Whether we are talking about corporate strategy, HR strategy, or talent strategy, we are talking about probabilities. And the closer the desired outcomes are to today, the higher the probability that they will actually happen. But, rapid change makes planning less and less relevant, and recruiters, planners of all types, and organizations are trying to find ways to cope with the lower and lower probability of being able to predict anything.

Historically our plans have been based on an assumption that is increasingly in question: that most things are going to be the same or at least similar in the near future to what they are today. Planning has relied on consistency and stability and to some extent a simple world.

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote a poem about the fox that knows many things, and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. His point was that some of us — the hedgehogs — are inclined to hold one big idea or view of things and disregard all others. But some are more likes foxes that go from one thing to another easily and hold many divergent ideas at the same time. This seems to be the winning approach for this part of the 21st century.

The world is not consistent, stable, or simple. Three-year and five-year plans are at best general, low-probability indicators of goals deemed desirable at the moment of creation. Any event might change those goals. The recruiters you hired in last year’s frenzied market weren’t needed months ago and may never be needed again. No one wants those HTML programmers who were in high demand just months ago. The sudden failure of banks, the quick economic fallout of 2008, or the seemingly sudden surplus of workers has changed many organizations’ plans. Falling home prices have made unaffordable property affordable. Fat savings accounts have become slimmer, changing retirement plans. And something as simple as the CEO leaving or the arrival of a new VP of HR can change the best laid plans.

So how can we deal with constant change and the need for fast action?

The best approach may be twofold: (1) develop an accepting attitude about change and a belief that change will lead to winning, and (2) design systems and approaches to deal better with change. Building skills that improve your ability to adapt is important to both personal mental health and to organizational success.

The change competencies are agility and resilience. A book that I highly recommend is called The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo. This short video will give you a sense of his perspective. In it he outlines why Al-Qaida is successfully beating the U.S. in Afghanistan and how Hezbollah is winning over Israel. Both of these groups have learned that they cannot succeed head on against a powerful foe like the United States or Israeli military, but they can win by being able to move fast, adapt to changing situations, take advantage almost instantly of any advantage, and break all the rules.

So what does this mean to us in recruiting?

Accept Change/Gather Information

Today everything from hiring managers’ needs to recruiting technology are a river of change. Wherever you step in today, it will be different tomorrow. Old rules are suspect; old thinking about competencies and job requirements need to be rethought. Part of a recruiter’s responsibility is to educate managers and candidates and encourage flexible approaches.

Social networks are a good example of flexible, readily tapped sources of candidates of all types — if you have mastered how to use them and have developed your own network. Rather than seek only people with particular narrow skills, include people with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills so that you can respond quickly to any request.

By using statistics and by gathering data about people and what competencies and mix of skills is most successful in particular applications or situations, recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions about who to hire, who to keep as a regular versus contract employee, and so forth.

Develop Agility

Develop multiple scenarios that balance people against costs against expected outputs with consequent resources allocations, time requirements, and costs.

Invent processes that are flexible. Instead of planning a candidate’s interview schedule days in advance, explain that she will interview with a variety of available people. Get hiring managers to agree to accept opinions of a variety of potential interviewers. Or, let the interviewee and interviewer schedule themselves for mutually convenient times whether face-to-face or virtual.

Have on tap not-needed-now talent so that when needs arise suddenly, you can meet the demand with part-time, contract, or sometime workers. Know everyone internal to your organization so you can encourage them to move or use their network to find what you are looking for. Build networks and use them to create a workforce with multiple levels and a variety of skills that can be used when needed.

Insist that plans, procedures, and your own schedule are as flexible as possible. Use virtual tools blended with office-based and face-to-face tools and options. Blend, flex, and act quickly.

Remove barriers or policy. Reduce signatures and permissions. Put the candidate in control as much as possible and get out of the way. Act as a guide and coach, not a clerk.

Build Systems That Respond Rapidly

Instead of encouraging your firm to hire lots of regular employees, take a look at the current workforce and make some quantitative decisions on which roles add the most value.

Leverage all the Internet tools available to you from email, IM, and Twitter to your applicant tracking system.

Encourage departments and people to self-manage and organize. Provide resources to support a variety of directions and options.

Hedge Your Bets and Experiment

What-if analysis is a powerful tool for uncertain situations. Take time to develop a variety of possible scenarios for possible future talent needs. Try to incorporate unlikely possibilities like Shell did in the 1960s when it postulated that a cartel (later known as OPEC) might emerge and corner the world’s oil supply. Consequently, Shell developed a scenario (which was executed) of always preserving an exploration function within Shell and thus maintaining the ability to deliver oil without reliance on other shippers. This led Shell to be the only competitor to OPEC for years and added billions to its profits.

Hezbollah is perhaps best at experimenting. It tries a wide variety of tactics against the Israel army and then quickly adopt those that are successful. No one wastes time trying to fix things that didn’t work nor on improving those that do. The attitude is simple: use it as is until it stops working and then have several other approaches to try.

Nothing is stable or predictable, so neither should you try to be that way. Learn to thrive on change because it is the way of this century.

Rethinking how we source is not easy. But the unrefined tools such as search engines, job boards, advertisements, and even referrals are slowly giving way to far more powerful social networks of candidates. These networks can be shaped for specific types of candidates and for specific skills and competencies. They can be the only source of candidates you have so that your focus can be on your brand and building awareness of your organization and the kinds of work you offer.

Does this sound a little pie-in-the-sky? Maybe given today’s level of understand and technology, it is a stretch to give up all other forms of sourcing, but I predict these networks will replace 90% of other sourcing techniques with in decade.

What Is a Social Network?

For those of us in recruiting, a social network may be better thought of as a pool of potential candidates or as a community of talent. This is not the same as a static database of candidates. It is an ever-changing, expanding network of people who have chosen to associate with one another virtually. I often make an analogy to a network being like a series of circles rippling out from a center. Those people at the center of the circles are your most valuable and most likely candidates. Each successive ring of candidates gets further from you, is less known, and therefore less valuable. LinkedIn denotes this by giving priority to those people you know and who know you and then giving lower priority to people who you know through others.

Why Create Your Own Social Network?

Most of us rely on the established networks for sourcing candidates. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and many others depending on your geography and specialty. These will always have some place in recruiting, but by creating your own network you can have much more impact and get better results.

The purpose of creating a social network is to bring the best people into your innermost circle. By building a relationship through frequent communication via whatever means make sense (telephone, email, Twitter, SMS, or IM), you get to know more about each other. Potential candidates can make decisions about whether they like you, the organization you represent, and the positions that are available. You get to screen candidates and select people who closely match your needs.

Creating the infrastructure for a social network can be demanding, but free ones such as Ning are available and provide some level of customization. Others are built from scratch or by using open source tools and modules. ERE.net’s community of users (you and me) is a good example of a social network of practitioners. We have common interests and any of us can find other recruiters who we might like to recruit or help to find a new position. This is an example of an open network, but it could just as easily be available only to people who answer some questions or pass through a filter of some sort qualifying them for membership.

With your own network, you can build in tests, require certain information, or in many ways decide if someone is the right person for your organization. By doing this you eliminate hundreds of unqualified people and reduce the time your recruiters spend screening out the unwanted.

A social network, or talent community, is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting website and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who answer questions in a certain way or who achieve certain scores can be referred to the most suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate followup. No one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

What Do Candidates Think?

Given these economic times, candidates are stressed and unhappy, as I have written in past articles. They are keen to find organizations that are responsive, friendly, and where they can showcase their own unique qualities. A social network allows this, and the candidates I speak with respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements. They are pleased to be invited to be part of a community they have an interest in and they are also glad to know right away that they are not a good fit and won’t be considered. No news is not good news to a candidate who is trying hard to refine his or her knowledge of different organizations and different positions, and who wants to maximize her time.

I am surprised that the hype about social networks revolves almost entirely around the public networks rather than on building your own. If you are in the planning stages for next year, set aside some of your budget to explore creating your own branded social network. You might be surprised at how well it works and at how it creates a far more efficient and candidate friendly environment than you probably have today.

I say this because I have recently talked to a dozen or more people who I know personally and have worked with over the years. I can vouch for their skill, professional abilities, and reputation. While they may not be a good fit for the particular job they were seeking, they were worthy of respect and of receiving a consistent and predictable response.

One particular friend of mine recently decided to switch jobs. He was not laid off and was not unhappy. He just felt the longer-term opportunity was better in a different place. Being a educated candidate, and with some advice from me and others, he laid out a plan. He started by asking friends about opportunities and also by choosing a few specific firms he might like to work at and finding LinkedIn friends who worked in those firms. The net result was referrals to a possible four or five potential jobs.

He then decided to check out the corporate websites of these few companies to see if the positions were listed. His first shock was at the poor quality of these sites. Most of them lacked good general information and offered nothing specific about the kind of work he was interested in. Only one of the sites listed the position he knew was open, offered little information about the position except the usual boilerplate, and then asked him to go through a tedious process of uploading a resume. None of them really learned anything about him or his referral. No questions, no interactivity, nothing. He didn’t know what they really wanted to know about him, and they certainly weren’t providing him much that was useful.

At this point he was already a frustrated potential candidate. While in no hurry to change jobs, he was the borderline passive candidate: sort of looking, interested, easy to recruit to the right situation, and totally unknown. He is also very competent and talented.

He had also given his resume to his friends to submit to the recruiting function and had even helped a friend upload his data into an employee referral site. Yet, after several weeks he had heard nothing at all of meaning. No email, no phone call. He tried to call several times only to receive a voice mail saying they would call back, but no one ever did. He kept checking with his friends and all the positions are still open more than six weeks later.

What is going on?

Here are my thoughts:

Possibility #1: The position is not really open and the recruiting department is just collecting resumes to find out who is out there.

This has a high likelihood of being the case, but is borderline unethical and certainly does nothing to build the brand or create goodwill among people that you might someday really want to hire.

There are much better ways of finding these people.

Possibility #2: My friend does not have the qualifications that the hiring manager is looking for.

Even if this is the case, he should get the courtesy of an email or phone call letting him know that. On the other hand, if the job description is even close to accurate, he meets and exceeds most of the criteria. He is also referred by a current employee and that should, according to all that we write about on ERE, make him a higher quality candidate than an un-referred one. This also makes not getting back to him worse, and it embarrasses the employee.

Possibility #3: The position has been filed and just not taken off the website.

Highly unlikely as he has checked with his internal friends who have told him it is still open and that the hiring manager is frustrated with the lack of good candidates.

Possibility #4: The recruiting department is inefficient and lacks good processes and discipline in dealing with candidate flow.

This is the most likely one in my mind and needs to be addressed quickly and firmly. Once this recession has ended (and for high-end jobs it was never really that bad), these poorly treated potential candidates will be hesitant to try you again.

There is really no excuse for not dealing with candidates in a systematic manner. No matter how many apply, your systems should be capable of dealing with the volume or you should remove the job posting until you can handle it. By letting more people apply than you can review and answer, you are creating an irreversible degradation in your reputation, brand, and future ability to hire the best people.

Needless to say as a foundation your department needs a set of protocols and procedures that every recruiter follows. These should lay out enforceable requirements for response time to candidates, how referral candidates are treated, what is communicated, and how shortfalls are explained to people who are declined.

Other procedures should govern how many resumes are received for a position before no more are accepted and how these are reviewed and presented to managers.

Websites need to be clear and should be interactive, interesting, and engaging. They should answer the questions candidates are likely to have with honesty. Your rules and response protocols should be publicly displayed.

Until we respond with the kind of service candidates are accustomed to from retailers and other service providers, we should be prepared for a backlash of anger and disappointment that has only grown louder over the past year.

We all get so caught up in our own success and survival that we forget to act in the best interests of the candidates, ourselves, and our organization. Almost everyone involved with talent acquisition is squirming under pressure from hiring managers to find qualified candidates and, therefore, are quick to grasp at any solution that offers hope of giving them access to better people. Hence the rapid rise of referral and networking tools and great interest in Internet search, as well as in “poaching” candidates.

Recruiters face pressure to source in ways that may be legal, but not ethical. Discussions about sourcing on ERE, in magazines, and on various blogs over the past months have not been encouraging. I do not believe in or advocate many of the practices that are being suggested. Poaching candidates, stretching the truth, using the Internet in deceitful ways, and “tricking” people to provide information they would otherwise not have given you are unethical. All is NOT fair in war. That is why we have a Geneva Convention and the International War Crimes Tribunal.

While recruiting is far less serious than war, that is no excuse to use patently dishonest and deceitful practices.

Many times it is clear that a practice is illegal or just dishonest, but the real test comes in the “gray” areas. These are where it is possible to make an argument on either side of an issue, and where the best answer is not simple. An example might be discrediting a competitor’s company to make a candidate more likely to accept your offer. Or, it might be in telling a candidate that you have filled a position when you haven’t, to avoid controversy and argument.

Recruiters who use methods they know are deceitful or dishonest do no one a favor. They harm their employer’s reputation and sully their own. Recruiters who are not sure if a practice is wrong or not might do well to put themselves in the shoes of the candidate or the manager on the other side. They might also look at all the options they have and ask which of them does more good than harm. Good ethical practices treat all the parties concerned with dignity and respect and advance the values of the organization. In the long run, it is not important whether you “win” the candidate but whether you have done so with integrity and fairness.

The test of an ethical recruiter comes in part from what candidates say about you and the organization. Do they feel that they were respected, given full information, provided both sides of issues, and their experience was fair? Everyone knows when recruiters are being deceitful or “stealing” employees from competitors by aggressive recruiting methods and high pressure sales. While there may be short-term gains, what are the long-term consequences to your own reputation and that of your organization?

Can you refrain from going after passive candidates with aggressive tactics? Is it possible to avoid using deceit in your conversations with candidates and still be successful? Can you act more as a trusted partner with your candidates and hiring managers?

There are many alternatives to unethical recruiting and to filling talent shortages.

Create a Strong Brand

Rather than go after people with desperation and resort to unethical practices, create a website that is exciting and that compels interest in your organization. No matter what your organization does or how big or small it may be, your organization has unique characteristics that are attractive. The key is to define your target audience very clearly and go after it with messages and promotions that are specific. I see most organizations promoting generic criteria and using generic messages that are not aimed at any particular group. This means that many ignore you, and others (mostly the unqualified) apply in droves. Using tools such as Twitter and the emerging social networking tools encourage transparency as well as relationship-building. Provide information; develop an internal set of practices to guide you and your fellow recruiters and give you ethical guidelines.

Look Inside

Larger organizations have many talented, culturally aligned, and productive employees who would welcome an opportunity to do something different. Leading-edge firms have developed internal systems that allow recruiters to locate people with specific skills within the organization. The systems capture employees’ skills, performance history, education, and interests. These employees are usually passive — not looking for an internal move and not aware of the opportunity. Yet, they are often eager to take a look at that opportunity once they are approached. These systems also allow actively looking employees to add personal information or apply directly for posted positions. When there is a need to fill very highly specialized positions, internal people are frequently the best qualified to do so with the least amount of training.

Short-term Training and Coaching

Many times employees can be given skills more quickly than we think. Cisco, IBM, and countless other organizations have put together short-term, intensive training programs that enabled employees to gain new skills and become productive in a matter of weeks. This is often no longer than it takes to source, screen, interview, and hire a candidate from outside who, after being hired, still needs time to become productive and to learn the new culture.

E-learning, mentoring, and coaching are all ways that employees can be given skills they need quickly while being productive.

Educating Hiring Managers

Times are changing, and with this comes the need for managers to better understand the talent marketplace. It will be harder and harder to find qualified people over the next decade. For some jobs, including certain finance positions, nursing and pharmacy jobs, as well as management position, there will be a crisis. Even aggressive stealing and blatantly unethical practices will probably not meet the needs.

Managers must have a better understanding of these issues and you as a recruiter need to have a sterling reputation for honestly, transparency, and ethical practices. Those qualities will get you far more candidates than deceit and other unethical practices.

Rather than a focus on rapid growth, companies will look for sustainable growth. To achieve this, many more workers will be contractors, consultants, or work as temporaries or part-time. The average age of the workforce is going to get older as Baby Boomers stay longer and fewer young people seek regular corporate jobs. Learning to re-use and find new positions for internal talent will be important.

Many economists are worrying that we may have a jobless recovery, which means that rather than hire lots of people, companies will not seek to fill the jobs eliminated in this recession. They will try hard to maintain a small, highly productive workforce. Today’s BLS figures indicate that productivity is at an all-time high, despite the layoffs and slower economy. That means we are all working harder (and maybe also smarter). So CEOs may be asking: why do we need to add more people and lower our productivity?

What Does This Mean for Recruiting?

Recruiting is full of managers. These are the people who run their recruiting organizations efficiently and effectively. They implement processes, cautiously install technology, focus on customer satisfaction, and stay within their budgets. As long as the world doesn’t change too much, they thrive.

For many organizations, this can be outsourced. A solid, well-chosen RPO can take over the transactional side of recruiting and provide the people you need. It may cost a bit more than the internal recruiter and may not always be as tuned-in to the environment, but they will be capable and offer flexibility in times when hiring is slow.

As I have written many times before, internal recruiters will have to become competent in thinking more broadly about talent. Here are five things you can do.

Step #1: Realize what is happening and accept it

It is highly unlikely that recruiting will return to its pre-recession state within the next two to three years; it probably never will.

Learn as much as you can about the labor market, productivity, and the economy. Understand where your organization is compared to its competition. Realize that recruiters will still exist and even prosper, but when working for a recruiting agency or an RPO and not when working for a corporation. Inside corporations there will be jobs for talent leaders and strategic recruiting people, but not for very many regular recruiters.

Step #2: Assess your organization’s talent

What capabilities and skills do you (or the management team) think will be needed to remain competitive? Does your firm have a labor force capable of thriving in the markets you engage in? What would make it more competitive?

You can form focus groups, talk to hiring managers, meet with your organization’s strategic planning team, and understand where the firm is headed. The more you can speak intelligently and in an informed way about business issues, the better you will accepted and the more influence you can command.

Step #3: Focus on building capability, internally and externally

Develop systems and methods to find the internal talent that will most likely be able to meet the longer-term needs of your organization. Perhaps set up internal talent task forces to begin suggesting what new capabilities and skills should be hired. Ask managers who their stars are and why they are stars. Involve line management but, in subtle ways, begin to demonstrate an ability to do things more strategically and to think on a broader scale than simply filling positions.

Step #4: Communicate and educate

Spread the word about the changes in the labor market and suggest new ways to look at talent. Use the resources you have such as ERE or any of the think-tanks such as my own Future of Talent Institute to get informed and able to explain what is happening to your management.

Write an internal blog, create a talent newsletter, or just send periodic emails about the labor market. The important thing is to keep the issues of people and talent at the forefront of any discussion about business development or growth.

Step #5: Focus on leadership issues, not tactics

What really separates a winner is the focus on longer-term strategic issues and not on day-to-day activities. As I said above, outsource or automate those tactical issues so that you have time to focus on the bigger ones.

By setting up task forces and by focusing on a few critical areas, you can broaden the focus of the recruiting department and make it more integral and important to the success of the firm.

This is what leadership is all about: educating and setting expectations, engaging people to achieve goals and then getting out of the way.

The future is fine for all of us in the talent arena, but it will require a different set of skills and a new mindset.

Organizations worry about being perceived as offering a good balance between work and personal time.

Many career sites and recruiters stress the ways the organization addresses this through flexible work policies, family-friendly HR polices, child care, and so on. And, for many job seekers, finding a company that offers this magic blend is the Holy Grail.

While Jack was addressing women specifically and speaking about their opportunities for promotion and growth within traditional corporate America, he was reinforcing this assumption. He was heavily criticized for talking to women in this way, even though it is an accurate reflection of the thinking in most of traditional corporate America.

My problem is not with Jack as much as it is with the assumptions that work/life balance is based on.

We assume that work and family should be separated and that there should somehow be an equal division between the two, which is implied in the word “balance.”

The concept of work and life being somehow distinct from each other is a recent construct. There was no work/life balance in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or for most of the 20th centuries. Work and life were integrated and no one would have even thought to separate out what portion of farm life, for example, was “life” and what portion was “work.” Wives and husbands and children worked together as family units, producing food, clothing, or operating a small family business. Roles were assumed and cast off as needed and whoever had the ability or skill needed at a particular time did what was needed to be done.

In most of the world this is still the case. It is only in developed nations that these artificial distinctions arose to meet the needs of factories where everyone had to be in a physical place for certain time frames in order for things to be made. It took England and the United States decades to get people accustomed to going to work at a particular time and staying for a fixed amount of time. The way we work today has never been an organic or natural way, and our fixation recently on work/life balance is only the latest manifestation of an old issue.

Where I think Jack was misguided was in not recognizing how rapidly the traditional corporate world is crumbling. Organizations like Facebook, Mozilla, and hundreds of other emerging firms are organizing in radically different ways. They are focusing on interdependence, on building networks and fostering relations between workers, vendors, and customers. Innovative firms realize that flat structures and open communication improve creativity.

So the good news is that many organizations are moving back into the world where work and life are integrated and where entire families may be part of the “team.” Technology makes this possible, and as high definition video, faster connections, and touch capabilities improve it will be easier and easier. At the most exciting startups, people are already seamlessly integrated into projects where roles frequently change as needs change and leadership rotates as project requirements evolve. Workers are able to be at home with their kids or spouse. They can be outdoors or indoors. And very often they can be physically far removed from the “office” whatever that is coming to mean. The emerging concept is that being in a certain place for a specific time is less important than achieving results and accomplishing goals.

While Baby Boomer managers are locked into the concept of physical space and time as keys to assessing contribution, younger workers have a different view. They realize that for personal as well as environmental and energy reasons, working from home is going to become the norm.

I am not downplaying how difficult it is to change the Baby Boomer attitude, but I am optimistic that as younger managers appear, as environmental pressures increase, and as younger organizations begin to generate significant revenue and employ more people, attitudes about work will change rapidly.

There will always remain work that requires physical presence — whether it is making something, caring for an ill person, or fixing your drainpipe. But less and less work requires a physical presence, and what remains may be done with greater flexibility and personalization than it is today. Our entire world rotates around an 80+ year-old concept that work is something done away from home, for a set amount of time, and should not be fun. Work is assumed to be only the means to have another life and as little of it as possible is good. The flip side to that is an assumption that work is what makes life meaningful and to do it with your partner, friends, or family is good. How many hours it takes to do it or where it gets done are far less important than the engagement and accomplishment.

Jack Welch was absolutely right if we are thinking about 20th century corporate life. However, Gen Y and those who follow are forging new territory and reinventing work — making it the engaging experience it should be where friends and families interact together all the time, teach each other, share workloads, and find emotional connections that have been purged from corporate life as we have known it.

According to Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 25 percent of the content that workers view each day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio by 2013.

As of this past February, emarketer.com ranked YouTube as the fifth-most popular website in the United States, eclipsed only by the likes of Google (who owns YouTube), Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Video, combined with the Internet, is a game-changer for recruiting. Used together they create a better candidate experience and raise the likelihood of a better hire. They also enrich recruiters by giving them a much deeper perspective on a candidate, in less time, than has ever been possible.

Video is particularly attractive to Gen Y — those young people between 20 and 29 who total about 70 million people. They are avid users of video and expect to be marketed to, taught, entertained, and recruited by video. Go to an Apple store and watch what young folks are doing: watching videos or movies or looking at pictures using the Internet. I rarely see any of them reading an article or an online newspaper.

They have been raised on television and those in the 25 to 34 age group watch more than 140 hours of it each quarter. The percentage of people watching videos and movies on the Internet has nearly doubled since 2006 and is now over 60% of all Internet users.

Some organizations are already leveraging the Internet and video to give them a competitive edge in reaching the millions of people who regularly use such sites as YouTube and Hulu.

Here is how they are doing it:

To showcase their company
They are creating career sites that are heavy with short videos featuring tours of the company, interviews with executives, candid chats with employees, and day-in-the-life scenarios of what people in particular positions do all day. They may include videos about the local area or videos that have been made by news agencies about the company. Examples of excellent career sites that contain video include those of KPMG, Deloitte, and Whirlpool. These have all won awards for excellence based on the success they have had in recruiting the talent they need using their career site. Companies such as RecruitTV and Thinktalk provide the expertise and service to help you produce these kinds of videos.

An interactive, video-based website is the core requirement for employment branding and may be the single best thing you can do to improve your success in attracting and hiring the people you want.

To post or distribute jobs
It is now possible to make a short video specifically describing a particular position, and then use that video instead of the usual written description. In London, three career magazines now provide this as an alternative to the written word. A Twitter-like application called 12Seconds allows you to make, yep, you got it, a 12-second video about a job and distribute it to a group of followers.

Monster Canada allows you to insert a streaming video into any job posting. And climber.com posts your video job description focused on Gen Y candidates to 45 different video sharing sites.

To hold career fairs
Virtual career fairs have been around for a while, mostly focused on college recruiting. CollegeGrad.com offers this type of virtual careers fair. For a broader audience CareerBuilder, Unisfair, and InXpo. A virtual career fair has much greater reach than a physical one and allows candidates to learn more about the positions you have and your organization. They are cost-effective ways to reach out to a broad geographical slice of people, quickly.

To do targeted marketing
Advanced and emerging uses of video include, for example, having your job video display when a person goes to a particular website or webpage. All clicks on your job display are tracked so that you can see who and how many show interest. This information will allow you to narrow down the sites where you display the ads, improve the content of the videos, and control costs.

Product marketers have used similar technology for a while and are now making it available for recruiting. As this technology matures, it will be possible to greatly reduce the number of unqualified applicants by limiting who actually sees a job ad.

To interview candidates
Interviewing candidates by streaming video is becoming more popular now that more than 60% of Americans have broadband access from their homes. With a simple webcam and a decent Internet connection using Skype, a recruiter or hiring manager or both together can interview a candidate from anywhere. This lowers costs and time to offer and provides a candidate and the hiring authorities an experience that is often as good as if not better than a face-to-face appearance.

Many companies offer video interviewing including Greenjobinterview.com, Clooks.com, and Hirevue.com.

For assessment and screening
A final way that video is being used is in candidate assessment. By creating scenarios and games that stimulate real-world experiences, recruiters can gain insight into how people would potentially react to them. These job simulations have been used by the U.S. Army and by retail stores intent on seeing how potential sales associates might respond to different customer problems. The U.S. State Department has recently started using a game to assess potential Foreign Service officers. It is called American Diplomat and recreates many of the scenes and issues a diplomat may encounter.

Another aspect of assessment is the self-assessment that candidates make when they actually see what it is like to do a particular job. Shaker Consulting does a good job of creating validated job previews that help candidates self-assess, as well as help recruiters and hiring managers.

Video is rapidly becoming core to recruiting success. Organizations that do not start to build video into every aspect of talent acquisition will find that they are at a competitive disadvantage, especially with college students and younger experienced hires. This is the age of video and we all need to learn to use it better.

Sometimes the recruiters who been laid off have just been unlucky enough to have worked for an organization that is failing or in an industry that has been strongly affected by the recession. Yet, others have been laid off partly because of performance or attitude. Many recruiters remain tactical, and fail to grasp how strategic their function is to a firm. Many have remained working for leaders and organizations that do not appreciate how much they could contribute to the success of the business. And even fewer have become leaders who take command of the recruiting process and forge a function that competes effectively against other organizations and consistently supplies their organization with quality talent without relying on the use of extraordinary measures.

In my many years in the profession I have only known a handful of these people. Most corporate recruiters become recruiters by accident and leave the profession for some other HR or related field after a short stay. Their stay is a roller coaster of half-completed technology implementations, high staff turnover, muddled objectives, and often leaves a legacy of unhappy hiring managers. To achieve even the simplest objectives, they have to use outside resources, employ a large number of recruiters, or seek to outsource the function.

Unfortunately HR has not positioned the recruitment function as strategic, nor has HR realized that the role of talent manager, aka recruiting and development leader, is emerging as one of the most potentially needed (and influential) professions within the organization.

Generally, those recruiters who lead the effort to supply scarce talent are filled with bad habits and uncertainty that create a revolving door of leadership and produce lackluster results.

To change this and move toward a position of respect and strategic leverage, recruiting leaders should examine their own behaviors and thoughts and see if they reflect any of the habits I list below. If so, now is the time to change.

Bad habit 1: Arrogance about yesterday’s tools and techniques
Yesterday’s successes probably will not be repeated by using the same techniques or technologies. Over-reliance on techniques like cold calling, telephone screening, and resume reviewing are examples of methods that have seen their heyday but are still widely championed and loved. I frequently talk with recruiters who swear that the old ways are the only ways — the best ways — and insist that everything from interactive websites to LinkedIn are just fads.

Tomorrow belongs to recruiters who embrace such emerging practices as social networking, video interviewing, online assessment, and candidate relationship management. Recruiters experimenting with virtual communities and with building online relationships already have a advantage over the recruiter who is tied to geography and to face-to-face meetings. Labor markets are not confined to single countries, work can increasingly be done anywhere, and recruiting is a virtual, global game.

Bad habit 2: Filling requisitions instead of meeting business objectives
Most recruiters are obsessed with filling slots. That is what they have been taught to do without regard to need or effectiveness. They have a hard time discussing the value of positions with hiring managers who often regard the recruiter as little more than a clerk trusted to filter piles of resumes that are supposed to magically be arriving each day because of the organization’s prominence or brand. They are given requisition to fill and they dutifully go forth and do so — even if it is a poorly defined job or one that might be done by someone with a different skill set.

Recruiters who have the respect of the organization’s leadership have to be brave enough and well-enough informed about current issues and business needs to engage in meaningful conversation with a hiring manager. They have to be equipped with knowledge about the organization’s strategic business objectives, the needs of the hiring manager, and the state of the talent marketplace. They need to present numbers and data and make a case for hiring the competencies and skills that will be most effective in meeting the business needs of the organization.

In short, they need to act as a resource and consultant to hiring authorities and show a deep knowledge and understanding of the needs of the business. And, on top of this, they then need to be able to fill the position from a talent community they have built in anticipation of the need.

Bad habit 3: Failing to build new competencies
The emerging competencies for recruiters include the ability to engage people in conversation using virtual tools, the ability to collaborate virtually on projects, to influence hiring managers, and build targeted marketing strategies. These are totally different skills from those that dominated the profession a decade ago. In fact, over 80% of the skills that made a recruiter successful in 1997 are of little value today. For example, interviewing skills, cold calling, and reviewing and screening resumes are not critical skills. Even less understandable are the recruiters who are competent at interviewing and who then focus on getting even better at it instead of on developing skills that might be more useful. It is very easy to rely on the competencies that made us successful and not notice that times change as do the skills we need.

Far more important are the ability to write a blog, influence a candidate, and identify the value proposition of an offer.

Bad habit 4: Functional Shortsightedness
More and more of the most strategic recruiters I run into have a background in disciplines such as marketing, sales, and operations. Fewer are coming out of traditional HR disciplines. And an elite handful is morphing into talent managers — people who can understand and integrate recruiting with employee development, competency analysis, performance management, and succession planning. These recruiters are not afraid to try out new approaches, nor are they afraid to experiment and leverage technology. The most innovative websites and process improvements are emerging from recruiting leaders who have no training as recruiters and who have recently entered the field. They are writing exciting blogs, using search engine optimization techniques, and experimenting with interactive websites and tools.

The recession may be tough on recruiters, but it is also forging a new breed of talent expert. Recruiting inside organizations is evolving into talent management and the focus will be on ensuring that the organization has the critical talent it needs to achieve business goals. The talent manager will need to be able to run scenarios, produce numbers, and show where the best talent comes from whether it is developed internally, hired from inside or brought in from outside.

Out of every recession have come new ideas, new functions, and exciting change. Recruiting is at the forefront of many of the changes and for a small number of you it will be an invigorating time of learning new skills and adopting new techniques, habits, and technologies.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful?

What Are Social Networks?
Very simply, social networks are Internet-based applications that allow you to expand and grow the number of people you know who have the skills, interests, or abilities that you are looking for. They also give you the opportunity to market your organizations to a targeted group of people.

For most of us the challenge is how to find enough of the right candidates to meet the needs we have and how to find people in markets and geographies that are new and strange. When your boss says that there are positions open in China, and you are in Minneapolis with only a local network, what do you do? This is where social networks can be magical.

Social networks as an idea are neither new nor unusual. We all have our own networks of candidates, friends, college mates, sports mates, relatives, and so forth. The only difference is that our networks are physical, and most likely interactions only occur face-to-face or over the telephone. We also often have very limited information about the people we meet everyday, and really aren’t certain if they could fit an open position we have or not. The Internet-based social networks provide a much broader ability to screen and communicate with potential candidates.

The social networks we all know best are LinkedIn and Facebook — both of which connect you to millions of potential candidates. They have been around for several years and through their own marketing and promotion have assembled a huge number of people. Other well-known social networks include MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, and others. There are also many smaller networks, some more focused on a particular type of candidate or candidates of a certain age group, but still very valuable.

By offering the ability for you to connect to people through other people, you can build a global network of potential candidates. By using your own branding and marketing efforts, you can create a large and robust sub-network of people who know you and your organization and who you can communicate with as frequently as you wish. Some organizations use LinkedIn and Facebook to find people and then invite them to join a private social network that you may create by using a tool such as Ning, for example. By creating your own network, you can tailor the messages to your potential candidates and you can use the members to find more people.

What Do They Replace?
Instead of posting jobs to job boards, you can instead list your job on your career site and invite your network members to refer it to anyone they think is appropriate. If you have a large enough network, you may find enough candidates using only this method. But, for many recruiters you may still have to post to a job board or use some other outreach method to gather enough candidates. But, given a large enough network, it could replace job boards.

And, rather than hire people to do Internet search, you can simply ask your network members to refer someone who has the skills, abilities, or experience you need. The potential of a social network is huge and is only limited by how many people you have in the network. That is why many recruiting functions are taking budget dollars from traditional sourcing and investing them in marketing and promotion to build their social network.

What Are the Benefits of a Social Network?
Social networks also let you reach out to targeted groups of candidates to let them know about new opportunities or to just provide them with background information about your organization. By doing this on a regular basis, you can slowly inform candidates about many aspects of your business, the culture of your organization, and the kinds of opportunities you generally have. This helps candidates to self-select out of organizations they are not comfortable with, and prevents many bad hires. It also creates excitement in potential candidates who feel they are a good fit.

By using Candidate Relationship Management tools, you can build excitement and create a relationship with candidates. CRM allows you to:

• Send messages on birthdays or other special occasions
• Offer the opportunity to come to events and/or job fairs you might hold
• Send information about internships or special assignments
• Share facts and corporate news with them
• Comment on their background or ask for additional information

Social networks allow you to increase the level of trust that candidates have in you and your organization, especially if you offer regular communication through a blog or some other media. Some organizations create regular videocasts or podcast about their business, offer videos of the CEO or other leader, and provide potential candidates with a broad perspective on the organization, its leadership, strategy, and culture.

What Role Does Twitter Play, for Example?
Tools such as Twitter are really micro-blogs and allow you to send messages to a group of followers to build or maintain interest in your organization. Twitter also serves as a type of CRM tool by letting you send job listings or specific messages to those same people on a regular basis. But Twitter is just one of a growing number of applications that either help drive more people to a social network or that keep them interested in your organization or build a relationship with them over time.

As you can see, using social networking well is challenging and time-consuming. It requires you to develop a social media strategy, decide which of these many tools are best for your organization, learn about new technologies, and practice a more proactive type of recruiting.

At the ERE Expo in Florida, there will be several sessions and a panel devoted to how to better use social networking. If you are still uncertain about how to make social networking payoff for you, this would be the event to attend.

While at first it may seem overwhelming to embrace social networking, candidates are getting accustomed to being treated in this more personal way, and the results are a higher quality candidate. Social media will become the primary sourcing tool and will provide the best forum for communicating with prospective candidates.

The recruiter’s opening remarks, telephone or face-to-face style, and assumptions about the candidate forge the initial impression a candidate gets of the organization. And as they say, you can only make a first impression once! If it is a poor one, you will most likely lose the candidates, and perhaps the referrals they could have made.

Rather than relying on a recruiter to create the candidate experience, smart organizations will strive to provide a consistent and constant experience that is independent of any individual, and that experience will be centered on the career site.

Over the next decades it will become a requirement that every organization have an interactive career site that will be the portal for candidates at any stage of the hiring process to provide feedback, information, and to develop and grow their relationship with your organization. Some organizations have started on this journey, including Deloitte, Microsoft, and KPMG. They have put together websites and online events that are targeted at their most desired candidates and create positive impressions. But, most career sites are weak at creating any impression at all and are just fluff.

For most organizations the candidate experience process is weak, broken, and badly in need of being rethought. As more and more candidates are from Gen Y, they expect to see dynamic, interesting, and authentic career sites that provide specific information. They are much less focused on talking directly with a recruiter or with developing a face-to-face relationship. Yet, recruiters are notorious for believing that the only possible way to know people is by “pressing the flesh”: meeting them in person, calling them on the phone, or having lunch or dinner with them. While these are all useful and time-tested, it is also possible to get to know people and build relationships using the Internet. By using technology to extend out from the small number of people it is possible to meet and know face-to-face, a recruiter can become vastly more effective.

Building electronic relationships with no personal contact is not only possible, it may even be desirous. Jack Welch, the former head of General Electric, has said that human relationships are declining in the selling of goods and services. What he means is that telephone and face-to-face connections between corporate buyers and their suppliers is rapidly being supplanted by Internet and email conversations. The same is also true of relationships with customers. Amazon, Dell, Lands’ End, and other retailers have developed sophisticated tools to build and maintain long-term relationships with their customers.

Here are six ways to build a more positive candidate experience into your career site.

1. Move your thinking from a career site to something more like a social network. Turn your career site into a social network by using tools such as Ning to create one, or engaging the services of an organization such as Standout Jobs that specializes in recruiting networks. This will automatically give you many of the features I describe.
2. Have recruiters write blogs. Blogs have become the voice of authenticity and provide the most credible information. Candidates become attached to specific bloggers and keep coming back, which results in them having a relationship and deeper understanding of your organization than they could have gotten in any other way. Even though we have been blogging for years, only a handful of recruiting sites have a blog aimed at candidates. The most well known is Heather Hamilton’s at Microsoft. Most of us have let legal issues and the difficulty to overcome internal bureaucratic processes stifle the use of this potentially excellent communication and relationship-building tool.
3. Make the site adapt to the candidate’s needs. Build in choices so that candidates who are analytical can get data, facts, and charts while those candidates who are more verbal get similar information in text or pictures. Creating various forms of the same content is a clever and effective way of adding what seems to the candidates a personal touch to the website.
4. Hold webinars. Periodic online seminars, or webinars, can be used to build traffic and create some opportunities for people to learn what your organization does and how they might fit into it. There are a number of webinar firms that offer inexpensive software that you could harness for this purpose. These can be recorded and offered later as podcasts.
5. Hold a contest. Promoting contests and games can also be a useful way to generate excitement and build relationships. People respond to trivia games, contests, and online minisurveys. They like the instant feedback and the ability to do something rather than just read. These contests are also a way to get people to come back over and over again to your site. Each time they return is another opportunity to recruit them — or at least to have a conversation with them and keep them excited about your organization.

The point of all this is to give candidates authentic information when they need it in a way they respond to. A good career site is not just a listing of open positions but also a carefully thought out and targeted marketing tool. By spending your budget dollars to develop a dynamic career site, you can lower your overall sourcing costs, increase candidate volume and quality, and build your organization’s reputation.

Many of us may have had a bout of unemployment and know how empty a day becomes when it is without purpose or goal. We miss the social interactions, and the distractions and diversions from our own problems. Employment, even when people are not really pleased with the work they are doing, gives meaning to life. It provides a reason to get up, to join social events, and is a primary source of happiness. Certainly, there are many people who for a while enjoy the leisure of unemployment, but almost all eventually became bored, dissatisfied, and start looking for something meaningful to do. Recruiters know this is true because every day they see people who may have the resources to not work but are seeking a job. When we ask candidates what they are looking for, they almost always, somewhere in their answers, mention the desire for a challenge or for social interaction and always for meaningful work.

Ultimately, unemployment becomes an issue that can threaten the stability of governments and lead to riots and worse. Germany’s Nazi government was partly an outcome of the unemployment created by the Great Depression, combined with massive inflation. Organizations are always caught in the space between wanting to be good citizens and keep good people employed, and the need to generate profit and increase stock prices. Many of us work (or have worked) for organizations that had every intention of not laying anyone off, yet in the end succumbed.

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is to create jobs — lots of them in new and emerging areas.

Most recessions lead to the destruction of jobs in industries and areas that have been automated or made obsolete by newer technologies and methodologies. And at the same time, new jobs are created in emerging business areas. This has happened here in Silicon Valley many times. As semiconductor production was sent to Asia, software and biotech firms began to emerge, and picked up many of the unemployed workers. Venture capital fueled the growth of Yahoo, Google, and hundreds of other firms. And these firms employed thousands and attracted some of the world’s most talented and educated people to the United States.

Innovation and creativity are employment engines, but at the moment they are idling when they should be at full power. Even the U.S. Patent office is slowing down as innovative dries up.

Yet in this recession we have seen venture capital investment fall to record lows and, after a peak of 22 companies filed for an initial public offering in 2007, only two have done so since. New companies are not being created with the zest of the past, and lack of money keeps many innovative firms small and less able to make an impact on the marketplace or to employ many people.

As a nation we face several conundrums: As Richard Florida points out in The Atlantic, unemployment is highest where there are the least educated and skilled people and where the likelihood of new companies investing is low. Fewer private companies are going public, venture capitalists are investing less money, and the education of technical and scientific talent is at a low.

We are not going to come out of this recession just by employing people in massive public works projects or by propping up failing companies with obsolete and non-competitive products and services. Even if these measures work at all, their impact will be small and short.

Our stimulus money should go to entrepreneurs, inventors, and creative people who will dream up the new services and the new tools and products that will fuel growth and employment. We need to incentivize investment in high unemployment areas and provide education and training at no cost to those who need it.

We should be investing in education of all types, but especially in non-traditional areas that hold the potential to help people learn faster, cheaper, and with more enjoyment. Education is partly to blame for the uneducated and unskilled workforce we have. It did little to make learning fun, challenging, or useful. It still relies on pain as the main indicator of learning quality; if a course is fun or easy, then the student must have not learned very much.

The online universities, video learning, podcasts, virtual tutors, and other non-traditional tools may be the game-changers education needs. It will take government investment to make this mainstream. Pouring tax dollars into yesterday’s industries is not only wasteful but very dangerous.

I realize that recruiters have little to do with job creation or loss. We are primarily the ones who find the people to fill these new jobs. But here are two ideas about how we can make a significant difference.

Idea #1: Find a job in an emerging industry or service area
Green energy, robotics, and biotech are all job creation industries. U.S. News & World Report each year publishes a list of those jobs they see as “ahead of the curve.” This past December, for example, a couple of their emerging jobs were data miner and healthcare informatics specialists.

By focusing on finding people for these industries, you can enhance your own career and help thousands of people find employment.

Idea #2: Help your organization use different people
Very often people with obsolete skills can adapt to new industries and learn new skills quickly. What recruiters need to do is to be aware of what skills translate well and of which types of people can make these transitions the fastest. As the semiconductor industry emerged in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, there were no fabrication workers and no equipment repair technicians who had experience with the equipment used. Recruiters were then forced to find existing workers who could learn fast. By taking workers from the fruit and vegetable canning industries and mechanical technicians from the Army, they staffed an entire industry. Our challenge today is to find the emerging jobs and the existing workers who can fill them. This is how we can contribute to the “new” world that is emerging from this recession.

Recruiters can influence, drive change, and educate their organizations. The great recruiters are already doing this and making a big difference in the lives of thousands of unemployed and underemployed people.

But I am not so sure that a contract recruiter should want to be an employee. While the functions that HR performs may be essential, they don’t necessarily have to be performed by an employee. Organizations are realizing that they have more employees than they need — and very often in the wrong place. Why should any organization spend salary, development, and retention dollars on employees who do not generate new products or revenue? What does a recruiter contribute that an contractor could not? There are already hundreds of companies that have replaced their recruiting team with contractors and third-party recruiters and have had success. Unfortunately, most HR professionals are convinced that their organization could not function without them as employees, but I think they are wrong.

Given what is happening in business strategy, HR is about to undergo the biggest reduction in workforce it has ever seen.

In an article written just a few days ago, Cowan analyst Peter Goldmacher says “. . . large companies will outsource an increasing amount of HR functions. . .” and raised his predictions for Kenexa stock. The Human Resource Outsourcing Association’s membership is growing rapidly, and more organizations are finding that they can successfully outsource large portions of the HR function and enjoy good service with lower costs. Over the next decade, outsourcing and automation will accelerate and other administrative functions such as IT, finance, and legal will also be outsourced. I am fairly certain that over the next decade, self-service, automation, and outsourced services will replace the majority of HR jobs within corporations.

That puts any independent professional in a good position. Outsourcing firms as well as corporations will be looking for people willing to work on fixed contracts with performance clauses. This will panic many HR professionals, but recruiters are in a good place. Except for the ATS, they are able to perform with little other internal support. Sure it will require recruiters to develop marketing skills, invest in some branding, and learn to negotiate, but it will pay back with many dividends.

Here are seven reasons that being a contract recruiter is better than being an internal employee.

Reason #1: Job Security. There is no job security working as an employee. I think anyone in a job that does not generate revenue, invent new products or services, or interact with customers in a strategic way is in jeopardy of being laid off in the next year or so, as I indicated above. There is no better security than that you create for yourself. If you build the networks, skills and put aside the resources to weather the downtimes, you will find much greater security in working for yourself.

Reason #2: You Do More and Do it Better. As an entrepreneurial recruiter, you will have to develop more cost-effective, and efficient recruiting methods, lower costs, and improve customer satisfaction. These have been elusive goals for corporate recruiters, who struggle with internal bureaucracy, an HR leadership team that does not understand or appreciate what a recruiting function needs to be successful, and few dollars for investment. There is almost no benefit to a corporate recruiter in being more efficient or cost effective. If they try to do so, they will lose budget dollars and staff. Contract recruiters can make prompt decisions and invest where they need to and therefore better serve their customers, and reap the greater profits.

Reason #3: You get more respect. As an independent professional you automatically get more respect from clients. If your demeanor and attitude are also professional, you will be listened to and hiring managers will take your advice. Contrary to the experience of many corporate recruiters, managers will solicit your opinions and market knowledge. The expert contract recruiter understands the labor market and can explain it to hiring managers. They can give examples of what other clients are doing and can apply the best practices of many. These are benefits that are hard for a corporate recruiter to offer.

Reason #4: You are rewarded for your performance. No one keeps a contract recruiter because they are nice people or because they have been loyal. Contract recruiters are rewarded for performing well — no matter the circumstances. You are always paid the amount you convince and show managers that you are worth. That’s why internal recruiters are often jealous of contract recruiters: they are only paid according to some general HR pay scale that has very little or nothing to be with how well they perform.

Reason #5: You can have more fun and be more flexible. Being on your own is scary at times, but it has its rewards. You get to take on the work that excites you and interests you. You can say no. You work where you want, you work your own hours, and you take vacations when they suit you. You can adjust your work load to match your energy levels, abilities, and motivation. This flexibility and freedom to enter new markets can be enough reason to go independent.

Reason #6: Candidates and employers will trust you more. Independence is associated with neutrality. Providing you give honest opinions and represent both employers and candidates fairly, you will gain a reputation as someone who fairly assesses candidates and employers. Candidates value that above almost anything else, in my experience. If you can let a candidate know that they are not a good fit for a particular employer, both appreciate it. Hiring managers often turn to outside recruiters when they wish to keep searches private and when they are seeking the widest reach and most objectivity. These are powerful assets for a contract recruiter.

Reason #7: You are cheaper. No matter what your hourly rate, assuming it is market competitive, you cost an organization less than the loaded salary of an employee. You also do not require internal promotions and you pay for your own training. There are no pension requirements or expectations of continued employment.

It is challenging to learn new behaviors. Working for corporations is a very established way of behavior that takes time to “unlearn.” Over the past decade the number of independent workers has grown faster than any other type and lots of people who were laid off in past recessions have learned to love being independent.

You may be asking what the difference is between a contract recruiter and a head hunter? It’s really about how you work and market yourself. Contract recruiters usually work for a particular corporation or other recruiting firm and do not own their own business. It’s a fine line and you may decide to become a third-party recruiter. Either way, you maintain your independence.

The time you spend looking for a new job can probably be better used to develop the marketing, selling, and negotiating skills that you will need as an independent. Hopefully these are challenges that you are willing to face. Even though you must face the consequences of your choices, nothing is better than being free to make those choices.

For as long as I can remember, recruiters have focused on cost as the primary measure of their effectiveness and value to the organization. The most popular recruiting metric has been cost-per-hire, and recruiting functions justify their existence by showing how much less expensive they are than an outsourced solution.

This, however, has begun to change.

Even though we are in a recession, skilled talent is hard to find, and demographic projections indicate a long-term swing toward a candidate-driven market. If you are in Europe or recruit for European operations, the aging workforce and the lack of fresh, skilled talent has to be a major concern.

Positions are open longer and hiring managers ask for more resumes to review, not being satisfied with those recruiters provide. There may be hundreds of candidates on the job market at the moment, but managers are still frustrated at the inability of their internal recruiters to find what they consider quality talent. The most important metrics today are those of speed and quality. The best recruiters are measured on how quickly they present candidates and on the quality of those candidates.

In many organizations, outsourcing decisions are being made on these metrics, not on cost. Managers are finding that having a good employee when they need one is much more important than how much it costs to get him or her.

But one hurdle looms over all of this. That hurdle is to define what we mean when we say that one candidate is “better” than another. How do recruiters and hiring managers define quality? Who defines it? And how can it be tracked? These are the tough questions that need answers.

Quality can be defined and here are a few ideas on how to do it. The only caveat is that this process has to be dome for each type of position in your organization.

Number 1: Establish specific competencies or traits that equal quality in the minds of your hiring managers and use it to assess candidates

Most hiring managers do not have any definition of a “quality employee.” Some managers say that they know a quality employee when they have one, but they struggle with a hard definition.

A recruiter’s job is to help them create that definition. The place to start is to unravel the skills, competencies, and traits of the best performers. Unravel the ones that really differentiate average and superior employees and make a list of those. A list should be short and clear, with levels of accomplishment included. It might look something like the diagram you see with this article. I usually try very hard to keep the list to two key items per topic.

It may also be very useful to look at the worst performers and see what it is they don’t have. By listing the characteristics that are common to both the best and the worst employees in a function, you will begin to develop a profile that can eventually be used for selection, performance management, and development. These characteristics could be traits such as willingness to compromise, an open attitude toward new ideas, or frugality in business dealings. Or they could be competencies such as the ability to create spreadsheets in a certain time, or the capability of editing complex documents. And they can also include a level of knowledge such as expert-level knowledge of Unix or of a manufacturing process.

Most likely any definitions of quality would include elements from each of these categories. Notice that these are all output-based measures — in other words, measures that can be seen or demonstrated in the work an employee does. They are the opposite of input-based measures such as length of experience or level of education. These types of measures tell you very little about the quality of a person’s performance.

You may need to partner with your internal organizational development group or with your training department to do this. It does take time and it takes willing managers to partner with you in the process. The result, though, will be a much clearer understanding of what kinds of people need to be sourced and hired.

Number 2: Educate hiring managers

Very few hiring managers know much about selection or about what it takes to assess a candidate. Even though you may have put all the managers though some sort of interview training, I am sure they have forgotten most of it and have used it less. Most of us are not disciplined nor can we expect the typical manager to become expert with these techniques. One area where recruiters can add value is to pre-screen and evaluate candidates against the criteria that you developed above. These criteria, remember, should have been determined in partnership with the managers. Each of you can use lists of these and behavioral interview questions or a variety of tests can be developed and used to measure these traits, competencies, and knowledge. Managers can help you determine how to weight the criteria, and they should be well aware of the consequences of using the criteria.

You can spend small amounts of time over a few weeks presenting bits of this information and moving the managers to understanding and acceptance. If you can, you could also hold seminars and use case studies and examples from your own organization to help managers understand how important it is to select people with the right skills and the right organizational fit and attitude.

Number 3: Investigate and experiment with new tools for screening and selection

It is still a bit surprising to me that very few firms are taking advantage of the many online tools that are emerging to help screen candidates before investing a large amount of time in interviews. By using the Internet and your corporate website, you can ask candidates to engage in a dialogue and mutual assessment process. While you are looking at their skills and fit, they can be looking at your organization and can make decisions on whether or not they like what they see. Many people I have spoken with have seen one side of an organization while interviewing, and another less attractive one after they are hired. There is still value in letting candidates email other employees for information about the company and work-life. There is a need for job previews and better job descriptions that are based on reality, not what we wish were true.

By defining up front what constitutes a quality candidate, you can remove much of the present frustration candidates have over why they were not chosen for an interview, and you can also reduce the number of unqualified candidates who apply. Many do so because they do not know or understand your definition of quality.

By working with hiring managers, getting them to write down and define for you the competencies and traits of successful employees, and by putting those to use in your screening and interviewing processes, you can improve candidate quality in a measurable way.

Recruiters frequently tell me they have a talent community, when further investigation reveals that they have a huge database of people they do not know at all. These databases have been built up using impersonal methods including the career website, profiles gathered through the applicant tracking system, and perhaps referrals from other employees.

Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools.

First of all they tend to get old very quickly, and the data about the people is frequently not current and often not even usable at all. While no one that I know of has done actual research on the quality of the data in corporate resume databases, I know from experience and from working with many clients that it is poor.

The second problem databases have is that they tell you very little. All a recruiter knows about the candidate is whatever is in the resume/profile itself. There is no additional information, no personal observations, and seldom any useful reference data. Because the resumes have been added mostly through impersonal methods, the candidates are unknown to the recruiters. This means that the qualification and assessment of a candidate begins after the resume is retrieved (assuming it is retrieved, which is very seldom) and may take quite a bit of time, assuming the candidate can even be contacted. Candidate quality is often poor, and the time to find candidates can become very long, especially for hard-to-fill positions.

Most recruiters do not really actively use their talent databases and instead turn to Internet search, cold calling, or hire a sourcer or a third-party recruiter. In effect, a talent database is a legal storehouse, suitable for printing reports and showing compliance, but of little practical value in hiring — especially the hard-to-find candidates.

You might make the case that a good recruiter should know this and develop his own community of candidates. It might be possible to maintain data on and build relationships with 50 to 100 potential candidates, but doing that would be a full-time job.

What makes the talent community I am talking about different is its ability to take advantage of technology to achieve levels of personalization that could not be achieved without it.

There are three distinctive features of corporate talent communities that make them more valuable than databases.

They can serve as initial screeners: A talent community is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, candidates who come to the corporate Facebook fan page and then are referred to a targeted career site are likely to be much more interested in your organization than someone just dropping by the career site to drop off a resume.

Interest is a type of screening, and combined with the right tools a career site can quickly assess a variety of things, including aptitude for the job and skill level. People who achieve certain scores or meet other criteria can be referred directly to a recruiter. This way no one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

This ensures that everyone who ends up in the talent community has been evaluated at some level and knows that they meet the basic requirements for employment in your organization. They have had a positive encounter, although that was entirely or almost entirely without actual contact with you or any other recruiter.

Years of experimentation and use of these tools show that most candidates respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements and are often surprised to get a phone call or personal email from a recruiter because the software has alerted the recruiter to the quality of candidate.

They are much more personal and dynamic: Candidates actually perceive talent communities as very personal. If the talent community is set up well, candidates will frequently get emails and other messages about jobs and about the status of their own candidacy. They may receive periodic requests to update their personal information and keep their address and email current. This means that information is up to date. Candidates can add more information about themselves, and recruiters can ask questions about specific skills or interests. All of this information is kept in the candidate record, and any recruiter can access this. If a new recruiter stats recruiting for a position, there may be many candidates in the community who she can learn a lot about very quickly.

Talent communities are like living organisms. They are always changing and becoming more mature and sophisticated. Recruiters may have never met a person face to face and yet know much more about them than if they have had two or three personal interviews. This computer-aided interaction, as well as testing and assessment, can provide hiring managers with a very complete picture of a number of candidates.

They are far more flexible: All of this means that talent communities are far more flexible than databases. Candidates who may have applied for one position are frequently referred to different ones after the recruiter knows them better through the interaction and testing. One candidate may be an ideal candidate for several positions, and fewer candidates get pigeonholed into a particular channel and thereby missed in the search.  Vigorous and thorough screening and assessment means that quality is as high as it can be and even higher than the quality that comes through employee referral or headhunters.

It is getting easier to set up talent communities every day. Tools such as LinkedIn or Google groups may serve as rudimentary communities. Tools such as Ning can be modified and put to work as active communities. Some organizations build their own.

Communities of candidates are powerful and reduce the need for special sourcing or the use of outside recruiters. They can increase the number of positions a single recruiter can handle and provide higher quality candidates in a shorter time. They always trump databases.

But the hardest part is not the technology or the screening and assessment tools or the acceptance of the idea by candidates. What proves to always be the hurdle that is hardest to overcome is the resistance of recruiters to using the tools and embracing the concept as a way to do what they do better than ever.

I have just been at the Australasian Talent Conference in Sydney, Australia, for the past week and what was most interesting was to listen to the issues and concerns of those recruiters who have not been laid off and whose organizations are still hiring.

They are faced with challenges that many of the ERE writing team have talked about over the past year.

First of all, many candidates are reluctant to shift jobs — or even take a job when they are unemployed — unless that organization and position fit very closely with their career objectives and values. It is not about money or security. It’s about alignment with their own inner self.

Second, they are carefully looking at the interaction with the recruiter as a reflection of the organization. How I am treated and served by the recruiter is likely to be how I am treated as an employee.

And third, they are looking for work that is engaging and meaningful — not a job, but a passion.

This may sound silly or even unrealistic given the economy, but it is a real phenomena. I am not sure what is driving it. Perhaps it is the fact that Generation Y values of passion, meaningfulness, and sustainability are becoming more mainstream. Many are looking for much more than a job.

I believe this is driving a change in the skills recruiters need. A modern recruiter needs less in the way of the traditional technical skills in the mechanics of recruiting, and much more in the way of “soft” skills.

Here are five skills for recruiters. These are ones I have used before, but updated for new times. I have also inserted a simple diagram that you are free to use, modify, and add to. I am open to your opinions about what should be on this chart and your thoughts on whether this is the right set of values and skills or not.

Skill #1: Recruiters have personal values and talk about them
Do you do what you say? Do you answer their questions honestly? Are you upfront about the issues and problems they may face? Do you connect them to people who are objective about the company and the position?

Knowing yourself and what your values are about work, people, and relationships is key to being a successful recruiter. You must be authentic and convey your sincerity to candidates who will test you and probe you to see if they are really your values. Candidates can sense if your values and the organization’s are not aligned, and that disconnect will make the best candidates much harder to close.

Skill #2: Recruiters know and can explain the talent market
The competent recruiter is able to tell the hiring manager what the talent market looks like, what the supply of talent for a particular job is likely to be in her area, and how difficult it will be to find and close on candidates. This knowledge has to be data-driven and can only be collected by vast reading, lots of discussion, the intelligent use of surveys, and other data tools. They are finding web-based tools that help them mine and understand candidate trends, likes and dislikes, and they can tell you which candidates are most likely to be good employees.

Gathering and interpreting data, making correlations between competencies and success, and measuring the impact of different marketing messages is already a skill top-notch recruiters need to have.

They also know the direction the market is moving for their client or organization. Are competitors laying people off? Is the market growing, shrinking, flat? This kind of information, combined with the ability to build relationships, can make an ineffective recruiting function very powerful.

Skill #3: Recruiters build relationships
The ability to find great people and build relationships with them should be the core competence of every recruiter. This is what all great recruiters do. Recruiters within organizations need to get out of the organization and get to know people at all levels and professions who might be useful to their firm. They need to use technology to help create the initial relationship, and then they need to leverage that by using social media including Twitter, blogs, websites, and anything else that will create authentic interaction with a potential candidate.

More than half of every recruiter’s time should be used to network, build relationships, communicate, and get involved with candidates. Recruiters who can provide some career advice, listen to candidates’ concerns, and provide advice on which positions might be the best fit will be recruiters who grow and thrive in this and any economy.

Skill #4: Recruiters prove their value
Competent recruiters use metrics to put together business arguments for programs they initiate or for the systems they buy. They use facts, numbers, and results to get what they want. They have a core set of metrics that show how they add value, raise quality, improve profits, or save money.

If a CFO asks for the ROI of recruiting for a position, a really modern recruiter will have data and can help a hiring manager make a business case for that position.

Skills #5: Recruiters sell and close candidates
In the end, a recruiter is as good as the number of candidates that she can close. To do this, she needs to be good at selling candidates and hiring managers. She needs to know how to overcome objections and turn negatives into positives. She needs to offer solutions, work out compromises, and in the end make the hire happen in a way that is consistent with her values and those of the organization.

Being a modern recruiter is, in some ways, easy. It’s about treating candidates as you would like to be treated. It’s about knowing who you are and what you believe so that you can quickly know when the direction you are headed is wrong.

Over the past year, despite the recession and corporate layoffs, he has survived and has even hired a few people. But, he recently approached me very concerned. In a conversation with one of top executives in the company — a person he has a very good relationship with — he learned that he was perceived as a “super-doer” and as a great person. The executive told him that most senior managers felt he was not strategic. They had kept him because they needed somebody there to handle the few openings they had and he had good relationships with everyone. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

It is rare to get this kind of candid feedback and, although it hurt, it did motivate Mark to try and make some changes. He really did want to add value and he knew he had the skills and insight to get better candidates in front of managers. He just wasn’t sure what they wanted — or if they even knew themselves.

Recessions bring the luxury of free time, and created an opportunity for him to do some research. Mark spent a few days talking to various managers and asking what they thought an ideal recruiting function might offer them. What would “strategic” look like to them? And, also, what was wrong with being a good executor? He also probed a bit into how they really evaluated candidates and employees.

He was a little surprised to learn how many managers saw recruiting jobs as cushy and overpaid. They felt almost anyone could post a job and whittle down a bunch of candidates to a few that were suitable. They relied almost totally on their own hiring experiences for reference, even though many had been hired decades before. None of them knew much about the employment market, nor had many of them ever thought about the potential value of a clear and comprehensive talent strategy. Their complaints about Mark really reflected their own ignorance and stereotypes.

And, that’s why Mark was talking with me and asking how he could change their perceptions. Was it even possible? Or should he just move on?

Neither I nor anyone I know has a silver bullet solution. But there are five specific actions that anyone can take to change perceptions and build a reputation for adding value. If Mark wants to stay at this organization, here are some things that he could start doing that would raise their image of him.

Action #1: Start talking the language of business. Good recruiters know what business problems exist at the strategic level and also what the hiring manager is afraid of or doesn’t have people with the right skills to do.

She focuses on underlining how a candidate can alleviate that fear, increase sales, invent new products, or help the organization achieve a specific objective or goal. The best candidates have the skills and experience to quickly make a difference. A superb recruiter can show how past candidates with certain skills were successful, or not successful, and use that as a lever to influence a hiring manager’s decisions.

It is critical to build a reputation of presenting candidates that are easily seen as being able to make a difference to the business.

Step #2: Begin understanding and explaining the employment market. This means they gather data on the supply of certain kinds of talent and on the projected internal and external demand for that same talent. They use the Internet, job boards, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and local employment agency data, and they create a picture of the supply chain. They compare that to the demand that is projected for specific jobs within the organization. And they educate management about the marketplace.

Most hiring managers have little experience in the job market and, if they are longer-term employees, have nothing to calibrate the supply and talent situation against except their own past experience. It is the recruiter’s job to spread the word, educate, and use facts and data to back up their position. The decision on whether to go out to search for a particular skill set or to train someone internally may depend on how deeply the recruiter understands the market. Over the next decade this skill set, augmented with technology, will be a core competence.

Step #3: Start focusing on offering sustainable solutions. There are two components of creating a sustainable talent solution.

First is to become known as a wise user of resources and as someone who practices frugality. Often this can be accomplished by reducing the number of recruiters while maintaining or increasing the level of service through taking advantage of technology, or by reducing the use of external recruiters.

And second, it is working with managers to help them do more with fewer, but maybe better, people. Your philosophy should be to help contain headcount, to push back on hiring managers who open new positions, and really seek to understand why they need to do this. By engaging in conversations with them over work responsibilities, the skills of other employees, and the need to be cautious in a tough economy, a recruiter can get a reputation as a thoughtful and strategic person who really cares about the organization’s success.

Step #4: Start gathering, interpreting, and using data and metrics to make decisions. I have written a number of columns about measuring the value and the ROI of recruiting. The recruiter of tomorrow will be facile and comfortable thinking strategically about numbers and goals. They will be able to take pieces of data and using knowledge that is partially tacit and gained by experience as well as analytical skills, and weave them into projections and models of human capital costs and opportunity and growth. Rather than just collect efficiency numbers, they will also collect effectiveness figures and use all those numbers to draw logical conclusions that support their decisions. They will also use this data to show the value of recruiting to the success of the organization.

Step #5: Learn to sell. What more needs to be said. A great recruiter will close almost every candidate and will work to overcome objections, build relationships, provide flexibility, gain trust, and work toward compromise. These are the things good executive recruiters have always done — but how many really great ones are there? This is a skill that can be learned, even though some are born with a gift and do this quite naturally. However, good sales skills will be of high value over the next decade.

If you ever want to change perceptions and move yourself up the ladder of respect in your organization, these are the actions you will need to start doing. They all involve skills you can learn and grow. These are skills like those in karate or golf — they take constant practice and determination to build. They pay big dividends.

Each recession gives rise to hundreds of new careers and entirely new job functions as old ones are made obsolete. Car assembly people, for example, are a dying breed, and not many will survive this recession. Other jobs that are at the end of their life cycle include ordinary bank tellers, cashiers and checkout clerks, and even many call center jobs.

But, on the other hand, the 21st century will bring hundreds of new jobs. Already I can envision the time when we will need experts in installing and improving artificial organs, in implementing green energy strategies, in installing solar and wind energy systems, in fixing electric and hybrid vehicles, in mining the Moon and Mars, and in navigating and understanding deep space. But we will also need people who are more skilled at virtual relationship building and in working across cultures. Social networking managers as well as network facilitators and builders will be a growing sector of the economy. Psychology and sociology are clearly going to be adapting and changing to a global, intercultural world. In the shorter term — say over the next three to five years, many jobs are already being identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States and by other groups.

U.S. News & World Report each year publishes a list of those jobs it sees as “ahead of the curve,” but these are mostly jobs that are already here and growing. This past December, for example, a couple of its emerging jobs were data miner and healthcare informatics specialists. Other jobs are being enhanced or enlarged as a result of the slow economy. These include car mechanics whose utility has suddenly increased as people keep their cars longer. But I am more focused on the jobs that will emerge in five or more years.

Academic institutions are very poor at identifying emerging careers, and most academic majors are traditional. This lack may be for the best, as the best preparation for skills that are not yet known is a broad and basic education. If we are lucky, we may see a return to a four- or five-year basic degree that is not in anything particular — just an arts or science degree that will be followed by more specific career development in a discipline. What we have learned over the past 25 years is that skills change as fast as do fashions. Skills such as semiconductor process engineer, analog recording engineer, HTML programmer, or BASIC programmer have all gone away or morphed into very different occupations. Function-specific engineering knowledge changes every three to five years, and whatever you learned in school is most likely obsolete before you are employed. Technology makes stability impossible, and anyone who is in school today had better be able and willing to quickly adapt and learn new skills.

Some of these emerging careers will require cross-functional multi-skilling. These careers might include those dealing with cloned human beings or genetic mining and engineering. We are already starting to grow polyester-like material from modified corn plants that consume no petroleum. We can clone humans and will at some point soon. Who is equipped to deal with the moral, ethical, and psychological issues that will arise?

Recruiters are at a special place in all of this. You will be asked to find, attract, and recruit people into careers and occupations that are new and vaguely defined. You may be ethically challenged and forced to deal with your own beliefs as requests roll in.

Are you prepared? Here are a few tips on getting ready for tomorrow’s job market.

Tip #1: Know where you stand ethically on issues of genetic engineering and related areas. What are you willing and able to support? The issue will not be whether these careers emerge — they already do exist is some form. The real issues will be whether you are skilled enough to recruit people into these fields and whether you are willing to do so.

Tip #2: Scan the market, read as widely as you can, and stay abreast of the trends and career developments that emerge. We are well into the age of genetic manufacturing and I urge you to read the work of Juan Enriquez — bestselling author, businessman, and academic, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. His books are fascinating as are his talks at TED. Watch one of his TED videos here.

Tip #3: Always be flexible and ready to embrace and champion new careers. Learn what you can and keep at the edge of your field. One day a hiring manager will approach you with the request to go find someone with a skill set that you have never heard of. How would you approach that? Are you ready for tomorrow?

Over at the Future of Talent Institute we are embarking on a new and ambitious project to identify some of the jobs that are less obvious but that will be important to the economy over the next decade. Based on some of the trends we see as major, such as sustainability, genetic engineering, and intercultural mixing, we expect to identify a number of careers, jobs or specialties that will fuel growth and employ many over the next 10 to 15 years.

I’d love to hear from any of you who have ideas about this or see emerging trends, careers, or occupations. We’ll give you full credit for your insight.

The current economic situation just underlines the need for organizations to develop sustainable talent strategies to minimize the trauma of poor economies; maintain a top notch, committed and skilled workforce; and encourage the development of new skills among those already employed rather than the mass hiring of new workers.

It is more obvious now than ever before that the need for semi-skilled labor is ending and that most organizations will need a highly skilled workforce to be competitive.

Successful organizations have a core of skilled people who generate revenue, create new products and services, and interact with customers in a deep way. Finding these people is very hard, and the supply is diminishing and will continue to do so as the Baby Boomers, who make up a disproportionate part of this supply today, eventually retire.

Organizations have four basic tools at their disposal to deal with people: the ability to attract and acquire, the ability to develop and provide competency, the ability to engage and excite so they are committed, and the ability to measure performance and provide feedback to adjust recruitment and development practices.

By developing the right integration and balance between each of these tools, there can be employment harmony and much less binging and purging of people when economic winds change.

One might expect human resources to step up and claim responsibility for this, and a handful of HR chieftains have tried to do this. Unfortunately, HR is mired in legalese, labor law, and in a general belief that their role is to make people happy and feel good, no matter what the business reality might indicate. HR has consistently failed to show strategic initiative and a “can-do” spirit. Many, some say most, HR people are process-police who focus on doing something “right” rather than on doing something that has an effect on the bottom line.

HR professional organizations are constantly presenting seminars and rolling out speakers extolling the need to be business-focused and to earn a seat at the decision-making table. Yet, HR remains disconnected from business and is rarely listened to for strategic people advice. Rather, they are expected to execute the decisions made by real business people.

A small number of organizations are instead putting people without HR backgrounds or credentials into roles where they will have responsibility to craft these people strategies. The people assuming the Chief Talent Officer role are often people who have demonstrated their business credentials, perhaps by running a business unit or by their involvement in product development or customer service. Many of them have also spent time building work teams, grappling with the internal people issues in teams, and who have an understanding of the external trends and issues that are changing the nature of work and the ways people want to engage in work.

A successful Chief Talent Officer has to be far more than a recruiter or a trainer or a process integrator. A talent officer is the general and strategist in charge of the supply of what is becoming the rarest resources an organization has — skilled, committed workers. Their job is to understand the objectives of the company, architect the strategy to find or develop the people who will be needed to meet business objectives, and redeploy people efficiently and effectively when their initial objectives are achieved without losing them to the competition.

While more efficiently finding existing talent is a great skill for a world-class recruiter, it is not enough for a talent officer. Their focus will have to be on creating a net increase in the supply of people in any needed job category, instead of just being better at getting at the existing supply.

And, while being well versed in training technology and being able to creatively and quickly build skills or re-skill a workforce are wonderful skills for a training manager, those are not enough for a talent officer. They will have to architect systems and tools to assess and continuously train people to fill jobs we haven’t even thought of yet. Effective talent officers will be partnering with vendors, working with high schools and colleges, and marketing to the community the benefits of gaining the skills the firm needs.

And, while being somewhat familiar with the corporate business objectives and the global talent pool is important, it is not enough for a talent officer. They have to understand the global workforce and know where to move work or people. They will have to do that according to their firm’s business goals.

A talent officer has to influence management to implement the integrated people strategies that will keep a sustainable workforce in place no matter what happens to the economy. This is not an easy job but the integration of recruiting, development, engagement, and performance is what talent management is really all about. Those organizations that get this mix right will enjoy long period of employment stability, harmony, and productivity. We have some examples today: Toyota is one. Toyota retrains during slow times, has had very few and very small layoffs, and focuses on process improvements and job enlargement rather than mass hiring. IBM, over the years, has also focused on internal mobility and employee development rather than on mass external hiring. These sustainable practices are good for the economy, good for people, and good for profitability.

By 2020 these roles will be common in large companies and many smaller ones will use consultants to help them architect similar strategies.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging.

Simplicity in Sourcing

The first of the emerging trends is a turn to simpler and more basic ways to find talent. With a rise in applicants, many organizations are finding it less necessary to deploy search specialists or engage in complex sourcing strategies. They can focus, instead, on building their employment brand, often by using Facebook or some other social networking tool. They are also screening existing candidates better and are more focused on building a talent pool or community that can be tapped into as needed. In addition, many are tapping their own workforce for internal redeployment and for referrals.

All of this has reduced the need for in-depth Internet search and it has also lowered the need to post to job boards. In organizations with proactive recruiting teams, internal placements may reach as high as 15% while over 30% may come from referrals. With another 20% being sourced by third-party recruiters for reasons of confidentially or because the particular job is very specialized, only a small percentage needs to be sourced in other ways. A good social network page linked to an interactive career site can probably close much of that gap, leaving a tiny fraction to Internet search or job boards.

As I wrote in my article last week, a comprehensive talent strategy combined with internal development can reduce recruiting requirements significantly. I see this as a continued and growing trend, which ultimately means organizations will employ fewer recruiters but highly skilled in networking, relationship building, and who deeply understand the business.

Social Networks

We are seeing the power of social networking in recruiting growing faster than any other segment. Candidates are able to substitute their social networking profile for a resume at some organizations. Jobvite, an emerging applicant tracking tool listed by Gartner as one of its “Cool Vendors for Human Capital Software 2009,” allows candidates to link to their LinkedIn profiles. No need for a resume or to fill out anything. Jobvite also provides an organization a button to place on their career site that lets prospective candidates see the people in their network who already work at that organization. This provides candidates with ready-made connections into the organization as well as a source of information.

Social networks will become the ultimate sourcing and screening tools. Recruiters and particularly hiring managers will be able to see a more 3-D version of a person and get a much better sense of their past accomplishments and capabilities. But there are negatives, and many recruiters are concerned about candidate privacy and discrimination. The truth is, discrimination can and does occur in face-to-face conversations, in interviews, and even over the phone because of accents and the way people phrase things. Every new technology and application has to pass through a maturity curve, which is happening rapidly for social networks. Laws will change and policies will adapt to accommodate them.

I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves than they can today. I think that as social networking matures, candidates will find themselves moving from a generic social network like Facebook to more specific ones aimed at an industry segment or a profession, and then perhaps to organizational-specific ones. We will have to wait a while to see what model eventually takes shape, but the roots are growing and resumes, traditional profiles, and static career sites will fade away.

Internal Redeployment

Smart organizations prevent the needless loss of talent by developing barrier-free internal transfer polices, by shifting talent and skills as jobs change, and by operating development and coaching programs to help employees successfully bridge skill and experience gaps.

They are also beginning to practice sustainable talent management — sizing the workforce for sustainability through good and bad times — and filling peak needs with temporary and contract staff. But sustainability is not just about numbers; it is also about having the right skills spread across all employees. This means development is continuous, internal movement common and often, and that a goal is for every employee to be able to function well in three or four different positions.

The natural result of this will be more focus on employee development, the rise of learning portals with relevant information and on-line training classes; the capturing of the knowledge of experienced employees on videos (using storytelling, talking about how projects were completed and barriers overcome, and by sharing technical knowledge that might be useful to those who follow); and connections to coaches and experts willing to answer questions or provide skill training.

We will see that more and more people will stay with a single employer for longer periods of time, as they find it easy to get refreshed and retrained.

HR has the opportunity to shine or be replaced by some other function as it is asked to ensure the availability of and quality of talent. Recruiters are central to that effort and many changes are underfoot.

Recruiting as a profession is challenged to embrace a broader scope of work and to take responsibility for more sophisticated and complex talent analysis and development.

There are several approaches to developing a sustainable talent management process and philosophy. Some of these mirror the methods used by manufacturing, finance, and other corporate functions that have undergone transformations over the past decades.

We can all learn from each other and draw inferences where they are appropriate.

Ask New Questions

What people policies will lead to a sustainable workforce model over economic cycles and changes in skills?

This is the central issue that must be solved.

Binging and purging people is a zero-sum game; neither you, the employees, the candidates, nor the organization gain anything. What each gets are anger, frustration, and fear.

Shift Your Thinking

Instead of thinking about your job as filling requisitions, or sourcing candidates, or screening people, think of it as providing talent guidance to management. Recruiters can help managers achieve their business goals by helping them determine what combination of skills and experience will make it easier for them to achieve their business goals.

You can push back on hiring managers who seem to be asking for talent that is not right for the direction the organization is headed. You will also need knowledge of the talent market and be able to speak intelligently about the availability of certain kinds of talent with numbers and facts.

Having the right frame of mind is the most important aspect of change. It will not be easy to begin thinking like a solutions provider rather than a “slot filler,” but as long as that is your goal and you periodically assess whether you are moving in the right direction, you will succeed.

Focus on Skills You and the Hiring Managers Determine Are Critical

To quantitatively improve candidate quality and overall performance, a solutions provider needs to be able to define every position in terms of critical competencies and skills that have been verified as necessary to accomplish the tasks of that position.

Ask hiring managers to define the skills they need to hire, not the degrees and experience levels they think are appropriate. While degrees and experience may add depth to the final decision, skills and abilities ultimately make the most difference.

Other ways to improve the sophistication and effectiveness of talent planning is to add more thoughtful analysis to the process.

For example, use modeling techniques to determine whether it is more efficient to hire a replacement for a position or to train someone internally. The decision is made on data, not on the opinions of HR or managers. Finance has developed models to help guide investment decisions, and over the next few years, HR will be developing similar models for talent planning.

Some possible areas for investigation and research include:

• Calculating the impact one person or a team of people has on profits based on a skills profile versus another person or team with a different profile.
• Looking at the attributes of successful performers and relating your findings to the recruitment assessment and development processes.
• Using search techniques to scan emails for employees’ thoughts about the organization and to hunt for clues to engagement and reasons why people might be looking for new positions.

Use Four Strategic Levers Wisely

Each HR function has what I call four levers to use that will have an effect on talent and define the talent strategy. These are the levers of attraction, competence, commitment, and performance.

We have overused the attraction lever for a decade or more as organizations convinced themselves that they needed more people with narrower skills. Recruiting became the darling of HR and has now suffered a significant blow as the other levers rise in importance.

The competence lever focuses on development of people and on increasing the capabilities of the current workforce. It is the lever being pulled the hardest right now, although the performance lever is also critical.

The performance lever defines success and focuses teams and individuals on accomplishing business results. As desired results are better defined, performance can be more finely measured and improved. We need much better ways to quantify performance and isolate elements of it from other influences.

The commitment lever contains the HR favorites of engagement and retention. People stay with an organization because it does two things: (1) it provides them with interesting, exciting at times, and meaningful work; and (2) it removes barriers to development, cross-training, internal transfers, and so on.

In other words, engagement is not about pay, the boss’s mood, the furniture, or the work/life balance. It is much simpler — it is about treating people as if they mattered, as if their opinions are important, and as if they were able to make their own decisions about what they can do.

The next 10 years will be marked by the increasing use of quantitative tools and methods in HR and recruiting. Many will be imported from other disciplines that have already been shaken to the core, such as manufacturing and finance.

It will be the era when we begin to quantitatively define how many people are needed to meet business needs, which work can be outsourced or given to consultants, and what needs to be done internally for well-defined reasons.

We will be moving to a disciplined, deeper understanding of work and how it gets accomplished, and what a sustainable workforce looks like.