This economic slowdown is not just about the failure of our banking system or of the credit markets. This failure is a symptom of the major changes that are occurring as we enter a new century. The Depression of the 1930s redefined the agriculturally based banking and finance world and made it competitive and efficient for an industrial age.

We are now in a similar period.

The nature of business and work is rapidly evolving. Organizational structure will become less hierarchical, more nimble, and flexible. Employees will begin to be treated with respect as investors — not assets or human capital. People are the most precious of success factors, and we each choose to invest our time and skills in an organization that respects and listens to us. When we are not respected, we move on. Entrepreneurship has grown rapidly in response to the lack of respect innovative employees have been given.

Look to see the finance system change to reward innovation. Look at small organizations with a global network or loosely allied suppliers and partners to dominate the economic climate of this century. It is the end of GM and other large, hierarchal organizations that were the model of efficiency in an industrial age.

Many of us will miss the familiarity and the rules of the past that gave us a sense of security and certainty. But surely this economic meltdown must signal to the most conservative of believers that times are changing.

Indeed, even our profession is changing fundamentally, although we are just beginning to see and understand those changes. The habits and skills we developed in a slower-moving, more certain 20th century no longer work so well. Our cheese has been moved, as the eponymous book says, and we will miss the familiar world of job boards, resumes, face-to-face recruiting, ringing telephones, cold calls, and classified ads. Technology and the Internet still feel unfamiliar and foreign to many recruiters, but we have entered a technology-dominated, virtual era.

But here are a few of the many things we have to look forward to:

1. Personalization of the recruiting process. Today every candidate is treated pretty much the same. Recruiters call that being fair, but I call it lack of customer service and concern. We are all individuals, and want our uniqueness to be understood and evaluated. Retailers and product manufacturers understand this and provide hundreds of variations on products to meet our individual needs. We will need to use technology to communicate with candidates better and more frequently and at a deeper level than we do now. We will have to tailor jobs to meet candidates’ qualifications rather than to keep looking for the “right” person for our standardized job profile. The whole matching process will become more dynamic and offer the candidate more choices. Social media will become the “home base” of recruiting, and the hallmark of successful recruiting organizations will be their ability to use social media well.
2. Development integrated with recruiting. When the supply of skilled and ready people is exhausted, which will be soon, we will have to look at developing people internally or hiring people without the skills we need and training them. Corporate resilience is marked by the ability to develop people with the skills they need to compete. Look at HP, IBM, and Procter & Gamble. Each of these firms has spent millions on employee development and each is successful — even in these dark times. I think there is a correlation. Integrated talent management will be a no-brainer for the HR people of this century. Being able to make solid decisions, based on data, as to whether a position should be filled with an external experienced person or an internal trainee will become a powerful skill.
3. Selling and marketing as important skills for recruiters. Even though it is harder than ever to see because of the slow economy, being able to explain to a candidate why your organization is better than another one will be a vital ability for recruiters to have. The candidate pool is going to get smaller, smarter, and more discriminating — just as the consumer pool has. Why would you buy one video camera over another? Mainly because of the powerful marketing and communication campaigns of their manufacturers. Candidates will seek out firms with good reputations and financial track records, as they are already doing. That is why lists such as the “100 Best Companies to Work For” are so popular. Candidates are literally shopping for jobs not, for the most part, taking whatever comes along.

The entire recruiting profession will look different, be run differently, use different tools, and be based on different assumptions than it was in the 20th century. And that’s good — because we will need new tools for the new problems of talent shortages, rising free agency, smaller firms, and rapid change.

Let us give thanks this week for the plentiful ideas and creativity that have contributed so much to America’s leadership in human resources, in developing human potential, and in continuously exploring the limits of our capabilities.

And may all of you have a peaceful, bountiful, and happy Thanksgiving.

I am not sure if recruiters noticed, but several analysts did. I recently read an analyst’s report that compared several high-tech companies on the number of open positions they had as an indicator of long-term earnings and profit.

Given that analysts are doing this, we should be, too. We should be very sensitive to what our own management is thinking, how orders are shaping up, what the sales team is projecting, and then adjusting our own efforts accordingly.

If you don’t have access to this information you have two ways to get it. First of all, go to your manager and ask him or her for help. They will hopefully share what they can with you or help you find it. Second, cultivate your own sources by making friends with someone in sales or another part of your organization where people have that “inside” information that gives you an early indication of how things are going.

With that information in hand, here are five specific actions you can take to increase the odds of surviving, and even thriving, in this down economy.

Action Item #1: Get in Shape

You can’t make much progress in building credibility with management until your own function is in good shape. Recruiters who saw the signs of a recession could have begun trimming the fat in their processes months ago. Get aligned with your management team and cut when they cut, slow down when they slow down, and show them you are aware and responsible.

The last several years of high demand for talent have allowed many recruiting functions to increase their headcounts, add tools and services that are not providing a significant return, and get sloppy in measuring efficiency. This is the time to examine every step in your recruiting process and see where you could be more efficient – in other words do more with fewer resources, less time, or less money. What are you spending on job postings? Could that be reduced? Could you switch to using targeted emails or some other lower cost methods? Where are you spending the majority of your budget? How could you reduce that by 10%? 20%? What can you stop doing that really won’t hurt you?

By prioritizing and cutting, refocusing, and rethinking everything you do, you will end up with a much healthier function. You will better weather the recession and be poised to aggressively deal with the boom that will inevitably come.

Action Item #2: Be Nice

Every act of discourtesy to a candidate will eventually be reflected in how they talk about you to other people. Employment brands are built on small acts – not on the big campaigns or websites. A solid brand is the accumulation of years of good deeds, happy candidates, satisfied managers, and authentic communication. Many candidates will be stressed and perhaps out of a job. They need honest feedback and guidance, if possible, on how they present themselves.

Firms that take the extra time to sit down with a candidate or send them an email and let them know their status, possibilities, and even strengths and weaknesses will reap many benefits in a stronger brand.

Action Item #3: Ruthlessly Focus

Target your marketing and sourcing only on the kinds of people you most need. Cut out or reduce all the resources you spend on marginal activities. For example, you might reduce the use of agencies that recruit volume candidates, stretch out the time to fill less critical positions, or try to use some of the new social networking tools to reach out to certain groups of candidates.

Look at internal hiring and see if there isn’t a way to improve the number of employees who move. Talk to management about increasing that number and decrease external hiring.

The goal should be to attract mostly the types of candidates you need and who are qualified. You can use this slower time to experiment on messaging, screening techniques, and on ways to get fewer but better candidates.

Action Item #4: Use Technology – Experiment!

As always, I harp on using technology whenever you can. Social networking tools can help you create and build relationships with candidates. Most are very inexpensive or free.

Experiment with better, more frequent emails to certain candidates on your shortlist; create a newsletter or blog to give interested potential candidates updates on your organization; and experiment with tools such as Twitter, Broadlook, or Checkster.

Action Item #5: Build Relationships

I am more and more convinced that posting job descriptions is an archaic process. While I have no doubt that the practice will live on for a long time, it is not the best, cheapest, or fastest way to find good people.

Using technology to develop relationships and to communicate regularly with a selected and screened pool of candidates is the key to your real success.

In general, you are going to find only a few of the people you need by posting on Monster or any other job board. The most successful recruiters use their network, ask employees (and others) for referrals, and focus on building communities of potential candidates. This is what agencies and headhunters have been doing for decades and it’s why they have been successful.

Learn from product and service marketing how to do a better job. Watch how some leading organizations are using social media to attract and recruit candidates. Begin to generate candidates from relationships formed online. Make it a rule of thumb that if you are generating hundreds of responses to a job posting, you are doing something terribly wrong.

I guarantee that if you do all five of these things in an organization that is well-managed, you will survive this recession and become an example of how to positively deal with stressful times.

Over the past almost two weeks I have been in Europe leading workshops, working with a few clients, and presenting to recruiters from Germany, France, the U.K., and The Netherlands. We all face the same issues. Some of these are generational differences, an aging workforce, lack of loyalty, difficulty to engage and attract new college graduates, the economic recession, and growing talent needs in some areas with meltdowns in others.

I picked out one challenging area: that of how to deal with diversity and the generations.

In a workshop I held a couple of days ago, one of the scenarios we grappled with was whether diversity is growing or lessening and the role generational differences play. I presented them with the following scenarios and asked them to discuss (argue?) and challenge each other on which of these is closer to their experience and belief.

I asked them to get data to support their positions and look at the generational issues on a macro scale as well as on a local or personal level. For example, it is a fact that there are more countries in the world than ever. Large unions, such as the Soviet Union, have broken into smaller countries and others have fractured within themselves. We also know that people are more mobile than ever and that many young people have traveled to, lived in, and worked in many countries.

Read the two views expressed below and then let us know what you think. This might be a great discussion for your weekly staffing meeting or for an offsite.

Your opinions will shed light and provide examples that will help us all decide which of these is most likely to be the reality. Or you may decide that the reality is some sort of fusion of the two or even something entirely different.

What do you think? What are implications for recruiting and development? Will recruiting these younger people be a significant challenge or just the same as usual? How will our views of diversity evolve?

View One: Gen Y and the generation following, often called Gen M for mobile, don’t carry the same baggage about gender, ethnicity, and other surface differences between people. They grew up with more awareness about different learning and communication styles and many of them are of mixed heritage/cultures themselves. Over the next few years, we will chuckle at the conflicts and issues that challenged us in the Twentieth Century. We will overlook physical differences, cultural and language differences, and embrace each other’s strengths. We have elected a President who is half white and half black. He bridges divides and unites us in the process. This will be the direction of the world.

View Two: While the “surface” diversity of sex, color, and ethnicity decrease, new differences emerge. Religious and cultural differences are growing every day and some parts of the world are polarizing. Rather than less diversity, we are discovering more and more areas of difference and are latching onto those differences to discriminate in many ways. Shiites, Sunis, and Kurds cannot find common ground. Religious sects are proliferating. Rather than become one, we are becoming ever more fragmented. We have learned how to hide our feelings, but express them in nuanced ways. Recruiting diverse people will be very hard and there may be conflicts that we haven’t anticipated. The world is more fragmented than ever.

It is not affecting employment across the board as many of the past ones have, but rather seems to be targeting specific sectors and types of work. Obviously banking and financial services, but also manufacturing and anyone in a semi-skilled job such as auto workers are especially affected. Needs are pocketed and specific. Talent shortages remain.

Yet, I have had calls from search firms looking for key sales and marketing people, and for R&D talent. Senior HR executives are in demand, especially if they have global experience. Sectors still largely unscathed by the recession – healthcare, gaming, entertainment, pharmaceuticals, and biotech – are still facing talent shortages and global competition.

The growth of global supply chains, increasing automation, and greater process efficiency means we can do more with fewer. New jobs are being created daily, but they all require education and skill beyond that of many current candidates.

This, combined with the different attitudes candidates and employees have about work and about how they live their lives, changes how we recruit and employ people.

The highly skilled, experienced, and educated will have an increasing edge in employment. And this recession should be a clarion call for an increased focus on education, training, and employment development. Everyone involved with talent will need to look at both development and acquisition as channels to meet their needs, rather than focus entirely on recruiting.

There are a number of permanent changes we will see.

Candidates Become Smarter, Warier

The first change is that many candidates will be reluctant to work under the same conditions as usual. Candidates have access to unparalleled information about a prospective employer through the Internet and its many sources. Reliance on a single firm for security has already eroded, and this recession will strengthen employees’ wariness about promises and deferred compensation. More top employees will seek employment contracts that include clauses that spell out layoff pay and benefits.

Candidates will probe positions more deeply and they will want more influence over the type of work they do. Prepare for candidates to negotiate what they will and won’t do.

Free Agency

Recessions have, in the past, increased the pool of people who decide to become free agents – contractors, consultants, and part-time workers. More people than ever are trying out life as independent workers. Many will not make it and return to the corporate fold, but they will be wiser and better prepared to abandon ship than they were before.

Many others will find they would rather work on their own than go back under the very insecure and fragile corporate umbrella. Companies will have to identify and take care of their key producers better than ever. While many firms do work hard to keep key talent, they will have to increase this effort and explore more creative ways to engage those people.

Charles Handy, a management writer and educator who has written numerous books on the organizations of the future, predicted that up to half of some company’s talent may eventually work as free agent, contracting to those firms as temporary staff, contractors, or part-timers. This will be a lasting change that is accelerated because of the recession.

Recruiters and HR staff will have to accommodate these free agents. Our internal regulations will have to be modified to make the use of contractors legal and compliant with IRS regulations and it may be necessary to lease employees, employ more employment contracts, and learn to share talent between organizations.

These changes will be fought by the legal department and more HR leaders, yet I believe companies will eventually have to embrace these ideas to be competitive.

Values Rule

Gen Y candidates, in particular, but all employees to a growing degree, are seeking companies that hold values high and make and keep commitments to their employees and their families. They seek environmentally sensitive, charitable, and ethical firms.

Gen Y is the tip of a spear followed by the even more morally and environmentally committed Gen M. They will have even higher expectations than the Baby Boomers ever did. While shareholder value will always be a core concern of the management team, they will also have to understand how important employees feel that values are and how close a scrutiny they will give every corporate action and statement.

Recruiters have to understand the values of the firms they work for and find better ways to match people to those values. They will have to also convince the management of firms that what they DO is just as important as what they say and that this emerging candidate pool focuses on actions almost entirely.

Flexible Work Arrangements

Employees now want to work where they want. The Internet has made it possible for most services and knowledge workers to be located far away from the physical center of their company.

Designers, call-center staff, sales people, some HR folks, and most anyone who works with information, writing, or data can effectively work wherever they wish. Only a handful of people – those whose work requires their hands or eyes on the work being produced – will need to physically be present. Even jobs we cannot yet imagine being remote, such as that of a diagnostic physician, may soon be possible using instruments and video from anywhere.

Recruiters will need to encourage flexible work arrangements and lobby with hiring managers to make these arrangements normal.

Recruiting will be more challenging and those recruiters who like to “fill positions” will find themselves looking for other kinds of work. Recruiters will need to be proactive, great influences, technically savvy, and adaptable to emerging work trends.

I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really was not even something anyone mentioned or thought about when I entered the workforce in the 1970s. It has come about over the past 15 years and has swept corporate America and the world.

I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees on the issue of work/life balance. Perhaps it emerged because more Gen X employees moved into leadership positions and were more aware of the precariousness of employment and about how quickly corporate can swing from breakneck hiring to layoffs.

But whatever the causes, the issues involved are core to whether people accept offers, stay with an organization, or decide to work for themselves.

Over the past few weeks most recruiters have had to spend some time thinking about their own employment situation and assessing its relative security, engagement, and continuity. They have also had to deal with reluctant candidates, uncertain retirees, and fearful employees. How we think about work is fundamental to almost everything else we do.

The work/life balance movement is based on set of assumptions that aren’t questioned very often, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied or thought about the history of work.

If I were to state the assumptions that underlie the work/life balance movement, they would go something like this: Work is something we do for money, is generally not very enjoyable, and interferes with more important things like family. Work, therefore, should be regulated and time with our families should be mandatory. The work/life balance cause assumes a more or less digital world: work is on or off, family is on or off.

Yet, for centuries work and life were co-joined. Men toiled in fields, small shops, bazaars, and at home without paychecks, labor laws, or a day off. Women and men often shared skills and children were almost always part of the working and life equation as soon as they were old enough.

Work might not have been fun in our modern sense, but it was a family activity and it was the fabric of life. Most people chose to do something they liked, or at least something that provided them food and shelter and employed members of their family. Even learning was a family activity and fathers and sons often co-invented things or passed their knowledge to each succeeding generation.

The modern separation mindset is new and is a result of the physical isolation of work in factories and offices. It is the result of physical and mental separation from family. It is the result of over specialization to the point where your spouse cannot understand what work you do.

Yet I see that the Gen Y folks, the Millennials, seem to have an intuitive understanding that you should seek out work you care about. They are rejecting the work/life notions, much to the chagrin of their elder Gen X colleagues. Gen Y tends to look for work they are passionate about and then they tend to work in ways foreign to Gen X. They take any sense of balance away and may work for days without a stop or not work much at all for some time. They try to choose meaningful and interesting work and embrace it with a passion only seen once in a while with Gen X or Baby Boomers.

In order to most effectively deal with the questions this economic turmoil raises, be able to answer these questions:

Question #1: If I am able to make an adequate living doing whatever I am now doing, what does your organization offer me beyond that?

You should have a clear understanding of the contributions employees can make to society or to fulfilling an employee’s long term career goals. Every recruiter should encourage the organization to commit to funding and supporting social and environmental improvements and activities. Google, for example, allows employees paid time to work for charitable organizations on a regular basis.

Question #2: Can you accommodate my preferred work style?

Many younger employees and also many Gen X and Baby Boomer workers are asking for flexible working schedules and telecommuting opportunities. These will be core benefits offered by successful organizations over the next decade. Without these you will find it very hard to hire and retain your most productive and valuable people. As soon as any competitor offers them an opportunity for these, they will leave you.

Question #3: What opportunities are there for me to fulfill my life ambitions here?

Work is no longer all about the employee doing things only for the organization. It is also about what the organization is doing for the individual. Some corporations offer employees college programs in areas that have nothing to do with work. For example, some pay for things like nursing school or law school while the employee is doing some totally different type of work.

Others offer cross-functional movement and provide the training and coaching needed to make the person successful. And they make this a significant part of the employment experience, not just a perk for the privileged few.

This is the out-of-the-box stuff that will keep the best people, at least for awhile, and improve the productivity and engagement of everyone.

I am not the only one predicting that it will be increasingly difficult to convince younger people to work for large corporations unless they have more input to the type of work and the conditions they work under. As work returns slowly to individuals, entrepreneurs, small shops, and small organizations, we will see more and more integration between work and life. More spouses will work together and more children will be part of that work. The days of specialization, physical separation, and mental isolation are ending, I think and hope. We have traversed across a century of change to return to where we started.

Yet, if you are like most of us, you probably have a sketchy picture of your employee population. I would bet that no one could tell me the exact headcount, nor could they tell me much about the skills and competencies of your workers except in general terms.

I believe that because of this inaccurate and vague picture of the workforce, American firms are caught in a vicious cycle that seems almost impossible to break. We hire like madmen when times are good, and dump thousands into the labor market when times are bad. This is an unsustainable cycle that leads to disgruntled workers, lower profits, and cynical candidates.

If we can plan and fine-tune our factory production cycles with precision, we should be able to do this with people — at least better than we do now.

An answer, however, may be forming.

At the latest Future of Talent Retreat that just ended, the concept of an employee-driven talent strategy emerged as core to the future success of organizations. The concept of a Chief Talent Officer is also gaining more popularity and strength if for no other reason than to have someone responsible for the overall supply of talent who is removed from the day-to-day operational tasks. Human resource departments are usually so consumed with tactical and operational issues that they have no time for strategy or planning.

I spoke a few weeks ago to a small group of the most senior HR executives from 15 Fortune 500 companies. The topics of their conversations were executive pay and stock options, freezing the headcount given the current economic times, and how to reformulate compensation to improve retention. Not even one of them focused on an overall talent strategy.

This reactive and administrative view that has ruled us for the past 50 years is a simple response to a very poorly understood supply and demand system. Fortunately for many firms, the labor they needed was unskilled and abundant. We all know that is no longer the case.

And let me ask you a few questions more relevant to today.

• How much is your firm planning to grow over the next five years?
• How many and what kinds of people will it need? Are these people out there? If so, where? If not, what are you going to do about it?
• Do you know who the most valuable contributors to your organizations’ success are? Do you have strategies in place to keep them?
• Do you know who your best hires were last year in terms of their contribution to your firm?
• Have you worked with management to develop an overall plan for the numbers and types of people your firm should employ? What percentage of employees should be full-time regular employees vs. temporaries, part-timers, or contractors?

I could go on.

I doubt many of us could answer these with honesty or any certainty. I am sure some of you have “guesstimates” of how many people you will need to hire due to turnover or growth. Maybe some of you even have an idea of how many of your projected hires will need to be engineers or computer scientists or some such professional. But we do not have a comprehensive picture of needs, nor do we have any kind of adequate picture of the potential supply. Most HR and recruiting functions have made an effort over the past few years to install software or improve their data gathering processes so that they have some idea of what the employee population looks like, but we are far from success.

If we are to ensure that are organizations remain competitive and are able to meet their talent needs, we need something more than we have now. What we need is a set of tools and processes that enable us to project, run “what-if” scenarios, and make financial projections. While software from companies such as Oracle and SAP are providing some if this capability, until we demand more we will not get it. These vendors have to see that there is a market for that and then it will be readily available.

In the meantime, here are some simple steps you can take to start the process of developing a talent strategy for your firm.

Step #1: Forecast likely demand.
Looking at all your internal growth projections and expected turnover, put together a picture of probable need. Break this down by occupations, skill sets, profession, or whatever makes sense. Constantly check this with line.

Step 2: Develop knowledge of likely supply.
Use whatever software tools you have, including Taleo or other talent management systems or the software from those firms I have already mentioned. Collect data on how many jobs are posted on job boards and track how quickly the jobs are filled. Use local employment data, and competitive intelligence which, when combined with your other facts, will paint a picture of likely supply. Include projected college graduates with the majors you are seeking and place a realistic guess, based on past experience, on how many experienced people you will be able to recruit from competitors and other sources. Take into account mergers and acquisitions and the excess people they may bring to your firm. Have contingency plans in place to deal with this through outplacement, internal redeployment, or development. These supply projections, when subtracted from the demand estimates, will give you an idea of how big your gap is and what kind of people you will need.

Step 3: Develop a methodology of getting at that supply or of changing the demand.
Once you have this, you can begin to propose ways to get more of the people you need. Will you put in place internal development such as Cisco and IBM and HP have done for years to supply some of the people you will need? Or will your plan be to vigorously recruit from your competition in the hopes of getting what you need?

You may also find that working to reduce demand or to change the focus of the demand will reap benefits. Why does everyone have to have an engineering degree, for example? Perhaps a technician would be adequate to do that job? There is no doubt that we have had degree inflation, and many jobs that were previously performed by high school graduates now require people with degrees. We may have to readjust this concept. And, there may be ways to simply use automation or process engineering to make it possible to do the work without more people. These are all choices that recruiters should be involved with and they are the kinds of things a talent officer would be focused on.

Step 4: Prioritize your needs and make line management aware.
Prepare a talent strategy report that contains the supply and demand data I have discussed and that outlines your proposed approach to dealing with the issues. Use facts, figures, and business-oriented examples. Ask for the resources you will need, and guarantee a certain level of result.

Step 5: Report on progress.
Develop a set of metrics and facts that you can report regularly to senior management to keep them aware of the supply and demand balance and to let them know how you are doing.

We owe it to ourselves and our organizations to ratchet up the strategic capabilities of our firms and provide senior management with the decision-making information they need. Until we do this we will remain in the cycle of panic hiring and mass layoffs. Proactive planning is the only way to get the people-cycles under control.

We should all use the pause in the hectic pace of the past few years to begin and frame the future we want when we emerge. And we will emerge. I am not sure when, of course, but within a few years we will be back at the global hiring process with renewed vigor and increased challenges.

The cry we all heard over the past five years has been that there was no time to plan, think, experiment, or implement new methods. Most of us used the methods we were comfortable with but just worked harder, longer, and faster than before. This is the opportunity to figure out how to do things differently.

Be Strategically Bold; Tactically Careful

The first step in dealing with the current situation is to sit down and plan out a 3-5 year strategic plan for the future of your recruiting function. Envision a new tomorrow where you can use the technology, processes, and learnings that have emerged over the past decade. Some of the technologies and tools include such things as social networks, blogs, wikis, and candidate relationship management tools.

The processes that have shown promise include less-restrictive internal mobility practices, real time candidate assessment, virtual job fairs and other virtual recruiting techniques, as well as more authentic candidate engagement using online communication tools.

This strategic planning process should be formal, should involve your team and other employees as well as outside people, if that is acceptable in your organization, and should be designed to force yourself and others to think outside the usual assumptions about talent and recruiting. If you have any budget, it would be wise to engage a facilitator who is experienced in this kind of activity. They can make the process robust and much more valuable.

By formulating strategies that use these tools and practices, you can emerge from our current morass with a roadmap for quickly trumping your competition.

At the same time, you need to act right now with fiscal caution and show your management that you are a responsible manager.

This means finding ways to conserve your budget by lessening the need for contingent labor, perhaps, or by reassessing your current practices and challenge why you do whatever you doing the way you do it. Try to find ways to be more efficient, without spending money. Cut back, but cut back where it will do you some good from a strategic perspective. For example, by reducing staff right now, you can position yourself to implement technology or bring in a person with a different skill set once things recover.

Your job is to balance today with several possible recruiting situations in the future.

Envision a New Workforce

The really best recruiting and talent leaders will sit down with management and have some open discussions about the desired workforce of the future.

Every recession is an opportunity to recalibrate, learn and decide on what skills and competencies are most likely to be needed as we emerge from this recession. I have lived through a few recessions now and one lesson I have learned is that out of each come new needs. As we emerged from the September 11 mini-recession, it was clear that security was the new issue and that we would need people with experience and skills not only in physical security but also in data and financial security. By anticipating these needs, recruiters could have had an edge on any competition.

Once you have even a blurry picture of the skills and competencies you may need, you can begin sourcing for these kinds of candidates and begin to populate a talent community with people whom you are getting to know and who are getting to know you.

Collaborate and Learn

Your third step is to collaborate and learn from your peers and from experts in the field. This is a golden opportunity to attend webinars, which are mostly free, catch up on the blogs you have wanted to read but didn’t have time to, and make a few phone calls to friends, colleagues, and others you may have heard of.

These calls can be partly social and partly learning experiences. Ask what they are experiencing, what they are doing to use this gift of time wisely, and what tools and practices they are considering. I have always found this kind of networking to be one of the best ways to learn about emerging trends and to get a calibration on where others are.

Everything you hear and learn can be used as part of your strategic planning process. You can get these colleagues to demonstrate what they have done and you can even experiment with many of the technologies for free or for a small amount of money. One of the best things about the past five years is how inexpensive software has become. There is really no excuse to not try blogging, wikis, or even social networking tools.

Focus on Candidate Engagement

The final step in your plan for the future is to carefully, authentically, and regularly communicate with all the best candidates you have. Experiment with tools like blogs, email, newsletters, Twitter updates – anything that might engage and stimulate the many potential candidates you should already have in your talent pools.

If you neglect them or just tell them that there are no openings now, you lose a resource that you have spent lots of time and money finding and developing. Better to be honest with them, let them know exactly what your situation is, and keep them updated regularly.

Invite the best to join you in a monthly phone call update (just like your financial people do for the analysts) or hold a quarterly webinar. Anything you do to maintain the connection with your candidates will pay itself back when times get better.

Economies will recover and the emerging world will be different and more challenging than ever. Use this precious resource of extra time wisely and well to frame the future you want.

Organizations are devoting more time to the onboarding process and employing more creative and exciting techniques in an effort to get their newly hired employees productive sooner and to lay a foundation that will help retain them.

In fact, employees who have gone through some sort of onboarding process above and beyond the usual process of filling out paperwork and choosing benefit plans report feeling better connected to their colleagues and to the company culture. This translates into a loyalty that keeps employees from turning down offers that tempt by simply offering more dollars.

There are at least three reasons that orientation or assimilation programs are becoming popular.

First of all they help new hires feel that they are part of a larger organization and that they are important. By introducing new employees to senior management and by spending time to build in them an appreciation of the organization’s past and future direction, these programs create a sense of security and comfort.

Second, they help convey the culture of the organization so that decisions get made that are more in line with accepted practices and that help the organization function more smoothly. When senior-level employees explain why decisions were made or how a result came about, they are also conveying the cultural values of the organization. By building roots from the beginning, people flourish and understand better why things are the way they are.

And, third, they expedite getting the new hires up to speed and productive. Some new hires take up to a year to reach full productivity, especially if their jobs depend on interacting with many other employees or in linking work from different parts of the firm. Inexperienced employees, especially college hires, can have long learning curves that can be significantly shortened with good upfront education. This is where an internal social network or some other Internet-based tools can expedite their connections and bring different people with similar needs together.

The best onboarding programs have several characteristics.

First of all, they are fun, not overly formal, and engage employees. Make sure you develop a program that has substance and that addresses serious issues effectively, but do it in a manner that is interactive and fun. Some organizations are using the Internet to facilitate the experience and provide the new employee with the corporate history, the values of the firm, an overview of the strategy and fiscal goals. This is often delivered in a video. Videos can be used to provide an overview of the finances by the CFO, for example, and a greeting from some senior-level executive. Many offer tours of the facilities via video narrated by an employee.

All of these tools and activities set a stage for productive, aligned, and focused work. Don’t assume that employees are just going to “pick up” all the things they need to know to be successful in your firm. What is obvious to you may be very obscure to someone just walking in the door.

Second, good onboarding programs may extend over several months. After an intensive 1 to 2 day session up front to start things off, subsequent activities may extend over several months at periodic intervals. Some programs include rotational assignments; others may include special projects that are designed to expose the new employee to parts of the company they would not normally have any contact with. For example, an executive could be given as assignment to find out something about the manufacturing operations that would require her to actually go to the factory and gather data. This way she sees how other employees work and begins to get a feel for the culture in action. Scheduling events out several months gives you the opportunity to get into topics in an in-depth way that short programs cannot.

The third thing effective onboarding programs are good at is getting the manager to be part of the onboarding process. Surveys show that the relationship with the manager is one of the most significant in an employee’s work life.

Most employee turnover is ultimately caused by that relationship (or lack of it), which makes the ability to assimilate new employees a core competence of managers. An employee’s immediate manager controls all career progression, educational opportunities, and the assignment of projects. So a manager who takes time to discuss issues with a new employee, who shows concern over that person’s assimilation, and who knows what the employee can do and wants to do, will make wiser decisions and build loyalty over time.

The manager should be included as part of the onboarding process. Some firms have the managers attend a session designed to provide the employee with an initial set of goals — perhaps for the first 30 to 60 days. Others include the manager in team-building exercises or have a luncheon where the manager sits with the new employee. At the executive level, the CEO can invite new hires to dinner at his or her home or set up a special quarterly new executive dinner and reception. The key is to make sure the manager has a real role in both the formal process of onboarding as well as in the informal one that happens every day.

And finally the best programs offer coaching and mentoring to new employees right from the start. Again, research shows very clearly that providing a mentor who can offer insights into the corporate culture, who can explain the organizational structure and help the new employee understand why things get done in the way they do, is a major contributor to increased productivity and lower turnover.

These mentors should be individuals who are exemplars of the kind of behavior and results orientation your firm would like all its employees to exhibit. The role of these mentors can be very simple — as simple as going to lunch once a week with the new hire to show them the ropes and transmit some of the tacit culture that is never articulated or often even acknowledged in formal sessions. These mentors are the vehicles to educate the new hire, and they should be trained to serve as listeners who can intervene quietly with a manager if an issue arises. They need to be respected and well-networked in the organization.

Onboarding in tough times becomes an essential tool for building engagement and improving retention.

His company, ABC, needed some very specialized people and he couldn’t find them. For over two years, Paul had tried to fill some very specialized and always open positions by using Internet search and revamping the career site. He had even put his reputation on the line a few months back when he insisted that a central sourcing team would solve the perpetual lack of qualified candidates.

He had just finished a tough meeting with his sourcing team trying to figure out why there were no candidates in their talent pool. He had been certain that there would be several potential people from that pool; when the hiring managers had told him about their openings, he had assured them it wouldn’t take very long.

After all, the team had known about the competencies these positions required for months. Now it looked bleak.

What had gone wrong?

When he took his current position, he was aware that finding the highly specialized robotic engineers and technicians the firm needed was his number-one challenge.

Even though the organization was located in the heart of the academic world, with major research schools and labs everywhere, these robotics people remained a scare commodity and the few that he did find were happier remaining in academia.

He had worked with compensation to sweeten the incentives and he had spent time with a big-name advertising agency honing the recruiting messages and redoing the career site. They had won awards and been written about in ERE and in recruiting blogs. Paul had been given several awards. But he was failing.

The company was quite unique. It developed robots that mimicked the human hand. These mechanical hands were incredible. They could pick up an egg without breaking it and yet they could slice through a piece of steel like scissors through paper. They could manipulate, sew, pick up tiny parts, and insert them into circuit boards and they could perform some types of surgery, with assistance from a human doctor.

The demand was growing rapidly, yet the supply of people to design, improve, and manufacture them remained small. Not many schools turned out robotics engineers and not many students choose that as a career.

The engineering team had also placed tight competency requirements on candidates. Every candidate had to have degrees in at least two related disciplines, such as mechanical and electrical engineering, or computer science and mechanical engineering. Or, they had to have 5 or more years of experience and a single degree.

Hiring managers wanted prior experience in robotics, if possible, or experience in manufacturing or designing miniature components or nanotechnology. They wanted engineers capable of demonstrating these products to a global customer base. And each robot had to be installed and “tuned” for each customer, which frequently required foreign travel for a long period of time.

Even though Paul had pushed back on these tough requirements, he had not been able to change their opinions. And his sourcing team couldn’t find the right people.

So here he sat on a lovely afternoon, befuddled and at a loss. Should he quit? Did he admit defeat? Was there a way out? What strategies or tactics could he apply to this situation that might rescue him, and the organization?

I am hoping you can help Paul. What are your ideas and suggestions? I will summarize them and add my thoughts in a future column.

“Sumak was a dream candidate. He graduated from MIT with a Masters degree in electrical engineering. He had 3 years of experience working for a large defense and commercial electronics firm, and he was willing to relocate. But he insisted on sending me resumes filled with photographs of his family. He even sent me some currency from his home country because I had mentioned that I thought it colorful.  He told me and the potential hiring manager all about his family connections back home and how those might be useful to us, and when he learned that I was single, he insisted that I at some point meet his sister! I was actually afraid to recommend him for fear I would be in trouble.”  - Senior Recruiter, large defense contractor

“Rapinee was sure she would be offered the position we had open because she had the highest GPA possible from her home university, which was rated the best in her country.  She also came from a titled family and her father was a very important businessman with government connections. She was reluctant to interview at all and answered my questions in a superficial manner. She thought she should just be offered the position!  I was so angry (although I did not show it) that I immediately decided not to pass her excellent resume on.”   - Director of Technical Recruiting, Semiconductor firm

These two vignettes illustrate issues that can arise when recruiting someone from another culture. While most North American recruiters have a basic understanding that people are different, most assume that the person being interviewed has been “westernized” and knows our operating principles.

It is usually a shock when either overt or subtle behaviors begin to show how different our cultures can be. Even recruiters who have lived abroad and have experienced other cultures are often caught off guard by the actions of candidates who seem very much like us and have excellent academic and experiential credentials.

I teach courses in cultural competency and have lived and traveled extensively in other countries for half of my life. I speak other languages and I am married to someone from another culture. Still, it is often surprising how often I react in negative or positive ways to the cultural differences that are increasingly part of our life.

Those of us who are in urban, coastal areas work with people from other cultures on a daily basis and are often deluded into thinking we are cultural experts. Yet, we get surprised as much as anyone else. As organizations expand their recruiting to other countries and as different cultures mix, being culturally competent is critical to recruiters’ success.

North American recruiters tend to operate under a number of assumptions and unspoken rules. Here is an incomplete sampling of some of them:

• Interviews are more or less formal affairs and exchanging personal information or getting “chatty” is frowned upon as unprofessional.
• Degrees are only important for a short time after graduation. By the time someone has been out of school for 3 years or so, the kind of work they are doing and where they are working plays a greater role in deciding who to hire.
• Where someone went to school, where they are from geographically, and who their parents are plays little role in selection.
• Family is not discussed during the recruiting process except in a general and superficial manner.
• The fact that a candidate has been a favorite of the boss or that s/he has received special praise or recognition internally is either frowned upon or of minor importance.

However, each of these may be deemed very important to those from other cultures. Many cultures place great importance on family connections, titles, and schools. Bringing these up in the interview is expected and necessary in order to gain the favor of the recruiter.

Anthropologists divide cultures broadly into those that are collectivist and those that individualistic.

Collectivist cultures are family- and group-oriented. We in North America are brought up in a very individualist culture where accomplishing things independently of others is considered a virtue.

However, in collectivist cultures, such as those in most of Asia, the opposite is true. So showing your commitment to the family and the group is important to them.

Another way cultures are divided is by body language and the way people address others. We are all sensitive to this and we know that people from some cultures won’t make direct eye contact.

Others show bodily deference by bowing or keeping their bodies lower than those of people considered superior. Some call everyone “sir” or “madam” or use titles and formal names when addressing anyone deemed more important than they are.

Most North American recruiters are turned off by this kind of behavior. We like people who “look us in the eye” and respond to our questions firmly, quickly, and with confidence. Any different behavior often influences their judgment as to whether a candidate is suitable.

Everything, from how close someone stands to you to their hand gestures, is the result of cultural training and upbringing. These behaviors are hard to change and yet should not influence a decision about a candidate’s skills and abilities.

Here are 5 tips on how to become a more culturally sensitive, and therefore more skilled, recruiter. Multicultural recruiting will be more and more important over the next decades as organizations become more global in their recruiting practices.

• Tip #1: Take a course in cultural competency. Build up your understanding of different cultural norms and gain skill in dealing with people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds. Most universities and many other organizations offer courses in cultural competency and a quick Google search reveals many books on the topic. Cultural competency is not about learning what to do and not do in a particular country. Rather, these courses provide you a framework of cultural knowledge that makes it easier to understand and respond to specific behaviors.
• Tip #2: Expect to be surprised. When interviewing candidates from other cultures, be prepared for different behaviors and try not to judge based on those behaviors or actions. Probe for competence and skill. Perhaps give a short skills test and make certain the candidate understands that you are focused on skills and competence, not on family or degrees or titles. Be prepared to spend some time in what you feel is meaningless chitchat or in conversations about family or other things that seems outside the expected. You may learn a great deal about the candidate and you will put them at ease. Schedule a little more time for the interview when the person is not a native of your culture and try to learn a bit about what the norms are of that culture prior to the interview.
• Tip #3: Let people have a preview. Email interview questions to candidates before the interview and even ask them to respond in writing.  This will give you a sense of their thought process and may open areas for you to probe when you actually meet them.  It helps them understand what you are asking for and gives them a chance to think through their answers in their own language.
• Tip #4: Use a set of criteria that you apply to all candidates. Make sure that the criteria you use are as free as possible of cultural bias. For example, a criterion that says the candidate must answer quickly and concisely may disqualify good candidates who prefer to talk and elaborate on their answers. Your criteria should be directly related to performance on the job and not on subjective and unproven traits.
• Tip #5: Separate culture from skill. The two stories at the beginning of this article exemplify highly educated and capable candidates who should not be excluded because of their culture. North American cultural traits may be the norm for most of us, but those traits are significantly different from those of people who have an Asian, Indian, or Middle Eastern background. Being able to separate culture from skill, and knowing how to steer a conversation or interview to the areas important to you, are important parts of being a good recruiter.

It is often said, I think erroneously, that as the world shrinks we all become more alike. What I see is that as we experience more cultures, we become more aware of the many small but enriching differences we bring to our work.

Most recruiters, corporate or agency, have finally developed career sites and use the Internet for attracting, sourcing, and communicating with candidates and clients. The website is the bedrock of an effective recruiting practice, and while it may still be possible in local or niche markets to avoid it, for mainstream and volume recruiting a website is essential. In this article I am assuming you already have a decent website that has interactivity, video, audio, and other graphic material and updates frequently. That is old news.

But, to get a jump on your competition and to attract the savviest candidates, it takes more than a good website and good recruiting skills. Here are four essential tools for success.

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

You should have a personal and a corporate presence on a social network. I have only listed Facebook and MySpace because they represent the largest share of the social networking world in the United States and a significant percentage outside the U.S. If your organization has global operations and recruiting needs, then there are networks for China, India, and many other places that you should also consider.

College students and most other young professionals turn to these networks for information about you, to ask their friends about you, or to join a community of practice that you have created.

IBM DB2 developers have a Facebook community developed and maintained by IBM. KPMG in South Africa has developed a Facebook page to attract and communicate with potential candidates.

The U.S. Army, faced with massive recruiting challenges, has numerous Facebook and MySpace pages. Some of the pages act as testimonials or provide videos of real people talking about why they joined the Army. Other pages are focused on fun experiences such as simulations of driving a tank or on gaming.

However you use these networks, you will be exposing your brand to thousands of potential candidates who, at least to some degree, will judge their potential work experience by the quality of the content. That’s why these pages have to be done thoughtfully and have to connect to the type of viewer and what they are expecting to see and hear.

Tool #2: LinkedIn

I separate LinkedIn from Facebook and MySpace because it is not really a “social” network so much as a simple way to link people who know each other together in a web of interconnections. These interconnections can be useful when they are leveraged well, and LinkedIn has developed special applications for recruiters.

You should all get a copy of Bill Vick’s excellent guide to using LinkedIn for recruiting. LinkedIn allows you to build a network of people who know you and each other. By working to populate this network with the kinds of people who you either would like to recruit or who can help you find those you can recruit, you can leverage your success many times over.

And by learning methods such as those taught by Shally Steckerl you can use LinkedIn as a structured, searchable database of potential candidates.

LinkedIn is a versatile tool and can be used for marketing, search, and connecting. This is what makes it as essential tool for your toolbox.

Tool #3: Your Personal Blog

Developing a blog puts you ahead of almost all other recruiters by building your brand and your organization’s brand. Blogs have become the most authentic course of information for candidates. They like to read the personal stories and hear about your organization from your perspective.

Most candidates are wary of official corporate career sites because they realize how controlled these sites are and they understand that a public relations expert wrote the copy. What candidates are hungry for is authenticity and personality. And this is what blogs have in abundance.

Yet, every time I tell recruiters to create a blog I hear groans and complaints. I hear things such as, “My organization won’t allow us to blog.” Or, “I don’t have time.” Or, “No one can read all the blogs that are out there.”

While I can’t do much to help you overcome internal organizational bans of recruiting blogs, I can suggest you think about creating a personal blog outside of work that can build your brand and help you source good candidates.

Blogs can be updated once a week or so and entries can be quite short. Good blogs keep each posting to a single idea and add pictures or video to maintain interest. Devoting an hour or two a week to a blog is far more useful than spending that time pouring over unsolicited resumes or cold calling.

Tool #4: Twitter

Twitter is the most recent and least understood of these tools. It is a mini-blogging tool that allows you to write 140 characters at a time and send the message to a candidate’s mobile phone or website as a message or as an SMS. Over 2 million people have Twitter accounts and the number is growing very fast. Twitter can be used in a variety of ways to improve the recruiting experience and as a sourcing tool.

Jason Whitman from IT.Toolbox has written a few blogs pointing out ways Twitter is being used as a sourcing tool. Art’s Blog from Bullhorn, a major supplier of recruiting software for the agency world, also gives some ideas of ways to use Twitter for recruiting.

Use Twitter to push out job announcements to potential candidates, stay connected to a special group of people, or keep those top candidates in the loop. It’s free and easy to use. And, because so few are actually using it, you will have a real advantage for a while over everyone who is isn’t using it.

Staying current is never easy, but at least it can be fun. Experiment, play, and see where these tools take you. I think you will like where you end up.

But smart organizations are foregoing the traditional campus activities, in favor of leveraging the Internet. In fact, if you want to attract and hire the best students, forget going to campus at all; it’s not necessary.

College students tell me they are confused by the entire recruiting process. Organizations on the leading-edge of technology are still using the most traditional of methods to recruit them.

While every student has a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile, most companies do not use them in the recruiting process at all. Students are actually a bit surprised that recruiters seem to use recruiting tactics that their parents relate to better than they do. Many are involved in virtual worlds, take online webinars, download lectures as podcasts, and learn from virtual professors. Yet, they must listen to a hiring manager and watch a PowerPoint presentation about some company in a stuffy room on campus.

Unfortunately, recruiters’ belief in the efficacy of past practices is reinforced with surveys by a variety of organizations and institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. But if you take a few minutes to sit down and actually talk to students, you get a different picture of what they would like, what would impress them, and what would engage them.

As demand for college graduates continues to steadily rise, the supply and demand figures for college students should be warning that times have changed.

The number of college students is fairly flat, growing at perhaps 1% a year, and is projected to remain that way for at least another four or five years. Another little-noted fact is that more women than men are enrolled in college and, unfortunately for the high tech and engineering worlds, women don’t tend to major in engineering, mathematics, physics, or computer science. All of these fields are facing significant declines in enrollments and in graduates.

Also consider the students of all age groups graduating from virtual universities that have no campuses. These students are valuable resources for corporations that are currently almost untouched and unrecognized.

Facing these challenges, I don’t see how organizations can focus on just a few campuses or limit their reach to elite schools. Here are a half-dozen tactics to guide your virtual efforts on campus:

• Tactic #1: Become student-centered, not campus-centered. Create an employment brand specifically for students. Your goal should be to attract any student, from anywhere who has the skills and major you are looking for. Why focus on a handful of campuses when the Internet allows you to reach all of them?
• Tactic #2: Use social networks. Create a Facebook, MySpace, or other social network presence. KPMG in South Africa and IBM have created Facebook profiles that demonstrate what can be done to build interest and connect with students. And this is just the beginning of what is possible. By leveraging a customized Ning site, for example, you could create a network where students could invite other students and generate a viral marketing program for recruiting.
• Tactic #3. Create a dynamic, energetic, and exciting website geared to college students. This should be designed to inform and entertain a potential hire. It should allow you to gather enough information about the student so you can decide whether a face-to-face interview is in order. These websites should have video tours of your organizations, interviews about the positions you are hiring for, and lots of diverse information about why a student would want to work for you. These sites can also contain screening tools and allow students to build a profile or link you to their Facebook or other profile. Use the money you save by not going to campus to pay for this website. Combined with a social network presence, this can largely replace any need to go to campus.
• Tactic #4. Build a relationship virtually. Once you have connected with a student, use email, SMS, Twitter, or some combination of these to keep the student informed about your organization and also about the positions you have available and any other details about the recruiting process. Frequent Twitter updates to students who choose to follow you, or regular updates to a blog, can keep students interested for a long time. You can link to presentations about your organizations and you can email specific information to individual students as appropriate.
• Tactic #5. Build virtual job fairs. Virtual job fairs have become common and are even more useful if you have already established a talent pool of interested students with your social network profiles and website. There are a host of virtual job fairs and more organizations are discovering them.
• Tactic #6: Use every source you have vigorously. Ask every new graduate you hire to tell others on campus about your profiles and website. Get them to recommend a few friends and then pursue them with good virtual advertising and a telephone campaign. If you hire interns, use them as both in-person and online ambassadors to other students. Have them act as talent scouts. Ask employees to recommend family friends. The goal has to be to pursue every avenue to find students who meet the skill needs your organization has. Cast a very wide net and let your website and social network profiles be your filter.

There are many more ways to leverage the Internet for campus recruiting. Over the next five years, virtual recruiting will be commonplace, and organizations that still plod around campus with presentations and cheese platters will be viewed as the dinosaurs – the companies no one wants to work for.

Whenever I mentioned his name, many would respond, “Oh, John! He’s always helped me out when I had a problem.” Or, “He’s one of the best-connected people I know in the company. If you need something, he’ll know where to go to get it.”

He was smart, helpful, and connected, and that’s the formula we all preach about how to succeed.

Yet, John languished in a dead-end job that was 80% clerical. He was passed over for promotions and new opportunities because everyone assumed he was happy where he was and he never sought new positions. He did not manage up well, nor did he want to. He was hoping that he might be recognized for his skills and abilities.

While some might say he lacked ambition, what John really suffered from was a lack of self-confidence and an equal lack of encouragement. I worked with him and his boss, and we eventually found a position with more responsibility where he thrived. He sought out mentors from his network and he learned the key elements of the job in weeks. In the past, whenever we hired an outsider person for this type of job it took months for them to fully understand the intricacies of the job and who to go to for advice.

We have all known people like John. In fact, our organizations are filled with people with talent, skills, and connections who may lack the self-motivation or confidence to try something new. Many are pushed down by managers who use these employees to bolster their own weaknesses and others, like John, choose to not move.

But in times of change, economic downturns, or mergers, knowing who your best people are can affect product development, profits, and sales. Many times, this hidden talent is your lifeline to success versus failure. The challenge we all face is how do you identify these people and how do you “recruit” them into new positions with significant potential risk?

Here are some ways to find these people and some strategies for convincing them to make the move.

Simply Ask is Method One

Ask every hiring manager you work with to name their two or three best employees who are also the longest serving. Their recommendations may uncover some great talent. Combine that with active listening and I believe you will find many more talented people than you expected.

That is actually how I discovered John. His manager kept telling me that John would handle this or answer this question, and because John had been with him for so long, he knew all the ins and outs. This set off my radar and I made it a point to get to know John better.

Selling the Risk

Frequently, people like John are afraid to move because they are so deeply skilled at their current job that change is uncomfortable. They are afraid they will fail and lose their job or that they are not capable of learning the new skills required.

To sell them on a change you either have to provide training and coaching or offer them the ability to return to their old job after 30 or 60 days. This is probably the time it will take to find someone to fill the old position; anyway, so not much is lost. It is important to provide a transition step or process to ease their fears and increase the chance for success.

Why bother to do this at all? It’s very simply a matter of cost and benefit: the years that person has worked at your organization and the knowledge they have, and leveraging it to further add to the organization’s talent pool, you have saved thousands of recruiting and training dollars. No internal investment in these people is going to cost you as much as hiring an unknown person from outside.

Provide Internal Development is Method Two

Just asking may not be enough. Many organizations have offered low-risk internal development programs just to engage this type of individual. IBM and HP and many other organizations have over the years offered special training programs. These are often designed to fill some looming skill shortage in a fast, efficient, and usually successful intensive development process.

IBM used to ask managers to recommend employees who met certain basic qualifications for these programs. Then internal recruiters would explain the programs and enroll the employees with a guarantee of continued employment no matter how they did and a promotion if they did well.

Needless to say, this worked well and thousands of IBM managers, programmers, and salespeople came into their jobs through these programs.

The Benefits

Payback is huge and ongoing. Employee morale goes up and the word spreads to the street that the company takes care of people, trains them, and doesn’t spend excessive money on external recruitment when good people are under their feet.

Turnover almost disappears among those who are trained as the number of 25-40 year employees of P&G, DuPont, HP, IBM, and GE all attests.

Force Them to Appear is Method Three

The third way to find these people is to force managers to make promotions and move people up or out. General Electric may be the most famous example of this philosophy exemplified by their mantra to promote the top 10% and move the bottom 10% out.

While not everyone agrees with this, it does have its merits. It forces managers to think about who performs best and who has the skills and abilities to do more than they are currently doing. It forces these managers to convince their employees that a move is positive and it forces General Electric to have stellar employee development programs. But these programs are only as good as the criteria used for selection and the persuasive powers of the manager.

Recruiters have the responsibility of thinking about themselves as talent managers and strategists. Your job is to ensure the supply of quality talent to your organization at the lowest possible price. Finding those already inside your firm is the place to look first, not last, and developing the resources and processes to do this is becoming a critical skill for talent leaders.

He heads recruiting for a large construction company where business is good and hiring strong. There are many open positions for experienced, senior-level people and there will soon be many more as a large number of boomers are approaching retirement. He is being urged by some on his team to begin using Web 2.0 techniques and to develop a more exciting and interactive Web presence in order to get ready for both current and projected needs.

So Willie is wondering….would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do)?

What would you do if you were Willie?

Here is one of the first responses that I received from a reader:

“I would suggest Willie fishes where the fish are. Web 2.0 is fun, new, different, exciting and sexy, however the fish he is looking for are not feeding there. 45-55 year old engineers and project managers are not on social sites on the Web. . .”

There is certainly a lot of merit in this argument. While a recent Pew study suggests that a very large percentage of people over 50 are using the Internet, it is likely few of them would use the Internet to find a job.

Most people – even those much younger – are most likely to find a job through a personal referral or family member. In the construction industry, this is even more likely as teams of workers often stay together and go from job to job.

So should Willie just forget about the Internet and Web 2.0? Another thoughtful reader offered this opinion:

“However, the trend line of usage is only heading in one direction – up.  Willie should not jump in just to be there. He should develop a plan to systematically explore the sourcing effectiveness of a range of established and emerging social networks.”

One intriguing thought was put forward by this reader:

“Let the old-schoolers do an open house or attend events and let the new-schoolers do another Internet-based project. Measure both, see which one works better. Experimentation is the heart of problem solving and data doesn’t lie (if you don’t lie to the data).”

And another writer says:

“Sticking to ‘old school’ exclusively won’t work (it tends to attract old-school candidates) nor will emailing everyone and his brother via LinkedIn or Zoom. However a mixture of these approaches (along with well-thought-out and updated Employee Referral, Employee Alumni, Blogging, Industry Websites, etc) and an action plan that follows up with rigor and process to emails with calls (early in the morning or late in the evening) has worked for me.”

One reader seems to think that if we could find an incentive that attracts construction workers, then the Internet, specifically a Ning site, could be leveraged to spread the word and attract potential candidates. Many organizations have had success with methods similar to this – Cisco Systems used to give away water bottles and associated running/jogging paraphernalia to attract potential candidates with great success. He writes:

“I would get a bunch of tool makers for construction to sponsor tool giveaways on his Ning site and establish an email campaign offering multiple entries into each months drawing for the tools to members that drive new membership to the site. I would set a limit of 5 entries per person per month for folks that drive a certain number of new members. Tools talk to construction guys!”

This would be a low-cost solution as well because the tool makers would be paying for the giveaways.

As in most things in life, there is no one answer or magic bullet. Change can be evolutionary or disruptive depending partly at least on when you choose to get started on a change effort. If you start before things are in crisis, it can be an evolutionary experience.

If not, it will certainly be unpleasant and highly disruptive. This reader recognizes this and presents a reasonable approach for Willie to consider:

“Willie is in the same boat as many recruiters. They all face the same challenge; what I’m doing now is working so why should I change? What they are doing now is just fine and will work in the current hiring environment. However, what works now might not work in the future. If the team is having problems with the hard-to-fills now, I would anticipate the problem only getting worse.”

Thanks to each of you for sending in your opinions. Here are some of my thoughts, many of which are mirrored in those of the readers who responded:

• Willie needs to develop a comprehensive approach to this issue. He should continue doing what works now and even needs to do it better. This means relying on some of the older and more experienced recruiters to continue building referral networks, holding on-site events, and doing other things that will engage and attract the current experienced worker.
• On the other hand, he also needs to start building capability for tomorrow. This means perhaps letting some younger recruiters get a social network started and to begin finding ways to connect effectively with construction workers virtually. That may mean focusing on mobile technology — recruiting via mobile phone, using Twitter, or finding some other ways to engage people working outdoors without a typical office connection to the Internet.
• Extensive planning, deep research, and large teams are not the best way to approach this. He should not spend much time in deciding which way to go because there is no good data and not many people with experience.
• His solution should be one of experimentation. He could start a number of small projects that each use a different approach and monitor and measure each one for effectiveness. As soon as one approach fails, he needs to kill it and move on. Speed is important, as is effectiveness. Keep each approach simple and cheap. Use low-cost solutions such as Ning until he is certain of its potential and then invest as much as possible to make the chosen approach robust and highly engaging.

As in almost everything in life, there is value in yesterday and in tomorrow. It is finding the right balance that is the key to success.

Taken at face value and looking at traditional work styles and jobs, there is some validity to these stories. Human resources people, recruiters, and some business people will affirm the shortage anecdotally. But it’s hard to find real examples and real numbers.

Certainly, anyone trying to hire a surgeon in North Dakota, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma, or a stock broker in Alaska may have to look long and hard. But if you are looking for these folks in urban areas or places with significant populations, the number of qualified applicants increases substantially.

After all, it has never been easy to attract skilled professionals to rural areas, and it has become even more difficult as people leave the country for large cities. Rural parts of the world are emptying into cities — especially those located in coastal areas or those with significant educational and cultural activities.

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class point out in stark numbers and colorful graphs and charts the shifts in population away from some less desirable (and often semi-rural) cities and toward others that offer the lifestyle and engaging employment desired by the emerging creative class.

Sure, thousands of baby boomers are poised to retire over the next decade or two and, yes, there are somewhat fewer young folks behind them; but is that really going to be a problem? And will the number of boomers who choose to retire reach the predicted numbers?

Studies I have seen indicate that boomers will most likely defer retirement for some time because they have not saved enough to make retirement possible or because they remain healthy and want to continue working.

We will most likely also need fewer people to reach the same productivity levels of today.

The nature of work has changed dramatically. Today only about 2% of Americans grow food or work on farms. This is truly amazing considering the amount of food produced and exported. Farms have grown much larger and are more automated. Completely automated, GPS-guided tractors cultivate fields that used to take a dozen men and several dozen horses to plow.

I was recently at a copper mine in Chile where GPS-guided ore trucks will soon obsolete the need for drivers. The widespread adoption of the Internet and its associated applications has simplified many work processes and will continue to reduce the number of people needed in many areas of the economy.

Manufacturing, too, has moved to automation or outsourcing. It was the 20th century’s economic backbone and required a huge supply of raw manpower. For the most part, workers needed to be equipped with little more than a high school education and a willingness to do hard physical labor.

But today only about 11% of workers remain employed in manufacturing and those workers are more skilled and experienced than at any other time in our history. Automation and outsourcing have replaced thousands of semiskilled jobs and the need for raw manpower has reached very close to zero.

So it is unlikely that there is any broad-based shortage of traditional talent or any need for drastic measures. Any shortages that may exist can be attributed to geographical location, the nature of the work, and the pay scale.

I am a believer that when the time is right, the solution appears. If organizations were really feeling the pain of shortages, they would have started training programs, raised wages, and lobbied educational institutions to change curricula. None of those things have happened on a wide scale.

And many of the solutions are expensive and socially or politically inconvenient. For example, as it becomes more and more difficult to find people willing to work for relatively low wages, retail stores are reducing the number of sales associates. They have installed systems that let customers do their own check out. And, without much additional trouble, they could install scanners that would use bar codes to bring up information about a product and answer customer’s questions. I think it is likely that we will see a “black box” retail establishment at some point, but no one would accept it today.

There are hundreds of other areas where automation could reduce the need for or replace humans if the costs were justifiable and it was socially acceptable.

Business has a responsibility to ensure its supply chain of talent and has gradually been putting programs into place to do this. Over the past decade there has been increased interest in internal leadership development programs, internships, and similar development activities. Companies are investing in diversity programs, training, college recruiting, and retention activities to ensure the supply chain.

The challenge for government is to find ways to partner with business to retrain and re-skill thousands of people who are no longer needed in traditional occupations. Educational systems from high school to university are not meeting the needs of our economy and make false promises to students by implying that they will be employable after graduation.

Recruiters know that neither a high school diploma nor a college degree is enough to ensure a job offer. Most occupations require extensive training and take years to master, but we have not built bridges between education and work.

For most people, figuring out how to get a job with no experience is the most significant challenge they face. This should force organizations to build bridges, which could be internships, short-term work assignments, part-time work, apprenticeships, and so forth. This means we need to lobby for changes in human resource policies and for changes in employment laws that limit their ability to build these bridges.

Our current employment system is based on the assumptions that workers need protection, are victims, are not able to work or make decisions for themselves. We need to wake up to the fact that the workers we need and want to hire are making choices every day about who to work for and why. They are opting for employers that provide training, ongoing development, personal growth opportunities, and flexibility.

The concept of a talent shortage is based on projections that assume tomorrow will look like today. It is also largely based on a mindset that arose out the manufacturing era when masses of unskilled, compliant labor was needed.

We now need fewer, but highly skilled, creative and independent people to propel us forward. This is the real talent shortage we face.

Willie is a progressive guy, usually the first to try out new technology or bring new ideas into a conversation. He was one of the first recruiting managers to adopt an applicant tracking system years ago, and he is an advocate of maintaining close relationships with candidates via email. He is just not sure how to go about implementing a Web 2.0 strategy or how to create a social network.

Willie’s organization is a construction company with over 1,000 employees, mostly all located in the United States with a handful in China setting up a new operation.

Despite the economy, they have lots of work. Many of their contracts are local and state government jobs that are funded by tax dollars and have strict deadlines. Revenue is excellent and the firm projects to earn more than US$1 billion this year. The future looks bright given the poor state of the U.S. infrastructure. They project doubling revenues within 5 years as more roads, bridges, airport runways, and water systems need to be replaced.

But Willie faces some major challenges.

The average age of employees is around 45 and the most valuable ones are the oldest. In fact, some of the key project supervisors and head engineers are approaching retirement and the CEO is worried about replacing them. As the competition for experienced project supervisors, civil, and mechanical engineers grows the pressure will definitely increase on his recruiting team.

His staff is centralized and large. He has two recruiters who focus on sourcing. They are expert at Internet search and generate a lot of names and potentially good candidates. He has another 10 recruiters distributed by function. Most of them are recruiting hard-to-find and hard-to-hire supervisors and engineers.

There are a few recruiters who focus on other types of hiring needs including IT and human resources and there are a few administrative and coordinating staff members to help out. Willie has resources, staff, and senior management confidence.

His senior recruiters are mixed in their interest in Web 2.0 and social networks. A couple of them are old-school and are opposed to any technology solution. They think that engineers and supervisors are not computer types and don’t surf around the web. They want to spend more time and resources on face-to-face meetings, attending conferences, and even dropping by construction sites. They would support adding more seniors recruiters.

But the rest see value in setting up a social network, especially if it could become a forum for discussing construction problems or for finding new projects. They are advocating a site that has lots of content and is less obviously a recruiting site and more of a site that generates interest and answers questions. They think it would be a way to begin attracting younger engineers and help them develop skills.

He has a colleague at another company that has used Ning to start a social network for prospective candidates. It really hasn’t been very successful. It has a few hundred members who are mostly passive.  They sign up and then never are heard from again no matter how many emails he sends or provocative chats he tries to get started. Willie suspects the problem may not be a Web 2.0 or social network issue, but more about how it is being used.

There are other factors that give him pause about social networks. For example, most people over 35 are not active on social networks, not everyone has the “Internet habit” and only log on occasionally, and some people are reluctant for privacy reasons to put personal information on the web.

But the looming retirements, lack of a strong current pool of qualified candidates, and projected robust hiring environment are real cause for concern.  Willie needs to ensure a supply of this talent for at least a decade. Current recruiting methods are working today (actually quite well) and any diversion might cause a problem.

So Willie’s woe is complex: Would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do).

What would you do if you were Willie?

I will collect your responses and print some of them (anonymously). I will also provide my own opinions about what Willie should do in a future article.

I have chosen four blogs/websites that I think are useful to recruiters and add new knowledge and perspectives. Each blogger that I have chosen is also an author of a book or two and is a researcher in his/her area. They all are looked upon as experts by their peers.

This list could be much longer, of course, and I know I have missed some other equally good blogs.  If you have a favorite, please send me a link and let me enjoy it too. I will do a new column from time to time and add more to the list.

Value Networks is a site that adds depth to the discussions we have about social networks. Verna Allee, the principal behind this site and discussion group, is known all over the world for her work in mapping networks – in other words, graphically showing us how people interact and with whom in a value chain. She has written several books on knowledge management and on social networking and has been a regular faculty member at my Future of Talent Retreat. Her website discusses and provides tools for value network analysis, which is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, optimizing internal and external value networks, and complex economic ecosystems.

While this may sound overwhelming, the site contains rich information about social networks and how to understand the interactions and interrelationships between the members of a network. The methodology is being used by many organizations to better understand how their customers interact with them and each other, how suppliers interact with customers, and how employees network both within and outside the organization.

There are many applications of this technology that could be applied to such things as mapping candidate interaction or tracking who networks with whom on your social networking site. There is also a Google group associated with this organization that might be of interest.

Jay Cross, the guru of e-learning and informal learning, has a fabulously interesting and entertaining blog discussing a wide range of topics generally around learning. If you are in a talent management role or have extended interests in learning, this is a good blog to make a regular read. Jay has written a few books on learning, coined the term e-learning many years ago, and is a regular on the speaking circuits. He is very knowledgeable about talent issues in general and often has posts that relate to the generations, demographics, and other areas of interest to recruiters and HR professionals.

His book on Informal Learning states that most organizations invest their training budget where it will have the least impact. He shows how most of us learn by doing, experimenting, or by getting someone to coach us.  You more than likely learned to be recruiter by jumping in a doing it with a little help from a more senior recruiter along the way.

Bob Sutton is a professor at Stanford and the author of a number of books that most recruiters and HR folks would enjoy. One of my favorites is his book entitled, Weird Ideas that Work: 111/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Performance.

This book is really a series of short articles or essays on topics highly relevant to recruiting. For example, weird idea number-one is, “Hire ‘Slow Learners’ and weird idea two is, “Hire People Who Make You Uncomfortable.”

His latest book is called the No Asshole Rule, in which he talks about the need for successful organizations to eliminate ruthlessly any managers who are assholes.  A fun and very relevant read for most of us!

His website and blog bring almost daily facts and commentary on management, human resources, recruiting, and related issues. It is a great source of information and ideas as well as a wealth of good material for discussion with your hiring managers.

His blog continues the discussions and is full of humor and current interest topics.

Many of you may have heard of Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto and the writer of two bestselling books, The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. He focuses on issues such as immigration and demographics.

His latest book, called the Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, explains that globally more than one-third of all workers are employed in the creative sector.

Some cities are more attractive to this class of worker and they are the growth cities which act as talent magnets. His work is almost required reading for any recruiter and his theories explain many of the unemployment and talent scarci