The economy is slow, gas prices are through the roof, and it is causing problems everywhere. Employees are looking for jobs closer to home or something better to offset the recent pillage of their pocketbooks. Employees are looking for ways to cut costs, so help them do it before they look somewhere else.

Brand your business as the best in town and you will really set your brand apart during these tough economic times.

Although the goal of any company right now is to reduce operating costs, all while trying to maintain or increase profit, what if that’s not enough? What if the goal you have in mind right now is really going to hurt you in the long run? Would you be willing to take a risk? Increase while everyone else is decreasing? That is precisely what I am telling you to do.

Growth during a recession in order to promote your brand is important, and talent is the key to growth.

“It is well-documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good times.” –John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School.

This is true with respect to recruiting. Branding your company as the best place to work during a recession is critical to the process. Trust me, top talent is looking, especially now.

When you start to grab these players during a recession, it will positively impact productivity, so whether you are a search consultant advising clients, or an HR executive, you need to think about this scenario as a way to impact your business positively over the long term.

Branding Basics

Use a simple plan to brand your business as the place to work during a recession:

• Maintain or increase advertising for key employees (profit builders).
• Implement four-day workweeks to reduce operational costs without hindering performance or productivity.
• Provide greater choices for preventive health programs.
• Consider telecommuting for certain employees to reduce commuting expenses.
• Promote innovative employer value propositions, not standard benefits.
• Make a recruitment video and link it to your website, postings, and ads.
• Market these benefits rigorously.

Small- and medium-size businesses will benefit the most, but if you can provide an image that highlights stability, security, growth, and innovation during economic uncertainty, you will see a shift in the attitude toward your company.

As the great Morpheus says in “The Matrix,” there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. Have a nice stroll!

Recruiting is not always easy. The working hours can be long, and the stress may seem never-ending, but when you have a superb team with an excellent manager, those negatives can turn into positives.

So how do you produce this superb team? The answer is great leadership, and though it may seem simple, there is a lot more to it than just having an experienced manager. The tools to be an effective and successful recruiting or talent-management leader can be broken down into three categories: attributes, association, and application. Or put another way, this is the “triple A” approach.

Breaking Down the AAA Approach

Attributes provide you with the leadership acumen necessary to manage a specific group or team, and in our case, we are dealing with recruiting teams. Why are attributes important? Consider this example: recruiters often use the art of psychological reciprocity, which states that if you give somebody credit for his or her intelligence, they are mentally and morally bound to give you credit for yours. This is a common tactic used by Type A recruiters to probe for a close or even draw out feedback to their own accomplishments. It sounds a little like reverse psychology.

Type A personalities are highly competitive, so it is important that you develop effective attributes in order to successfully manage your team and common behavior patterns associated with it. So use the following:

• Consistency is important when you are managing a recruiting team. You are consistent in your decisions, your attitude, and how you manage individually as well as collectively.
• Vision matters. I remember Michael Jordan saying during an ESPN interview that he envisioned himself winning a championship, completing a shot, and reaching all of his goals before he ever did it. The same applies when you are managing the recruitment process. You must envision the success of your team first.
• Flexibility is very important, especially when you have an office full of type A go-getters. If you provide flexibility to your team, you have essentially created trust. This goes a long way from the traditional hands-on approach, which can be taken in a negative way. You are flexible and encourage communication, not intimidation. You are flexible with ideas and strategy or you’re open to change (also called adaptability!). This attitude encourages open communication.
• Focus keeps your team on track and whether it is a weekly production review or mentoring a junior recruiter, your focus must always be consistent so that your team will stay on track. As managers, you are always being looked at by the team above you and the one working with you. Your focus and determination is infectious.
• Commitment will provide continuing reassurance and confidence in your ability to provide support to your recruiting team.

Association gives you the ability to network with your team in as many areas a possible. As a manager, it is important that you encourage and allow the association of your team in as many different areas as possible collectively which will not only increase your marketing but showcases your organization as a team or brand, not an individual. A great example of this would be having your entire team register online with many of the different networking sites, as well as local organizations like SHRM. Your role as a manager is to coordinate these associations in a positive way, not as an inconvenient task. Your team will soon see the value of association and the benefits because of it.

Association has a lot of branding characteristics as well. You can measure the brand equity within your own recruiting team by the total value of the brand to your team. Are they passionate and proud of their organization and eager to be associated with it? Do they feel your passion and are you able to inspire them to do better? These questions will give you an idea of your association and its brand equity.

Application is how you apply your management skills successfully in order to achieve the recruiting team’s success. How you manage your team is important because everybody on your team has a different level of skill or experience. In combination with the five attributes discussed above, you are developing your team to achieve more by focusing on each individual’s strengths and encouraging them to develop more. This is called application. Example: If you have a recruiter who is excellent on the phone but is not a strong interviewer, then you need to mentor and coach this recruiter in a positive way while recognizing their strengths as well. Sound familiar?

Successfully applying good leadership and management skills through positive reinforcement reduces stress and inspires others to do well. The best way to incorporate application is to let each member know what they can do in order for the team to be successful and how their strengths are helping everyone reach that goal. If you allow each team member to apply his or her strengths while mentoring and coaching any weaknesses, you will develop a much better team overall.

If you are having difficulty producing that winning team, then I urge you to use the AAA approach. Get your team on-board and explain what you are doing. It is easy for a manager to think he or she is doing the right thing. But if you have a plan and focus on your own attributes as a leader, your association as a group or team, and your application of your management style, then you will see a noticeable difference in your relationships at work and the attainment numbers at the end of the year.

Aloha!

If you have been viewing more video resumes (or, what I like to call “vesumes”) recently, then you are aware of a growing trend that is replacing the standard 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper resume. And, with the speed of technology in our future, you are sure to see more.

Since I’m located in Hawaii, I have viewed a number of resumes as a part of my candidate searches, and it gives me a better picture of the candidate. Here is my advice on the 10 things that make a good video resume.

1. Video Quality. Just like a paper resume, presentation and quality are important, so attention to detail means a lot. A good-quality video resume can range from something that someone shot at home on an old camcorder to a professionally-shot video that could have been paid for, not unlike a resume writing service. These productions are much better and come with clear pictures, excellent sound quality, and an overall professional look.
2. Appearance. Did the person invest time and effort in making his or her vesume instead of shooting the entire video in one sitting and at one location?
3. Language and Business Acumen. Does the person on the video speak clearly and with the knowledge and business acumen that grabs your attention?
4. Substance. With most good vesumes, you will have the following: an introduction, objectives, history, knowledge or special skills, education, and a summary. It won’t always come out exactly in this order, or you may be missing some of it.
5. Creativity. Perhaps the best thing about a vesume is the creativity that you see with what may otherwise be a standard candidate on paper. I like to see creativity because, generally speaking, if it gets your attention, it will get the client’s or hiring manager’s attention as well.
6. Background. You will notice a lot about the quality of the video and often something about the person just based on the background or location.
7. Character. My favorite part of viewing these videos is that it shows the person’s character and that may play a significant role in a good fit. It is a great way for candidates to show their stuff and be creative in the process.
8. Editing. Review it for mistakes, errors, accuracy, and content. If you are new to reviewing vesumes, you can miss critical errors like something in the background or something that was said or was not said. So, if you are new to watching video resumes, watch them a couple of times. It will be clear after watching it more than once whether the candidate edited the video for content and clarity.
9. References. One of the best vesumes I have reviewed actually had three very credible and desirable references at the end of it. It went a long way toward presenting a high-quality candidate.
10. Length. The best video resumes are not epics. I like three to five minutes in length.

The importance of a good market analysis in your area cannot be over emphasized, and whether you’re a large corporation or a small firm, understanding your market will help identify many different factors that can have an impact on your business or clients.

As a recruiter or consultant, the employment market analysis will give you an overall projection of industries within a specific state, region, or ZIP code. There are many different companies offering detailed employment or industry data along with many different factors. I like to use www.economicmodeling.com, which has detailed data on occupations and industry location quotient, to name a few.

These reports are derived from information obtained through various state and federal agencies. I use this information in my workforce planning to clients and in business development.

Economy Overview. A good market analysis will have an economy overview, which is very helpful in understanding where your current market is and where it is going. My analysis focuses on five-year trends, which can tell me if a specific industry is growing or not. This can be important in identifying industries in your business development that you can capitalize on. It is also helpful in establishing parallels in which one industry may suffer but, because of the paralleled verticals, you can focus your candidates in another direction.

Shift Share Analysis. Shift share analysis, or regional competitiveness, isolates growth (projected to occur over the next 10 years) that can be attributed to regional causes rather than simply to national economic or industry trends. In my case, this is especially important in Hawaii due to our specific region. Local knowledge should be employed to discover why these industries in your market analysis are outperforming national trends and thus reveal the region’s competitive advantages. A very good report will give you these specific details in presentation-ready graphs, bars, tables, and maps.

Occupational Changes. My report usually shows the fastest changing occupations in my particular region and, as I previously mentioned in the article, this information will not only guide your business as a recruiter or consultant, but it will also be valuable in educating clients with respect to growth. The information in my report will give you a rough calculation of the change in five years. This may be very useful for a recruiter or consultant who is working in a new region or market and needs a snapshot usually arrived at with local knowledge.

Strategic Advantage. Providing your company or a client with a detailed report gives a strategic advantage with information and demographic analyses that can be used to analyze the regional economy and workforce. In my case, having a tool like the market analysis provides that advantage. Knowing the impact of businesses entering, leaving, growing, or shrinking in a region can be valuable not only to your success but that of your clients. I recommend taking a look at a sample of these reports so you can gauge how it will be helpful in your particular situation. The ability to understand current and future trends in a regional economy is more important than ever to both add value to your knowledge as a recruiter or consultant as well as to provide leverage in your area of business development.

A good market analysis is important, and I would recommend it to anyone looking to stay competitive in today’s market.

In today’s competitive search market, it may just take a bit more than a creative voicemail or a tasty phrase in your cold-call in order to entice a passive candidate to entertain a better opportunity.

Within my own very tight market in Hawaii, unemployment is at an all-time low and potential passive candidates deal with a barrage of cold-calls and emails from recruiters looking to fill positions with top talent. A more progressive strategy for finding these candidates could make all the difference in your search.

Creating interest is perhaps the most important goal in obtaining a passive candidate. You may be presenting your opportunity with the same approach that other recruiters or consultants use. It behooves you to take a different approach. It is so easy today for a candidate to delete an email, or hit No. 3 and erase a voicemail, so whatever you say must attract interest and whatever you provide must be eye-catching.

In your goal to create interest, a face-to-face meeting, whether over lunch or coffee, always provides you with the best way to present your opportunity.

Let’s look at some creative ways to get that meeting and create interest:

1. Assemble opportunity portfolios. This is a creative way that I use to cold-contact a passive candidate. It consists of a folder or portfolio that is personally addressed to the contact. Inside the portfolio is a snapshot of the opportunity for which I am contacting them and an invitation to lunch or coffee. I hand-write this invitation. A lot of passive candidates receive regular solicitation on the phone for a potential opportunity, and while this is a time-tested and proven way of contacting candidates, it also can be very uncomfortable for some. A portfolio or folder is a great way to market to these candidates.
2. Email your opportunity on a video clip. Shoot a video explaining why you are contacting them and personally address them in this video. Something like: “Hello, Mike, my name is Joe Smith, and I am sending you this email because I would like the opportunity to speak with you about an opportunity with a different company. Please accept my invitation in confidence over lunch or coffee. Thank you.” This is a basic and simple invitation, but it is effective in opening up lines of communication.
3. Update your selling skills. I took a course a couple of years ago (“Professional Selling Skills” by the company Achieve Global), and since recruiting and sales share a parallel, it may be helpful to give your selling skills a boost. I enjoyed this course in particular because it focuses on helping your customer and gets you involved in open- and closed-probe question interactions and provides more of a consultative approach. Like a professional athlete, it is important to practice and continually work hard to improve your game so that you will get better at it.
4. Find an attention getter. If you’re old enough, you remember a 1977 movie called Smokey and the Bandit. Jackie Gleason’s character is Sheriff Buford T. Justice, and in the opening scenes of the movie he walks up behind a car thief, kicks him in the butt, and says, “That was an attention getter.” I’m not suggesting that you kick your potential candidate, but like Sheriff Justice you must do something unexpected and painless to get their attention! My attention-getter is opportunity portfolios with a handwritten note. Yours can be anything really, as long as it is creative, different, and allows you to make initial contact.
5. Remember that privacy is paramount. A majority of passive candidates will listen to what you have to say about an opportunity, but privacy should direct your actions. A lot of passive candidates are uncomfortable about engaging for the simple fact that it may not be a comfortable time and place. Know how to contact them without putting them in a situation that may initially make them feel concerned about confidentiality. If you show concern for their confidentiality, initially it will put a potential candidate at ease and will also help open up the lines of communication.
6. Know the value of importance. Have you ever heard about the rule of psychological reciprocity? The rule states that if you give a person credit for his or her intelligence, they are mentally and morally bound to give you credit for yours. I like to credit them for their present and past achievements and how that is important in my opportunity.

Be different than what your competitors are doing. If you aren’t following the same model as everyone else, candidates will notice you.

To capitalize on your referral base network, it’s important to implement different techniques and strategies in order to maximize the return of investment. In this article, I’m going to suggest different techniques or strategies that will continue to build your referral-base network so that it will provide you with a wealth of referred candidates and yet provide you with a progressive recruiting tool that can diversify your results.

When you first started building your referral-base network, you used simple tools like meeting key people, asking for referrals from placed candidates, or attending professional networking events.

I noticed that over time, my network became stale and didn’t grow to include the kind of key people who could make a significant impact in my referral base network. I decided to take a look at new and progressive ways of refreshing my existing network and adding to it as well.

1. Trend capitalization is an excellent way to refresh or build your network. Following trends will diversify your network and give you more visibility. If you pay attention to trends, you’ll have a definite advantage by having the ability to contact a greater network pool. We have all used Craigslist.com, LinkedIn, or Zoom. You can also capitalize on other trends, such as structured network groups (i.e., the Five O’Clock Club or the Financial Executives Network Group). I have recently started networking with YouTube as well. Here, I’ve experimented with looking for people’s video resumes and marketing myself using video.
2. Create a network plan that will identify who you’d like to meet and why. I designed my plan similar to that of a pyramid. It identifies the need as well as who in my pyramid could provide referrals for that need, based on their profile in the pyramid. The final and most important step in network planning is connecting your network, which adds value. Connecting a network is like a round robin. I may speak to Jane on ERE, and she knows Eric, and Eric knows Steve, who knows Todd. I can ask Jane, “I think you know people who know Todd ? any chance you can introduce me to him?”
3. You are a brand, regardless of your employer. Brand yourself to your network in order to obtain your referrals. An effective referral-base network will source candidates to you based on your reputation, so treat it as a brand by marketing yourself creatively. I recently did a testimonial on television for a local job board. TV viewers saw who I was and where I worked. It could have worked against me, since the ad was for a job board and viewers might have asked themselves, “Why use Mike when we could use a job board?” The answer is simple: you got free publicity with a testimonial that will further enhance your credibility as a professional.
4. Globalize your network referral base and stay in touch. When you were growing up, perhaps you had a pen-pal in a different country. I have network-referral contacts pretty much all around the world, and I’ve benefited by stay in touch with them. Call and write to people while consistently staying in touch in order to give value to your network.
5. Building relationships is very important and is critical in obtaining a referral from your network. I’ll never ask for anything without giving something first. I like to showcase how I’m different from others by taking interest in how I can help someone. For example, I like to give a free market analysis and salary survey over lunch. Being creative is important in building relationships and your goal is to stand out.

In time, with the right network, you’ll see more and more candidates being referred by more than one person. In other words, people hear your name once, they hear your name twice, and they hear your name three times, and pretty soon they feel like they must check you out.