outcome is to attract the right person, get them into a job they feel great about, and watch them deliver long-term business results, then you’re out of luck. That happens about as often as a tourist outsmarting a “friendly” Three Card Monte hustler!

I still remember my harsh introduction to the concept of having my performance as a recruiter measured.

I had joined a company to support a functional area that had lots of needs. Jobs were open for unacceptably long periods of time, and hiring managers were questioning the candidate slates that were being presented. I had been hired by a fantastic manager, and that person was incredibly supportive as I worked with my sourcing partner to find new and innovative ways to identify and attract candidates.

It was a really exciting time in my career, and I remember the thrill of filling jobs with the great candidates we’d found. Each month the recruiters would compete for small awards: “Most jobs filled,” “Shortest time-to-fill,” etc.

My sourcer and I certainly didn’t win every month, but we did win. More exciting to me, though, was watching that backlog begin to disappear, and walking though the building and seeing all the great people we’d hired.

Then my manager was promoted. I didn’t do anything different, but my monthly one-on-ones with my new supervisor weren’t fun at all. My first manager liked to review my dashboard metrics with me, and we talked about what I was doing to improve my recruiting efficiency. My new manager never talked about metrics; instead, she would open a file folder filled with emails she’d printed and notes from phone conversations.

“I heard from a very senior-level person that you were kind of slow in returning a phone call a few weeks back,” she’d say.

“Gosh,” I’d stammer, as I opened my notebook. “Who was it? I take notes whenever I return a call.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she’d say. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Our conversations moved away from reviewing statistics and metrics, and I began to feel more and more like I was testifying in front of a congressional subcommittee! Our meetings would always end the same way.

“How am I doing?” I’d ask.

“You’re doing?ok,” would be her even-toned reply. She never elaborated, and that was all she’d ever say.

How successful are you as a recruiter? It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? Surgeons measure their performance by how many people got better under their care, and how they minimize morbidity and mortality. Professional athletes measure lots of statistics, and compare their performance against their peers, their competitors, and against historical data. Businesses measure sales, income, and volume. It seems as if nearly all professions have a standard way of measuring performance, but for some reason recruiters don’t always seem to measure success the same way.

Perhaps this is because ours is a profession in transformation. It wasn’t that long ago that companies hired talent by simply running advertisements in the local paper, or even hanging a “Help Wanted” sign in the window. Success was measured by how many people sent you resumes (on nice paper, no less, and we even checked to make sure they had the watermark aligned properly!).

Now we target job-seekers with employment branding campaigns, by pushing them emails and multimedia pieces, and seeking them out on social networking sites.

Job-seekers have changed, too. People used to look for a job with a “good company” where they could work for decades and build a nice pension. They now look for places to build their skill sets and enhance their resumes in preparation for their next job.

Rather than sit politely and list all the reasons we should hire them, they come with a list of their own questions, and quiz us mercilessly about our tuition reimbursement programs, medical plans for domestic partners, and what we’re doing to reduce our carbon footprints.

Different organizations measure recruiter success in many different ways. This can be confusing, especially if you get a new manager who measures success differently (like I did). Since our role in competing for talent will only get more significant, it’s important to understand the differences in how performance gets measured.

In talking with peers at lots of organizations, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are essentially three ways recruiters are measured. It’s important to know how your performance is being tracked, and to make sure it’s aligned with your own professional philosophy and supports the long-term goals of your organization.

Let’s look at the three ways recruiters are evaluated:

• Time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, etc. Modern applicant tracking systems make it easy to run reports and generate lots of data. Generating time-to-fill reports makes it easy to calculate short-term impact on the business; every day a job is open represents lost revenue to a company. These are valuable metrics because they’re easy for a business person to understand. They also make it easy to identify trends (I filled more jobs in less time), and measure the effectiveness of particular initiatives (as a result of our targeted advertising campaign, we hired more people away from our competitors). People who use metrics like this to measure performance are able to build a business case for new investments, and can more easily demonstrate their value to the recruiting team on which they work. On the other hand, in the race to “fill orders,” long-term investments in process improvements can seem less important.
• Do your business partners “like” you? This is a surprisingly popular measurement. Recruiting teams have been thrust into the company spotlight recently, CEOs can now recite your brand message, and everyone in the company seems to wonder why you don’t have an avatar on Second Life yet! Hiring managers are feeling the pressure to fill jobs that seem to stay open for longer these days, and human resource partners seem to have a new (and decidedly unpleasant) edge to their tone. People in my company who I don’t even know now forward emails from vendors offering to solve every recruiting challenge you can imagine, from increasing my diversity hires to helping me attract Millennials. Talent is now the business of every employee, and recruiters are feeling the pressure to deliver; what used to be a very behind-the-scenes type of job is now a decidedly public role. Selecting a recruiting strategy and sticking to it is sure to disappoint someone in your organization, and without proper internal support it’s impossible to succeed. Assuming you have a robust strategy that will work in the long run, you need to also ensure you maintain d?tente with your business partners.
• Quality of hire. Quality of hire is pretty popular at the moment. It represents the long-term value you’re bringing to your organization. The idea here is to invest in long-term strategies that improve your organization’s ability to attract top-tier candidates. Some have argued that it’s difficult to obtain objective measures of the “quality” of a hire. While I agree it’s not as straightforward as, say, time-to-fill, it absolutely can be measured. Quality of hire can be measured though employee engagement assessment (How connected do you feel to your job and to the company mission?), surveying hiring managers (How well is the person you hired six months ago performing compared to their peers?), tracking performance or length-of-service, or a dozen other methods. It’s a great way of aligning your own objectives with the mid- and long-term strategic objectives of your organization.

Which One to Select?

Rather than make a case for one of these methods being superior to the others, I’ll acknowledge that each of them can work well. Trouble starts not when you decide how you want to be measured, but rather when your boss decides to measure your performance differently than you’re measuring yourself.

For example, if you decide that you want to measure your success using quality-of-hire metrics (for example, hiring manager satisfaction and performance scores as measured over the employee’s first three years), your focus will naturally be on selecting candidates with a high probability of long-term success. This may increase your time-to-fill as you invest a little more time in gaining a deep understanding of the position and waiting until you find the “right person” to hire. However, if your boss is accustomed to seeing time-to-fill and cost-per-hire metrics, she might express concern as she sees these metrics creep up.

Similarly, a desire to increase your operational efficiency and de-bottleneck your recruiting process in an effort to reduce time-to-fill can sometimes strain your relationships with your hiring managers or human resource partners as you push them to review resumes faster and minimize the number of people on the interview schedule.

Correctly Measuring Performance

Before you spend another day recruiting talent, take some time to do the following:

• Decide what kind of recruiter you want to be. Many of us recruit for years before we realize that we’re self-sabotaging ourselves. I’ve known recruiters who love innovation, and bring all variety of technology into their organizations, yet never measure their long-term effects on candidate quality. Others really and truly value their partnerships with internal customers, yet don’t let them know what’s needed from them to drive an efficient recruiting process. Spend some time thinking about what makes you happiest as a recruiter. Look for patterns, and determine how you want to be measured.
• Let your boss know. Does your boss know your goal is to reduce time-to-fill and save your organization thousands of dollars, even if it means asking your generalists to take on additional responsibilities they’ve never had before? If not, they’re likely to hear it on the streets, and you’ll suddenly find yourself defending your actions during your one-on-ones. You need to schedule time with your boss to talk about one thing only — what your goals as a talent acquisition professional are. Once you are both clear on outcomes, you can work together to negotiate a fair way to measure performance. Simply assuming your boss knows why you make the decisions you do is very dangerous.
• Let your organization know. Once you and your boss have agreed on how you’ll measure performance, let your business partners know. I recommend one-on-one conversations with your generalists, a high-level overview with the entire HR community, and then company-wide updates as you make progress on your goals. One example might be a news story on your organization’s home page celebrating how you saw improvement in candidate feedback after interviewing. You could talk about how that’s becoming more important to job-seekers, and how you’ve come to realize as an organization that waiting a few more days for the right person is critical to achieving your business goals. People throughout your organization should be able to articulate how recruiting success is measured.

Chances are you crave feedback so you can get even better at something you already enjoy doing. Ensuring you have a consistent approach to measuring your success as a recruiter makes it easier for your boss to recognize when you’re being successful, and helps your organization understand how you’ve chosen to approach talent acquisition philosophically.

This profession is sure to get even more complex; ensuring alignment within your own organization will make it much easier to navigate this complexity, and provide you with the support you need to bring top talent into your organization consistently.

I still remember the first time I heard about the Millennial generation. I was at a recruiting conference in New Orleans about 10 years ago, and one of the presenters was commenting about how the boomers were about to turn 50. He said the bulk of workers who would be replacing them would be coming from a generation we now know as Millennials.

I can still see the crowd’s reaction as the speaker talked about how this generation would be particularly coddled (raised by overly indulgent parents), have off-the-charts self esteem, and focus on a “what’s in it for me?” attitude.

I have to confess that I overheard more than a few staffing professionals remind themselves to check on the status of their IRAs when they got back to the office, as they were seriously considering retiring early rather than be forced to conduct campus job interviews with students who brought their parents along with them.

That was 1997, and here we are 10 years later. Amazingly, just about everything that speaker said has come true (I think he worked for an insurance company). The Millennials are here, they want it all, and they want it now.

Just like you, I’ve experienced the drama of the college kids who have their mothers negotiate their offers for them, the new MBA who tells the vice president that she won’t travel unless she has “at least two weeks’ notice,” and the interns who refuse to stuff binders. The chilling fact, though, is that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

The first boomers only just turned 60 last year and have not yet started leaving the workforce in significant numbers. As staffing professionals, our job during the next few years will be to replace a generation of almost 80 million people with these Millennials.

Before I go any further, I need to do some disclosure and point out that I am in no way an expert on this subject. If you’re interested in the characteristics of the four generations currently working side-by-side in today’s workplace, I highly recommend a book called Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe. If you want to learn more specifically about Millennials, I recommend Cam Marston’s book Motivating the “What’s in it for me?” Workforce.

While the arithmetic challenge of replacing these hires is daunting, there are other considerations that will make this shift especially complex. These considerations include your ability as a staffing professional to find and attract job seekers you’ve never targeted before, your ability to truly understand what motivates this generation, and your ability to prepare your organization for this inevitable change.

This is a huge responsibility. I know some days I feel like celebrating just for getting our applicant tracking system to work. How will I ever be able to lead what amounts to a total revolution in how my organization views talent?

Fortunately, unlike many other changes we encounter in life, we already have a great deal of information available to us. The Millennials are the most studied and analyzed generation in history; we know what motivates them, we know what’s important to them, and we know how they view themselves. A few well-spent hours researching this topic can really help prepare you to guide your organization through the next few years.

Once you’re done, see how you answer these three questions:

1. Do you know how to find these job-seekers? The building in which I work has been renovated several times throughout its history. In the conference room near the staffing department there is a door that opens up into the front yard along the street. While it’s currently used as an emergency exit, it has a nice awning over the door, which is different from the strictly utilitarian design of the other emergency exits in the building. Someone finally explained to me that the door was once used by the “Personnel Department” to receive walk-ins who literally walked up to the building and filled out an application for employment! What a long way we’ve come since then. Nearly all of us now post jobs on specialty websites and do the odd bit of branding to attract passive job-seekers. Some of the braver among us use social networking sites and virtual worlds to recruit new hires. Do you know where inexperienced hires are looking for their first jobs? Do you know how they want to learn about your company, or even what questions they’re likely to ask you when you meet them? If you don’t know any Millennials personally, find some and talk to them. This generation has great clarity around what they want from their careers and will be glad to share their insights with you.
2. Is your organization appealing to these job-seekers? In nearly every meeting I’ve attended where the topic of recruiting Millennials was discussed, someone has vowed out loud that they’ll never hire someone who isn’t willing to “pay their dues” like they did. Boomers value hard work and don’t take kindly to people who don’t see the value in “putting in their time” before they begin to realize the rewards such hard work inevitably brings (i.e., a bigger office, a loftier title, more money). Interestingly, the Millennials aren’t motivated by the same things their boomer bosses are.
3. Do your hiring managers and leadership know how important this is? If your organization is like many others, you’ve probably never sat down and taken a “generational” look at who currently comprises your workforce, who runs things, and how your reward structure is configured. Many organizations today are run by boomers for the exclusive benefit of other boomers. Getting in early, staying late, and appearing to work hard is rewarded. People probably brag about how they came in on the weekend, or that they answered a Blackberry message in the middle of the night. People who navigate these organizations successfully are rewarded with corner offices, drive expensive cars, and enjoy the ability of having people obey their directives without a lot of discussion.

In a few years, the workplace will be significantly different. People will come and go to suit their schedules (some companies already offer employees unlimited vacation as long as their work is getting done); employees will change jobs much more frequently, so rewards will take the form of training and development; and titles and corner offices will take on less significance as good employees challenge ideas no matter who comes up with them.

Question: Does this workplace vision sound better or worse to you than your current work environment?

Answer: It doesn’t matter what you think because the changes will take place regardless of your buy in.

During the Great Depression, my grandfather walked into the headquarters of one of the Big Three automakers, was hired on the spot, and worked there for 40 years. Today’s Millennial job-seekers will have a very different experience: they’ll work for perhaps a dozen employers, participate on virtual project teams with team-members located around the globe, and probably integrate their work life and personal life more effectively than any previous generation.

I’m quite excited about seeing what life will be like when the world is run by a generation that has never known a time without computers and cellular phones. Getting your leaders to acknowledge the impending changes will allow your organization to get the edge on your competitors and make you a hero.

Before a job candidate becomes an employee, there are questions they should be asking you, their potential employer.

Some are questions they’d actually pose to you. Others, like #35, are rhetorical questions they’ll ask themselves.

The more questions you can answer throughout this process, the more successful the employee will be.

The First 10 Questions

We begin with a set of very high-level questions one would ask when trying to decide whether they want to join a particular company:

1. Who are you?
2. What do you make/sell?
3. Why should I work there?
4. What is the corporate culture like?
5. What kinds of people work there?
6. What skills are necessary for success?
7. How competitive is your total compensation package?
8. What is your company’s reputation, and are you an ethical company?
9. Where are you located?
10. What will having you on my resume mean for me in the future?

The Second Set

The next 10 represent questions one might ask if they’re interested:

11. How can I learn more?
12. Where can I find your financial data?
13. Where are you located? Where can I find your open jobs?
14. How do I navigate your website?
15. Where can I hear from current employees?
16. What current corporate-wide initiatives are taking place?
17. Have you dealt with any major shake-ups, scandals, litigation, etc.?
18. How is your organization set up (reporting structure)?
19. What is this company most proud of? What is their heritage?
20. Who is your customer?

The Third Set

These questions ask very specific questions about your company’s interviewing process:

21. How do I bid on a job?
22. What kind of interviews do you conduct?
23. How do I get to the facility? Where do I stay?
24. How much detail can I find in your brochures/website?
25. How can I get more detail about the topics that interest me?
26. How much information do you require from me, and when do you want it?
27. Where can I find detailed benefits information?
28. How will you compensate me for leaving my current situation?
29. How competitive is your relocation package?
30. Who in your company knows I’m interviewing? Is this job search on the radar screen of senior leaders?

The Fourth Set

The remaining questions represent the hesitation so many job-seekers feel upon recalling past recruitment horror stories:

31. When will I hear back?
32. How many interviews will I have? How many return trips?
33. What will drive my compensation package? Will you be flexible or tell me “That’s what it pays, take it or leave it”?
34. If this isn’t a fit, will you respect me by telling me in person?
35. Will your background process treat me with dignity?
36. How long will it take to get my reimbursement?
37. Will you value my time?
38. Will you pressure me into a decision?
39. Did you only introduce me to people you thought I’d like?
40. Will I feel like you respected me at the end of the process?

Believe it or not, I’ve got 60 more questions (all 100 will be in your November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership). Those 60 questions cover the onboarding process, how an employee can add value once hired, how they can prosper as leaders, how they can leave their mark on the organization, and how they can attract more great employees.

Answering the 40 questions above, however, should keep you plenty busy for the time being!

This is a true story. Years ago, I interviewed for a job with a well-known, multi-billion-dollar global company. I was flown in the night before, and interviewed with the hiring manager, the hiring manager’s boss, and the hiring manager’s HR partner.

The interviews ended at noon, so around 1 p.m., the agency managing the search called me to ask how it went.

“How did it go?” I answered. “I honestly have no idea!”

The interview with the hiring manager had gone well, and she even suggested that we get together at the end of the day for an unscheduled debrief, so I was feeling good about the job. At the end of the last interview, though, the HR manager abruptly walked me to the elevator without asking me if I had any questions. I was sent on my way without so much as a “thanks for visiting.”

I probably looked ridiculous standing there on the sidewalk in my suit, staring back at the building with my little file folder of extra resumes in my hand! As I recovered, I realized that no one had discussed next steps with me, let alone given me a timeline. I hadn’t even received a company brochure! Mama mia, what had I done wrong?

It’s so difficult to do everything right when you’re working with a candidate. Not a week goes by that you don’t read about the shortage of talent, so there’s just no room for mistakes in managing the “candidate experience.”

In addition, finding talent is now quite complex, and best-in-class companies and recruiters are doing more proactive sourcing, so the process is likely to include more steps. This means potentially dozens, even hundreds, of emails, phone calls, discussions, and interviews before a hire occurs.

The point is, with so many distinct interactions with candidates, simple statistics make it unlikely that you’ll be able to ensure every single step comes off flawlessly. Instead of trying to be perfect, I recommend you concentrate on making the first and last interactions count the most.

In studies going back to the 1920s, scientists noticed a peculiar pair of phenomena now known as the Primacy Effect and the Recency Effects. These effects were noted when experimental subjects were asked to look at lists, then recall as many items as they could. It was observed that people tend to recall items from the end of the list first, and when attempting to recall earlier items, they recall the first few items best.

Subsequent research led to many fascinating insights about how our memory works, and most psychologists and sociologists acknowledge that the phenomena probably result from the processes our brains use to store information.

Primacy occurs because as we begin filling our short-term memory with items, there are fewer items to remember, allowing them to make a stronger impression on the memory center. Earlier items are also more likely to end up in our long-term memories.

Recency is probably just due to the fact that the items memorized last are freshest in our mind, and are stored in our “working memories.”

As I recall my visit to that company years ago, these two phenomena are definitely at work. The first memories that come to mind are the call I received when I was first told about the job, and the odd sensation associated with being unceremoniously escorted from the building after I thought things were going so well.

Can you recall a similar experience from a past interview experience? If you’re like many people, you’ll remember things that happened at the end of the process, and then things that happened right at the beginning.

From First Impressions…

Whether you run an agency, perform contract recruiting, or work for a large company, it’s important to make sure all your candidate interactions are awesome. However, the old adage about making a good first impression is more that just a piece of quaint advice. In fact, it is a scientific fact that your first impression is one that will stay with your clients.

Here are four ways you can ensure people have a great “first impression” when you contact them:

1. Do some research before you contact people. This one is so easy now that there’s simply no excuse for not doing it. A quick Internet search can reveal information about where someone has worked, how long they’ve been with their current employer, and even information about hobbies and interests. Identifying patterns in people’s behavior can also help you understand their motivation when it comes to what they want out of a potential employer. For example, someone who has spent their entire career in the IT world and also runs a website devoted to technology will need to be approached in a particular way depending upon what job opportunities you plan to discuss with them
2. Ensure your message is powerful, consistent, and memorable. Another way the Internet has changed how people look for jobs is the way it allows complete and total access to the “real truth” about your company. Calling one person and telling them your company is all about teams and teamwork, then calling someone else and describing your company as being all about the individual contributor, is very likely to come back and bite you. Try spending the next week listening to people talk about job opportunities. You’ll likely hear things like “I’ve heard it’s really hard to get resources there,” or “I understand that you can only get to a certain level unless you’ve been with that company a long time.” Establishing a clear and compelling recruitment brand will help you understand what’s idiosyncratically unique about your company. Keep that unique brand message strong and positive whenever you interact with people.
3. Know your outcome. I remember a call I received when I first started recruiting. The caller left a message on my voicemail telling me he had a “great employment opportunity” that he wanted to discuss. I called him back, only to discover the “great opportunity” was merely the chance to hire one of his clients! His outcome was to get me to call him back promptly (which I did). Of course, I never called him again. Make sure your outcome is something like “I want to discuss a particular job with this person but establish a long-term relationship with them even if the job isn’t a fit.”
4. Anticipate obstacles. If you recruit for a company, have you ever “lived” the candidate experience you ask your job-seekers to live? Have you ever tried to catch a cab at your local airport after 11:00 p.m.? Have you tried to bid on a job through your own website? Are your hiring teams trained to ask relevant, legal questions? Optimizing a candidate’s first look at your company is critical, so get your team together every six months to review the message you’re sending. Some teams I know turn the process into a type of game, and brainstorm all the ways that the candidate experience could possibly go wrong. They then go back and build mechanisms into their process to prevent the mishaps.

How important is it to manage your company’s first impression? Consider your candidate database and determine how many names are in it right now. Thousands?

Even if you’re the busiest recruiter in the world, most of your candidates will not get a job with your company. However, every one of them will remember their first interaction with you, even if it’s only a visit to your website.

To Last Impressions…

Leaving people with a great impression is also important, and I believe this is the area of greatest opportunity for most of us.

Here are four suggestions for leaving candidates feeling good:

1. Always leave people with a clear idea of next steps, timeline, deliverables from them, and deliverables from you. Even when you are in a strictly “sourcing” mode, and end up talking only briefly with someone who is not a match at all for a particular job, you should end the call by discussing next steps. “I don’t see you as a match for this job, so I don’t plan to forward your resume on. However, I do anticipate some hires in your functional area in 2008. Let’s stay in touch.” Similarly, if you can’t move to next steps until you receive a piece of documentation from a candidate, or until a background check is started, let them know.
2. If you’ve had success, circle back with your client after a few weeks to relive the experience together. The best recruiters I know make this a priority. Say you place someone in a great job. Circling back and talking through the experience with the hiring manager accomplishes several things: (1) it allows you to make the client aware of all the things you or your organization did to make them successful, and (2) it allows you to “package” their final impression of you. In the chaos of switching jobs, it’s amazing how quickly people forget how hard you worked to increase their sign-on bonus, re-negotiate a start date, or extract some obscure piece of benefits information for them. Linking all these positive memories together and associating them with your efforts is a great way to leave a good impression.
3. A thoughtful, tasteful gift can go a long way. Some companies give every candidate who interviews with them a small gift related to the company’s business. Other companies give college interns a small gift like a USB flash drive or a pen. The value of the gift is irrelevant. The important thing is to leave the client with a gift that reminds them of the good experience they had with you. I once commemorated the conclusion of an extraordinarily difficult search for a pension fund manager by presenting the hiring manger with an old civil war era widow’s pension certificate I found on eBay. The gift cost virtually nothing, but the manager loved it, and whenever he looks at it hanging on his wall it reminds him of our successful search together.
4. Ask job-seekers what they thought about their experience. Best-in-class companies survey their candidates to ensure they had the information they needed, that they understood the hiring process, and that there were no unpleasant surprises along the way. On-line survey tools are cheap (or free!), and easy to use. What better way to find out what kind of a “final impression” you’re leaving your clients with than to simply ask them: “On a scale from 1 to 10, how positive an impression did the company leave you with?”

In today’s recruitment market, no one can get away with randomly interacting with job seekers and simply hoping for the best. While an unbroken chain of perfect interactions is the goal we should all be shooting for, making the first and last interactions the best interactions is the next best thing.

By the way, in case you’re wondering how my adventure in the big city turned out all those years ago, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, I never heard back from the hiring manager, nor did I ever hear from the agency with whom I was working.

Every once in a while I run into a colleague who works for that company, and she always promises to find out “what ever happened with that job.” She needn’t trouble herself, though. Whether I like it or not, my brain has already stored some very powerful memories about my experience!

There is something truly magical about that precise moment when a product is bought or sold. I suppose it’s because our species has relied upon this most fundamental form of capitalism for so long.

As humans became more efficient in drawing sustenance and were no longer engaged 100% in the act of survival, we learned to plant a little more rice or catch a few more fish. This abundance was then taken to the “marketplace” where people traded it for something they didn’t have but nonetheless needed. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but I’d be willing to bet the act of buying and selling activates some ancient and primitive part of the human brain.

The act of selling, of course, requires a customer, and for years sales professionals have been taught that Customer is King. They learn about the product they are selling, learn how to counter objections from their customer, learn how to educate their customer, and learn how to generate new leads. When each person was responsible for selling their own extra crops, it was clear who the customer was.

As business grew, though, entire functions came into being that had nothing whatsoever to do with product, or customers, or selling.

It certainly makes sense. After all, there is no point in having every person in the company learn all the thousands of regulations associated with the accounting function. It’s a trade-off, though, as a smaller and smaller proportion of employees gets to participate in that most sacred act of selling products to a customer.

The company where I work makes products associated with eye care, and many of our products are sold to eye-care professionals. Recently, the recruiter who hires our sales professionals and I joined one of our territory managers for a day in the field. I’m not about to suggest that we contributed in any way to the sales that were booked that day; I’m sure our presence was more of a nuisance than help.

However, my “day in the field” was an awesome experience. I prepared by reviewing the training materials and learned a lot about our products. For the first time, I opened packages of the different products and held them in my hands. I was also able to meet the medical professionals who used these products to help patients.

No matter what business you’re in, you have a customer. I hope as a recruiting professional you don’t wait as long as I did to watch your product get into a customer’s hands. I know my colleague who recruits sales reps now uses her experience in the field to answer questions for potential hires. My major take-away was that, regardless of your business, there are a few fundamental characteristics all customers share.

Customers, Like People, Are Unique

The day we visited customers, we stopped at six different locations. Every single person with whom we spoke was totally different from the others. One was all business and wanted only the facts. Another was very friendly and spent most of her time asking about us. Still another was shy at first, and then became more comfortable as the conversation progressed. Anyone who makes the mistake of assuming every customer will respond to a single prescribed sales approach will realize quickly how wrong they are.

My friend Reid Buckley loves to tell the true story of an acquaintance who is generally regarded as one of the most successful salesmen in his field.

Looking back, though, his most vivid memory is that of a customer very early in his career who treated him brutally. He had invited the young salesman into his office, and then promptly ignored him for hours at a time. The lesson he had to eventually learn was how to sell to that customer “the way he wanted to buy.” He did, and paradoxically the lessons he learned from sitting for hours in front of someone who ignored and humiliated him ended up serving him very well.

Everyone will eventually encounter a customer like that. I watch many recruiters get frustrated with these “tough nuts” because they want them to respond to the sales pitch they’re most comfortable with. It’s important to be flexible in your approach, and learn to sell the way the customer wants to buy.

Your Competitors Are Always Around

When we’re immersed in the culture of a company, we’re surrounded by its symbols and imagery. Our company homepages have large logos, as do our stationery, brochures, and signs on our buildings. The first thing that struck me when I walked into the first doctor’s office was our lovely product display.

More specifically, I was struck by the way it was located right next to a competitor’s display case. And under another company’s calendar. Just beside still another company’s mouse pad.

It was jarring to see the look and feel of our company brand piled up so incongruously with other branded materials. It struck me that, when I go to work, I see only things that remind me of my own company. When my customers go to work, they see things that remind them of all my competitors. It’s important to keep that in mind and truly differentiate your product from all the others.

Unglamorous Things to Make the Sale

When we visited a doctor’s office, I helped straighten up the store room. I removed old product, put new product in the little drawers, and even made sure all the packages were facing the same way in the drawers. If you spend time with people who are passionate about what they do, you’ve already seen this level of dedication.

As I think back on specific leaders I’ve met who deliver strong business results, inspire their teams, and regularly deliver innovation to their businesses, they’ve all impressed me by their willingness to do whatever it takes to delight the customer. I remember when one of my favorite leaders agreed to attend a recruiting event I was coordinating several years’ back.

I expected that someone so successful and powerful would probably want to hole up in his hotel room and make phone calls or answer emails. Instead, he helped assemble welcome packages, directed people around the property, and delivered an impromptu talk to a roomful of students.

A cynic might think he did those things to show us he was a “regular guy,” or to demonstrate the traits he wanted to see from his subordinates. I myself was cynical, so I asked him why he chose to spend his time with us as he did. I remember his look of surprise.

He didn’t realize he had “sent a message” at all! Instead, he knew that attracting talent was a critical activity for the business because it directly impacted our ability to get product to customers. While much of his “attracting talent” activities did include approving multi-million dollar consulting agreements and overseeing talent reviews, he knew that the little activities were equally important.

Go to Your Customers

I forgot to look at the mileage gauge when we first got into the car, but we drove around a lot during our visits. In some cases, we went to one location, drove across town to another, then returned to another office just down the street from the first office. The reason is that, despite our best intentions, sometimes the customer’s schedule just couldn’t accommodate an ideal route and schedule.

I’m often struck by vendors who cold-call me and leave a voicemail informing me that they’ll be in my town on a certain day and will be stopping by at 9:45 a.m. to meet me to talk about a solution they’ve developed to “fix” my problems. One vendor caught me on the phone recently and told me that “based on her research, her company’s product would be a great solution for my recruiting challenges.”

I responded by asking her what data she gathered, how she gathered it, exactly what conclusions she drew, what my company does, who my competitors are, where my company is located, how many people are employed by my company, what sources I use to fill my jobs, and what about her product made it an ideal solution for me specifically.

Taking time to understand your customers’ needs is critical when our job is helping them identify talent with whom they must work and rely upon. Sometimes it’s not convenient, but it’s important to make that connection.

Maintain Your Enthusiasm

During our “day on the road” we met one customer for 15 minutes, one for five minutes, one for a quick drive-by hello, and we caught only a glimpse of another (though we waited 45 minutes to see him).

I was amazed by our host’s ability to deliver the same level of enthusiasm to our 4:30 p.m. visit as she did to our 8:30 a.m. visit. I think the reason she did it so well is that I didn’t get the sense that she was “psyching herself up” in the car before her visits. Instead, I had the distinct impression that she truly loved what she was doing and was taking special delight in visiting customers.

I’m sure you know people who are filled with energy and passion for what they do. They truly enjoy what they’re doing and can take pleasure in their work even when it seems like nothing is going right for them.

Customers don’t care if you just called 20 people and they all hung up on you, or if a hiring manager just sent a nasty note about you to your boss. The people I know who are happiest (and most successful) are those who are enthusiastic.

Customers Want You to Return

Sometimes customers can’t talk to you right then, but they want you to come back.

This was a minor observation, but one that has stuck with me. Several customers were unexpectedly busy when we arrived, despite the fact we’d re-confirmed the appointment the day before. I never felt like people were trying to get rid of us, but rather that there were patients who had showed up with serious issues that needed treatment.

I thought about how many times I’ve called or emailed someone who wasn’t able to give me the information I needed in the timeframe I wanted it. It can be tempting to tell one’s self a story about how they don’t respect the recruiting function or aren’t devoting sufficient time to their open requisition. In reality, they’re probably just trying to respond to their own customers.

I’ve tried to modify my own behavior as a result of this observation. Last week I received a cold call from an agency that wanted to talk about helping us with some open requisitions. I was on my way to another meeting, but I promised to call her back. She didn’t sound too convinced that she’d ever hear back from me, but several days later I did return the call.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in. Everyone has customers, and it’s important to remember that they are the kings and queens. If you don’t have regular customer-facing interactions as part of your responsibilities, be sure to schedule some soon. You’ll be glad you did.

If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time reactively addressing questions and requests for information from your customers. If that’s the case, you should feel good; people obviously know where to find you, and someone must have told them you often have answers!

My top three questions generally concern requests for processes and forms; requests for recruiting/sourcing data; and requests for interpretation of policies. Your mix might be different depending upon your job, but I’ll be willing to bet you’re often asked certain questions over and over. Have you ever noticed, though, that the best parts of these conversations usually occur in the last few seconds?

“I’m glad I was able to get that information for you, Sue, but did you know we actually have a program launching later this year that will proactively addresses that concern?”

“I didn’t know that. How interesting! Gosh, I have to run, but maybe we can get together sometime to talk about it?”

I imagine that the outcome you want for your organization is not to deliver value “just in time” as your customers ask for it; you want to anticipate their needs and have solutions in place before they even realize they need them.

I talk to so many talent-acquisition specialists with innovative solutions to current recruiting challenges. Yet many don’t have the resources or the visibility to the right people (at the right time) to launch them optimally. Even worse, they probably have all kinds of great ideas for things they want to do in the future!

To avoid this, and to allow people (other than your own boss) to find out how clever and strategic you are, I recommend you create a recruitment-strategy document.

If your company is like most, attracting talent is probably a key priority. Your CEO is thinking about it from his or her broad, long-term perspective, while your enterprise leaders are thinking about it from their own functional perspectives. People who have grown up within the organization are picturing it the way it has “always been done” there, while the newcomers are already crafting ways to change things to the way it was “where I came from.” If you’ve ever had the experience of discovering “rogue” recruiting brochures, or learning that people are attending career fairs without the knowledge of the staffing department, you know what I mean.

It’s impossible to be physically present for every single water-cooler conversation and every strategic business review where recruiting is discussed. Creating a well-crafted strategy document, however, is an indirect way of influencing your customers even when you’re not around.

By the way, a recruitment strategy isn’t just for corporate staffing departments. So if you work for an agency or run a business, I believe that anyone who has a customer (and that means just about everyone) can benefit from creating a documented strategy.

Recruitment strategies can look any way you want them to, but I believe they should contain several key elements.

An Executive Summary

This goes right on the cover. If you had just 30 seconds to tell your CEO (or your best customer) what three things your company must do to be successful competing for talent in the next one to three years, what would you say? That’s your summary. Resist the temptation to embellish it or make it sound fancy. Simple is best.

An Introduction

This is where you let people know that, while they are experts in engineering or finance or marketing, you are the world’s foremost authority on recruiting (at least within your own company)! What is making it hard for your organization to compete for talent today? Is it low unemployment? Is it a lack of knowledge workers? Describe the current state of recruiting in your particular business. Keep in mind that most of your customers really and truly believe that they are experts in recruiting. You want to acknowledge their enthusiasm and buy-in, but simultaneously establish your own credibility as a subject matter expert.

How Did You Develop Your Strategy?

Did you conduct face-to-face customer visits? Did you purchase survey information? Briefly describe how it was that you selected the specific areas of focus that you’ll be recommending later in your strategy document.

What Best Practices Are You Competing Against?

Today there are many clever ways to use technology and innovation to find and attract talent, yet most of the customers we support are na?ve about them. For example, I’ve had dozens of conversations with fellow staffing professionals about what it might be like to recruit in cyberspace; yet I still have hiring managers who believe a newspaper advertisement represents the ultimate cutting-edge recruiting tool. Use this portion of your document to give your audience a peek at what’s going on in the world of staffing and recruitment. Do this not because you are suggesting that a cyber-recruiting initiative is the direction to go this year, but rather to re-frame what “cutting edge” looks like today.

Everyone has heard the story about how, until Roger Bannister’s record-setting run in 1954, many thought a four-minute mile was not humanly possible. After Bannister ran the mile in three minutes, 59.4 seconds, a number of other runners subsequently broke the four-minute barrier because their psychological limitation had been removed.

Do the same thing for your hiring managers; visit the websites of the 2007 Recruiting Excellence Award Winners (and they’ll be written up in the Journal, online, and some at ERE’s Fall Expo in DC). In your strategy document, describe what you see. Your readers will probably move very quickly from, “We could never do something like that,” to “Do you mean to say that other companies are doing this right now?”

Barriers to Success

Are there things that could still spell failure for your strategy even if every one of your proposals is implemented? It’s important to capture those, not to “cover” yourself in case your plan fails, but to demonstrate that you understand how to scan the external environment for threats. As I look at my own strategy document, I tend to view my barriers to success with the same weight as my proposed areas of focus.

How Will You Measure Success?

Developing objective, measurable ways of establishing success is a critical part of this process. Using a balanced scorecard, dashboard metrics, or any other data-driven method is perfectly acceptable. The important thing is to ensure you measure the right things from the beginning (quality of hire vs. cost per hire), and to ensure you can tie specific actions to changes in your metrics. For example, “After launching the employee referral program, knowledge of the program as measured by online surveys went up 35%, and actual referrals increased 10%.”

Areas of Focus

Up to this point, you’ve told your reader that you intimately understand the recruiting space in general, that you thoroughly understand your own company and its culture, that you’ve done a competitive analysis on what others are doing, that you’ve already anticipated things that could go wrong, and that you have devised a way to prove what you’re doing is actually working.

Now for the fun part: what exactly do you want to focus on? Is it an employment branding initiative? Do you want to change your funding model? Are you proposing an organizational change? The careful selection of a few important areas of focus will help your customers understand your philosophical approach to attracting talent. Some staffing professionals believe strongly in process and technology; their strategy should imply that. Some believe that recruitment should be functionally aligned; others believe it should be aligned by business. These strategies will look very different. Select things that will have an impact on your business quickly, and reinforce your own high-level views on recruiting.

Conclusions

Briefly re-cap the current situation within your company, talk about where your organization is on the spectrum of current recruiting practice, and explain specifically how your strategy will move the organization along the continuum toward best-in-class. This should be a very short section, and do not introduce new material here.

Appendices

If you talked about new initiatives, new documents, new procedures, etc., place draft copies of your proposed paperwork in the Appendix. Also, if you used original research, obtained bid information, or want to recommend any further reading, include these in your Appendix. You want this document to stand alone, and not require that people come back to you in order to satisfy themselves that you researched your conclusions comprehensively.

Now, share the document with your boss, and share it with your team. They’ll doubtless make great suggestions, and help you identify areas that require further clarification. Next, “leak” a few copies to some trusted colleagues. You’ll want to know what a typical customer’s initial response is likely to be. This might also prompt some further editing on your part. Finally, print copies and send them to all of your customers (along with your contact information).

A well-crafted strategy document will allow you to continue providing day-to-day support to your customers, but also give them a glimpse of your plans for the future.

It will help people to understand your company’s competitive position in the marketplace, and thus demonstrate why you are making the specific recommendations you are.

Most important, it enables you to participate in conversations about recruiting?even when you’re not there in person.

Companies spend millions of dollars a year trying to develop compelling employment brands by interviewing current employees, surveying external job-seekers, and validating the conclusions they draw from the data. But even after all that, there’s no guarantee that the brand statement will perfectly reflect what an organization offers potential employees.

If branding is that difficult for a company with money and resources, how in the world can you and I figure out what our own brand is, let alone try to publicize it to our customers, without consultants, ad agencies, or budgets?

Fortunately, it’s easier than you might think.

This morning I went to my “Rolodex” of business contacts (really a stack of business cards held together with a rubber band!) and randomly chose three. As I pulled them out of the stack, I wrote down the first word that came to mind:

1. Sleazy. This is the agency contact who always calls me to demand placement fees for people we sourced through our own careers website. Even though we stopped working with this guy a long time ago, we can always count on him to weave some extraordinary “six degrees of separation” tale designed to convince me that he is ultimately responsible for the hire.
2. Incredible. This is a woman who supervised another department at a company where I used to work. She was so smart and innovative I volunteered to take on any project of her choosing just for the privilege of working with her. I still marvel at how much I learned from her.
3. Innovative. This is an IT consultant I worked with for several years who is always able to think of a clever solution to any problem, and consistently delivers it ahead of schedule.

Let’s face it: no one probably deserves to be reduced to a single word, and each of these people undoubtedly exhibits behaviors contrary to the labels I’ve given them. Nonetheless, over time, this is the label they’ve earned in my mind. What label have you earned in the minds of your customers?

A popular phrase among the self-help profession is “We teach others how to treat us.” Do you find your HR partners claiming credit for your best hires, yet find yourself saddled with blame for hires you were not even involved with? As an agency recruiter, do you have problems getting your resumes to the right people? How is it that the new hire in your department, who has very little prior recruiting experience, became so successful so quickly?

Perhaps the problem is your brand. Just like a company, everyone has a brand, whether they like it or not. The challenge is to learn what your brand is and then position yourself such that you emphasize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Gather Data and Assess Your Current Situation

People, like companies, have both positive and negative qualities. As a first step in the branding process, most corporate initiatives start with an assessment of some sort. This is accomplished through the use of focus groups, surveys, or individual interviews.

Similarly, when you’re attempting to learn about your personal brand, it’s also a good idea to find out how your “customers” perceive you. You can certainly ask a trusted colleague to share their thoughts, but I recommend one of the widely available 360? assessment tools. In a pinch you can also use a free Web-based survey tool.

Regardless of how you do it, it’s important to learn what you do well, what you don’t do well, and what your customers’ overall impression of you is.

Determine What Makes You Unique

I remember being assigned to a business group as its new recruiter. Every person I talked with had the same thing to say: “I’m sure you’re a good recruiter, but, alas, no one will ever be as good as Darla was.”

Darla was this group’s recruiter several years before, and despite having worked with several competent recruiters since, the entire team was unable to get beyond the fact that their beloved Darla was now gone.

It would have been easy to start acting like Darla to try and get that client group to like me, and that’s in fact what they really wanted. However, as I probed a bit, I learned that Darla’s style was very different from mine. Darla hired nearly all her folks using agencies (not necessarily a bad thing, but not in alignment with our department’s strategy for that function).

Also, she always asked the hiring managers what they thought about a particular candidate first, and would respond the same way each time: “Isn’t that amazing, that’s just what I thought!” No wonder everyone liked her! I realized quickly that such a style just wasn’t me.

My style is more analytical: “You have expertise and I have expertise. You define success this way, and I define it that way. You want this outcome, and I want that outcome. Let’s design a process up front that will get us both what we want, and allow us to measure how we’re doing along the way.”

They certainly never liked me as much as they liked Darla, but what was important is that we hired some great people into that business who were sourced internally, and I also earned the respect of the hiring managers.

Advertise and Embrace Your Idiosyncratic Differences

The best recruiters I know tend to unabashedly let people know what makes them unique in the way they approach their job. Adopting a professional style that’s not “on brand” for you can make you look insincere, unconfident, and unprofessional.

To hiring managers looking for an opportunity to challenge the “current recruiting model” for their own political gains, such a flicker of weakness is like blood in the water. I’ve seen it result in phone calls to supervisors, power plays by HR generalists, and frustration on the part of recruiters who begin to question their own abilities.

There are many different recruiter styles, and they all can be effective. For example, we all know the recruiters who are loud, brash, and direct a never-ending stream of resumes at their customers. Some of the resumes are worthless, but they just laugh that off and send over even more. Their customers adore them, and over time they start to focus that barrage of resumes and zero in on the correct skill set.

We also know the more cerebral type of recruiter, the one who thoughtfully goes back to their workspace for several days, triumphantly emerging with a single, perfect resume in hand. Can you articulate your own recruiting style?

Communicate and Reinforce Your Brand

Once you understand how your customers perceive you, and develop a style that plays to your strengths, let people know what to expect when they work with you:

• “You’ll be hearing from me by phone several times a day. I like to keep you informed as we work together.”
• “Let’s set up a face-to-face conversation each week to review the resumes I’ve sent you, and agree on next steps.”
• “I’m only going to send you the resumes that meet your exact specifications; otherwise, we’ll just waste time. I need you to be very specific about what a candidate must have and must not have.”

Take time to point out the things that make your style unique as you develop working relationships with your customers. The confidence that you project will result in confidence on the part of your customers. That allows you to focus on your job, and get people hired, the ultimate victory.

Several years (and several companies) ago, I was on a team responsible for launching a new careers website. I was working for a large, well-known multinational company, and in keeping with our stature, we worked with a very prestigious advertising agency.

Things had been going pretty well, when for some reason we stopped hearing from our account director. We were on an aggressive timeline, and needed the branded graphics we had been promised in order to meet our website launch deadline.

We tried everything we could think of to get our ad agency to respond to us, including calling and leaving numerous messages and sending countless emails. In desperation, I decided to leave a very polite and diplomatic message with the account director’s vice president.

As if by magic, three things happened almost instantly. First, my company’s senior HR VP was whisked off to an expensive lunch at a very exclusive restaurant. Second, my direct supervisor’s family was treated to a Broadway show in New York City. Third, I received my graphics, unremarkable in every way, and we eventually saw the very same images in several other ad campaigns for completely different companies.

I left my company not long after that for unrelated reasons, but when I did, that advertising agency was still in place, smugly and arrogantly.

More recently, I was on a team charged with selecting a new exhibit-group vendor for my company (another large multinational). All we needed was someone to store our exhibit displays, and we had worked closely with our procurement department in identifying promising leads.

After reviewing our options, we had narrowed the choice down to two. I was particularly busy at the time, and was none-too-thrilled by the prospect of visiting two companies that, on paper, appeared to be offering identical services for similar costs.

We visited the first, and I saw pretty much what I expected: a large warehouse, a fleet of trucks, and a dedicated team. But when we went to the second, we were absolutely blown away by what awaited us.

The second exhibit group company had gone to great lengths to prepare for our visit. They had read everything they could find about our company. They had prepared “idea books” to show off their creative folks. They talked about how excited they were about the possibility of doing business with us, and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt how they were the only possible choice for storing our booths.

We ended up selecting them, and over the next 18 months, they took on dozens of other successful projects for us.

Helpful Hints for Working With Vendors

Selecting vendors carefully is one of the most important tasks that we as talent acquisition specialists have. Think of how many vendors you work with right now: applicant tracking system providers, advertising agencies, background screeners, job boards, consultants, and more.

Here are some hints I’ve picked up through the years that can make your vendor relationships the best part of your job:

1. Stop awarding business on price alone. I can’t claim credit for this one; this is one of E. Edwards Deming’s “14 Points for Management” from his famous book Out of the Crisis. If a vendor’s culture and ethics don’t match those of your own company, you’ll end up overpaying dearly in the long run (both in financial terms, and also in terms of lost opportunities because your vendor doesn’t really understand you). It’s also a terrible way to build relationships based on trust. I am NOT suggesting that cost be eliminated as a consideration; rather, that it not be the only one. I have seen too many examples to name where a vendor was selected because of a ridiculously small “price advantage,” then provided such lousy service that it took years to undo the “guilt by association” created in colleagues’ minds.
2. Tell others when you’re happy. People are often surprised when they learn how freely and willingly I give out the contact information of my favorite vendors. I can’t help it! When I find a person or company that does something well, I want to share in their success. Some of my proudest moments have come when vendors tell me that a contact I initiated at a meeting or convention resulted in new business for them. This is an ethical way of rewarding a vendor for a job well done, it reinforces the type of vendor behaviors you like, and it helps ensure the company is around to serve you in the future.
3. Be brutally honest when you’re “dating.” If you deal in impossible deadlines that will ultimately be passed along to a vendor, you need to tell them that up front. If you have a strange billing cycle and need your invoices at odd times, you need to make the vendor aware of it. If you like receiving acknowledgements to all your emails, expect your account rep to be reachable at all hours of the day and night, or demand final approval on all decisions (no matter how small), be clear from the beginning. Sometimes the best decision you can make together with a vendor is that you really shouldn’t do business with one another. This is as successful as finding the right vendor.
4. Call and visit your vendors just to talk. Once you’re working successfully with a vendor, you’ll begin to see a synergistic effect start occurring. As a recruiting expert, you probably have some pretty good ideas; your vendor also has some good ideas. When you take time to brainstorm together, however, you’ll come up with frighteningly great ideas. If you don’t already experience this on a regular basis, please do yourself a favor and try it. Some of the most novel and innovative ideas I’ve ever seen in the recruiting business actually came about from conversations between vendors and their customers.
5. Acknowledge when there is a problem. I don’t mean acknowledge the problem to your vendor! I mean acknowledge the problem to yourself and your organization. When I was younger, I used to wonder why companies used horrible systems, consultants, or software. It took a while to realize that the reason was that someone actually picked that system, consultant, software. Further, they probably asked their boss for a lot of money to purchase it, likely committed to a “successful implementation” in their goals and objectives, and will do pretty much anything it takes to avoid admitting they made a mistake. It doesn’t have to be that way in your organization; when something is fundamentally wrong with a vendor relationship, commit to fixing it right away. If it can’t be fixed, do both of yourselves a favor and move on.

If you don’t find yourself smiling when you get a call or email from your vendors, it’s probably time for some reflection. How were they selected in the first place? Do they like working with you? Do they understand what you want from them?

In a nutshell, do these vendors take pride in helping your organization be successful or will they just send your boss to the Broadway show? Having the right partners working with you makes a world of difference.

As a staffing professional, how many resumes have you reviewed in your career? Hundreds? Thousands? Do you ever find yourself pausing over something in a resume just because it seems strange? I recently found myself doing just that, and it ended up taking me down a very interesting path.

The resume in question was that of an IT professional who was under consideration for a full-time position. I was reviewing the resume when I noticed that, under the Education section, the job-seeker had indicated that he had “matriculated” at a school in Europe, had obtained an IT certification, and had received a B.S. degree in Computer Science.

“Hmmm, that’s strange,” I thought. It is rare to read a resume that lacks the name of the applicant’s alma mater, so we probed a bit. He told us that he had received his degree from a school in Alabama (let’s call it Acme University).

As things progressed with this candidate, we had our third-party vendor verify his academic credentials as part of our regular background screening process. No problem, as he did indeed have a degree from Acme University, and even provided the background screener with a copy of his diploma.

I’ll stop here, since you can probably see where this is going. Of course, there is no Acme University. But not only does this job-seeker have a diploma, but he could just as well have provided a letter of recommendation from one of his “professors,” produced a transcript, or supplied contact information for the school. He might even have a student ID card or a class ring!

“Diploma mills” have been around for a long time (I remember seeing ads for them back when I was in graduate school). As is the case with so many other scams, the Internet and our global marketplace have allowed this problem to reappear in a more pernicious form. Companies that sell diplomas come and go quickly online, often operating from overseas, which makes tracking them extremely difficult.

I believe this will grow to become an even bigger problem for those of us involved in talent acquisition. Because of new legislation designed to protect job seekers from discrimination, job descriptions have become much more specific regarding qualifications that are required vs. those that are simply preferred.

Having a degree can now make the difference between receiving fair consideration for a position, and getting a form response e-mail. It is not surprising that people are willing to take the risk of getting caught. Combine this with the recent proliferation of legitimate online educational resources, and the situation becomes almost overwhelmingly complex. The potential liabilities, however, are sobering.

Take a simple scenario: What if you hired someone to perform a specific task, and their degree is the proof that they are competent to perform that task (i.e., hiring a lawyer to review contracts). If they had a fake degree, it would be bad. But what if they interacted directly with an external customer while performing that service?

What if you selected this person over the next most-qualified job-seeker because their degree gave them an edge?

Are You Scared Yet?

Now imagine that someone is injured as a result of their work, or the company gets sued because of something they did. What if it’s revealed that your company didn’t bother to verify their academic credentials? Or, worse, that you did and then failed to take action.

My first response upon uncovering this whole sordid business was probably one many others would have: “I’ll simply ensure the job-seeker’s degree was granted by an ?accredited’ school.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. First, many diploma mills are accredited, just not by a legitimate body. Legitimate accreditation by the appropriate boards is also complicated, since there is no single organization responsible for the process.

In the United States, for example, there are several regional boards that grant accreditation to schools who voluntarily submit to a review, but there are significant distinctions at the state level. As you might imagine, things get even stickier when you try and establish accreditation for schools in another country.

It’s not the intention of this article to solve the problem; no matter what solutions are implemented today, someone will probably find a way around them tomorrow. As staffing professionals, we need to make decisions about how to respond. Our customers are relying upon us to develop strategies for ensuring high performers get through the door and behind a desk. Fast.

Tips to Implement Now

• Develop a broad-based strategy. Your organization is looking to you to come to them with a solution. You can be nearly certain that you will encounter this problem sometime in the future, so the time to decide how to react is now. By the way, relying upon your background screener to catch this for you is not a strategy! They only do what you tell them to do. Look upon this as a fantastic opportunity to take ownership and examine the overall process you use to evaluate resumes. Work with your employment counsel, and determine where best to put controls in place. Prepare your management for what will happen when you catch someone with a phony degree, and explain beforehand what the next steps will be.
• Implement a process for verifying academic credentials. It would be wonderful if there was a website somewhere that listed all the “diploma mills” in existence. Unfortunately, since they tend to come and go pretty quickly, there’s never a complete list. Further, certain types of diploma mills are technically not doing anything illegal; they are simply selling pieces of paper that look like diplomas. The wrongdoing is perpetrated only when the job-seeker tries to represent them as something they are not. While there are no comprehensive diploma mill lists, there are lists of accredited schools available online. The Federal Office of Postsecondary Education or the Council on Higher Education Accreditation are great places to start. Just keep in mind that accreditation is not necessarily an endorsement that a school is good or bad, only that the school volunteered to undergo a process. There are numerous resources about this topic available on the Internet.
• Listen to your gut instinct. As a staffing professional, always listen to your gut instinct when you find yourself questioning any strange or confusing background information.

As I reflect upon all I’ve learned on this journey, I keep returning to the idea that we as staffing professionals are in a great position to add real value to our organizations.

Consider other things we encounter in a typical resume that could be subject to “alternative” interpretations: endorsements from personal references, prior professional accomplishments, language fluencies, etc. Simply establishing the credibility of someone’s degree is only another piece of the puzzle we try to assemble every time we’re identifying talent for our organizations.

Rather than simply adding another box to check in my pre-screening process, I’ve decided to use this as a way of challenging my customers with questions about the types of talent they want and what “good” really looks like to them.

It’s wonderful that technology has allowed us to automate so many of our processes, and abiding by specific and documented workflows has helped make the process of matching “job-seeker with a job” a much more open and fair process.

It’s important to remember, though, that this process still benefits from a human touch. And sometimes that takes the form of a little voice that says, “Hmmm, that’s strange.”