So why am I doing this?

I receive calls all the time from colleagues in the industry wanting to share best practices and pick my brain given my background and experience. When I got approached by the Muscular Dystrophy Association through a friend to donate some time to help raise money for children in need, I thought to help, by not only giving back to a worthy cause but also helping our industry as well.

I challenge you all to represent our industry and make a substantial donation to the Muscular Dystrophy Association through this initiative.

If you would like to read more about my eBay Brain auction and potentially put in your own 501(c)(3) charity tax deduction donation bid, see the EBay Auction Site. If you feel you cannot afford my brain, but you would like to help such a worthy cause, then please make a small tax-deductible donation here.

Howard Adamsky penned an interesting article the other day that struck a raw nerve with me. So much so that not only did I take the time to respond (which I do not do a lot of these days), but it actually lured me out of the darkness to jump on my soapbox with an article.

For those of you with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), I will give you the abridged version so you can all get back to busily juggling your day. Further on, I will give you the larger, contextual version from a recruiting leader who has learned some hard lessons over the last five years.

ADD Version

As children, we were enamored with objects that were bright and shiny. Our parents would pull their hair out in dismay as they tried to keep us on task and focused on the discussion/lesson at hand, but the magical enticement of that new bright and shiny object was too much.

Fast-forward many years in the future, where we are now adults with recruiting responsibilities, and some of us are even in important positions of management and leadership.

A typical day might involve you reading an article or receiving an e-mail from a colleague highlighting a new tool, website, or technique. Later that day, a recruiting or business leader comes to you saying that recruiting (you) cannot find enough quality candidates, so what are you going to do about it? While in that state of dread, you flash back to childhood. You remember the joy that that bright and shiny object brought you. Back in the present day, you suddenly remember that article you read recently about Second Life.

“Let’s try Second Life,” you pronounce to the leader.

Larger, Contextual Version

Don’t get me wrong: There is nothing wrong with innovation or trying something new. The world of recruiting would not advance if we did not continue to try new things. This is where we have to be careful though, as the correct balance needed between innovations and tweaking or enhancement of an existing model, process, strategy, or structure can be the difference between success and failure. Go too far on the innovation front and you might get kudos for trying something new, but will it produce the results? Go too far the other way and people will frown at you as “old school,” not willing to look to the future, and you are putting your company or yourself at a competitive disadvantage.

It is human nature to gravitate toward things that are new versus revisiting and refining something that you have done before. It is easier and sexier to try that new social networking site (last count, I think we are pushing 100) than it is to take the time to carefully analyze what produces the greatest results, then refine, adjust, and build upon the existing success.

You might be saying to yourself, “Bah, humbug! My employee referral program delivers up to 40% of my total hires, so it really does not need any more attention. I want to focus on some of the new ideas like blogging, social networking sites, or interesting things like Twitter, video resumes, Second Life, or MySpace.”

Of course, that is your prerogative, and just because I am writing this article does not mean you are going to change. But, before you hit the back button or move on from this article, I pose to you the following questions: Do you know all the sourcing channels where you made your hires from last year? Do you know what they represented as an overall percentage? Do you have any ideas as to how much they could be increased this year? Do you know if the percentages are even accurate?

Let’s look at an example of a corporate recruiting function and what the breakout of its sourcing channels might be. (Note: Of course, all companies will vary on these numbers, but for the purpose of this article, I am taking a mix of my own experience, that of colleagues in the industry who track this data, as well as external benchmarking like the CareerXroads Source of Hire Survey.)

• Employee Referrals: 40-50%
• Careers Web Page: 15-20%
• Job Boards: 15%-20%
• Networking/Cold Calling/Headhunting (generally referred to as “sourcing”): 0-20%
• Agencies: 5-10%
• Other (social-networking sites, blogging, MySpace/Facebook, Twitter, Second Life, etc.): less than 10%

So, the million-dollar question that needs to be asked here is: If I am going to help my organization increase the identification of quality talent, where am I going to invest my time, resources, and dollars to try and produce the greatest return on that investment? Is it better to focus on what produces the greatest volume and quality of candidates (employee referrals, as an example), and look to adjust, improve, or re-invigorate the program to increase it by an additional 10%? Or, am I better served investing in dozens and dozens of seemingly innovative new approaches to try and get the additional 10% increase that way?

Don’t get me wrong: Change and innovation is good. Every recruiting strategy must be diverse and look out for potential new sources that identify candidates. I am sure that most people reading this will say, “I am going to do both.”

But, do all of us have endless resources and deep pockets? Of course we do not. For that matter, I would argue that you are better served doing a few things incredibly well rather than a dozen things with so-so results.

Why don’t you invest heavily in print media anymore? Why is it that you do not go to as many career fairs? The answer to both is they generally do not produce the ROI that you are looking for. Otherwise, you would advertise in every newspaper or magazine where you thought you could get candidates to come to you. Look at the percentage of hires that new social networking sites produced last year. Did it produce the comparable investment (not just money, but recruiters’/sourcers’ time, energy, and effort) you expected, or were hoping for more?

This scenario is just as applicable to a process, program, or recruitment organizational structure. New leaders have a tendency to want to come in and implement the “new thing” so as to make an impact with leadership and save the organization from itself. I cannot count the number of times industry colleagues have told me that they have a new leader in place and they are going to roll out something new that was tried many years prior by a previous incumbent in the same role. Change for the sake of change is bad; innovation for the sake of innovation is similarly disruptive. We have all heard that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I believe that doing things too widely different or blindly following innovation can have just as dramatic an effect. From a business/recruitment perspective, investing in something because it is new without proper due diligence is just as insane, particularly when you are no further forward from where you originally started, as this is just the same as if you never started at all. What you have ended up doing is wasting your and the company’s time and money.

I know companies selling new products and services will not be big fans of my thinking, nor will some individuals who spend their time writing articles about new, bright, shiny objects. Remember, what I am not advocating is the stopping of change or innovation, but more of a “look before you leap” attitude. Simplify and refine what you already have before adding more to the pile for the sake of saying to your boss that you are trying something new. It takes courage. It takes conviction. But, in the end, it is generally all about results (producing a hire). What we do for a living is quite simple, but sometimes we seem to have a tendency to over complicate it.

The next time you read an article or see someone presenting the latest “bright and shiny” new tactic or tool that claims it will solve all your talent identification problems, you might want to stop, think, and do a little homework before you go blindly investing in something where, in the end, your energy and effort could have been served better elsewhere. Sometimes, the right answer does not necessarily equal what is interesting, different, and new but, rather, something that you know already works and requires a focused commitment and conviction to adjust, tweak, and improve.

Conquering and Dividing

Given my sales background, it occurred to me many years ago that recruitment is not that different from sales. In most cases, unfortunately, our business models do not reflect the similarities. If you look at sales, most organizations have “hunters” and “farmers” who hold very different roles in the organization and possess very different skill sets. In my mind, a sourcing structure within an organization is no different. You have experts in leveraging primary and secondary intelligence (i.e., “researchers” — a role on my team) and another group of individuals who romance candidates, build relationships, and sell the talent (i.e., “callers”). I have even taken this model to a level where it includes a function that most staffing leaders agree is important but often allow to get pushed to the side given the other priorities of a reactionary model: I employ dedicated individuals who focus solely on account management, providing proactive, high-level strategic sourcing consulting to the staffing businesses we support. This way I now have individuals who find the talent, individuals romance and sell the talent, and finally individuals who focus on the business issues and solutions that map back to the sourcing strategies, thus allowing the other two functions to focus on what they do best.

My team now operates with a mindset that is more akin to a sales and marketing function, which creates strategies around market segmentation, relationships, and strategic selling and deploys permission and viral based marketing programs.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

One of the key problems we initially hit as a sourcing team, given that we do not operate at the requisition level, was trying to provide talent that is relevant and directly targeted to the recruiters we support. Additionally, we found that given the size and complexities of a company like Microsoft, one inherent problem historically existed: Not all recruiters know exactly where a great candidate might fit beyond the business they supported, given that most recruiters do no go deep into every business in the company. So we embarked on an exercise of understanding how all the core tech roles at Microsoft might “bucket” into like requirements, thus enabling us to also understand the unique, but similar, core requirements of each of our businesses. We now have a global map of all development profiles, domains, and the business groups they role up into. The bottom line: 80% of the candidates we supply to the P&L recruiters we support are now accepted, a definite increase. This has also allowed us to focus on what I know a lot of great agency recruiters do, which is to identify a great candidate and shop him or her around to several clients, acting as a “talent broker” for the businesses that have the greatest appetite and need for that person. By being able to step up one level above the requisition and see the similarities of the development profiles across the company, we have removed the issue of playing “go fetch” on multiple reqs from multiple clients. We now have a model that allows us to push candidates into the inboxes of the recruiters who need them the most.

Elevator Pitches

An elevator pitch is an exciting and enticing story or opportunity that can be told in the time it takes to ride an elevator from the top floor to the lobby. Given that my team had embarked on a exercise of understanding all the development profiles at Microsoft, it made sense that we also must create elevator pitches on our candidates so our “callers” would be at there most effective in selling potential passive candidates on the cool opportunities that Microsoft has to offer. If you are like me and you do not subscribe to the “blah, blah, blah” help wanted ads on most job boards and corporate websites — which mostly inspire candidates (especially passive) to do nothing more than flee in horror — then you certainly understand where I’m coming from. Most good recruiters create elevator pitches naturally in their heads after working in a space they support for some time. But I wanted to ensure there was some corporate memory for any new people who came on to the team, so we would be able to confidently and quickly reach out to passive candidates with a common and sexy story to tell. Using elevator pitches to describe opportunities at Microsoft allows all team members to understand the bigger picture around all core technical profiles and adjust to sell other opportunities outside of the business they support. This small adjunct project has gained a lot of traction in the rest of the staffing organization, who are looking to use our elevator pitches for their own P&L recruiters to help sell candidates.

Automating the Web

I recognized long ago that there was a need to work out how to most effectively separate qualified and interested candidates from the high volume of candidates out there in the global talent pool. This was even more apparent in building a high-volume sourcing model, given that we needed to do achieve quantity while maintaining quality, even if we only spend 5% of our time on active candidate identification (vs. the 95% we spend on passive talent identification). Thanks to people like Shally Steckerl, who I hired as a Microsoftie to specifically help me architect such a solution, we have been able to turn this vision into a reality. We have now created a system that allows us to automate the identification and pre-screening of active and semi-active candidates by leveraging “bots” that run every 15 minutes, 24/7, against the core technical profiles we support. We then automated a process by which we personally reach out to these individuals to ascertain their interest and validate their expertise. The approach is one of smart, targeted, direct email contact initiating one-on-one conversations with hundreds of individuals simultaneously. The end result is that we can quickly and ethically identify a very large volume of leads, reach out to a targeted subset of that number, and produce interested and pre-qualified prospects yielding an acceptance of 80% by the business units we support.

This strategy also allows us to track deep metrics against each of the core technical profiles, which show us critical throughput on how many people opened the emails, read them, deleted them, forwarded them, responded, and ultimately made it through to the recruiters we support. With this type of data it makes it a whole lot easier to adjust targeted communications real-time to ensure we get maximum effect and throughput for out efforts. Such automation also allows us to dig deeply into hidden information and process it in such a way as to be able to identify patterns and pools of talent previously untapped. One of the most critical aspects of this is Peer Regression Analysis (Shally and I plan to co-author a joint article on PRA shortly), by which we are able to regress successful industry luminaries and identify the single pivotal point where they “became” or were recognized as a luminary. Once we locate that point, we then analyze their relationships at the time and find other individuals who were influenced by them (or who in turn influenced them), thus revealing a source of potential prospects previously unexplored.

Yesterday Is Not Today

One area that I noticed that usually gets put on the bottom of the to-do list — even though all recruiters agree it is important — is reaching out to candidates who might have been considered years ago but who at the time turned down a job offer or opportunity to interview. My team decided to revisit all candidates who had previously been made offers or declined interviews to see if they would be interested in discussing a career path again. Lo and behold, the majority of people were interested and surprised that an organization had taken the time to reconnect with them. This program has been so successful that is has become part of my team’s recurring core sourcing strategies.

Outsourcing the Administrivia

One of the things that I and most recruiters hate about our jobs is the amount of administration associated with the role. To me, it was critical to remove or greatly reduce this aspect of the role so that talented individuals could focus on what they do best: identify talent and sell that talent on a great career opportunity. To solve the problem I formed a strong relationship with a RPO partner who handles all of our adminsitrivia. I know my team thanks me for it.

CRM Rules!

We could not effectively manage many of the strategies above if we did not use a solid customer relationship management solution that helps us not only proactively capture talent and market to it, but also drive real time metrics and reporting to identify the flaws and holes in our business on call. I could spend just this article alone covering the value that CRM has to play in any model, not just sourcing. I’m sure that if my team is reading this article, they’ll get a chuckle — as they hear this from me almost daily. When you can produce reporting and metrics at will on every part of your business, from individual to team level, that everybody can see real time, you have reached a level of transparency in your business where everyone is accountable (including your customers), everyone knows what needs to be done, and everyone gets solutions quickly and easily. I will leave you with a final thought on CRM that to me this year has resonated louder than any other: Transparency implies openness, communication, and accountability.

If your process, tools, systems, and strategy are transparent, then your customers better understand the challenges and opportunities you collectively face, allowing you to move past the “how to hold both parties accountable” phase and focus on what is really important: spending the time removing the roadblocks and delivering on results. It’s a win/win proposition. I intentionally did not get down into the weeds in this article around how to make all these programs and strategies come to life, because the reality is that what is originally dreamed up or white-boarded takes a large amount of effort to realize. More importantly, it takes a very passionate group of individuals coming together and sharing a collective vision. Without such a team, none of these programs and strategies would ever have been born in the first place.

1. Identifying prospects. How many prospects (to steal a sales term that refers to people before they become candidates) actually need to be identified through primary and secondary research? This could be through personal networking, name-generation services, cold calling, etc. These are basically candidates who are not in your ATS or active on job boards.
2. Pre-qualifying interest. How many prospects that you’ve identified are actually interested in talking with you about potential opportunities with your company or client?
3. Qualifying candidates. How many of the remaining pool are actually qualified?

I will argue that most companies don’t even think of these metrics. Of those that do, most can’t or don’t know how to capture them. Let me give you an example of how this might look. Some companies will have better or worse ratios than this so I have taken a conservative middle ground (based on data our team has captured through numerous projects as a reference point and questions asked of other companies working in a volume model). Example scenario:

• 80 passive candidates are actually identified through primary and secondary intelligence for a research project.
• 25% (or 20 candidates) are actually interested in talking with you to further explore the opportunity.
• 25% (or five) of those interested candidates are considered pre-qualified, based on a look at the resume, an initial phone call, or biographical data you’ve captured elsewhere.
• Still fewer of the five pre-qualified are actually fully qualified, thus the numbers dwindle down even further.

If we assume a short-list-interview-to-hire ratio of 5:1, and further assume that the five pre-qualified candidates are actually fully qualified, then the above scenario would result in one hire. Now let’s imagine you represent a company that needs to make 500 hires in a year. Reverse the metrics back up, and you will see that you would need to initially identify 40,000 passive candidates to meet your hiring goal. Scary, huh? While you’re considering the implications of the above, consider the following questions:

• Are you resourced to handle a true passive candidate model?
• How many of the other four candidates on the shortlist above might map to other roles in your business? Do you know the most effective method to shop them around?
• Do you know how to improve this number and metric to your favor?
• Can you keep the candidate experience high while volume sourcing?
• Does an active candidate strategy make more sense? It might seem like it, but are you really getting top talent that way? For that matter, can you even reach your hire numbers through just an active strategy alone (job boards and candidates coming to you)?
• Do you know how much of your strategy needs to be passive and how many resources or costs need to be aligned to get there?
• Do your hiring managers, staffing leaders, or business-aligned recruiters scream for passive talent they can’t find? If so, what is their real reasoning for making this statement? Are passive candidates really better anyway?
• Does the actual passive talent pool supply equal your business demand for the target area?
• Do you have a CRM strategy to capture passive candidates who might not be interested today but could be interested months from now? How many of those initial 80% in the scenario above who said “no interest” could transformed into interested or active candidates down the road?
• Do you have a permission-based one-to-one marketing strategy to continually target this audience?
• Are you aware of the EEOC and PII implications of approaching passive candidates?

Granted, if you represent an executive search firm, where you might fill a handful of positions a year, then your strategy of seeking passive candidates by reaching into your rolodex (or for the young recruiters reading this, your contact management system) and networking makes perfect sense. But what if you overload your recruiters with too many reqs that have diverse requirements? Then the passive candidate strategy becomes a little more tricky, given the fact that it takes more time to produce results. So what does this all really mean? First, I know a lot of you will be up late at night thinking about passive candidate strategies and will split the atom every which way to Sunday on the metrics example I have given above. Don’t get hung up on the specific numbers in the example. Rather, you should be thinking about what you really need to understand in order to make a passive candidate strategy work for your situation. There are lots of questions that a single article like this could not answer anyway, but I can leave you with one thought that is worth pondering: Passive candidates might potentially equal better quality talent, but ask yourself if you are ready to pay the price (in terms of cost, resources, processes, strategy, technology, etc.) to get this kind of quality in volume and whether you are structured to successfully deliver on that promise. Do you even know where to start? If you don’t know the answer to all of the questions posed here but you believe that a passive candidate strategy is critical to the success of your business, then there is no time like the present to start putting your previous assumptions under the microscope!

• They share the knowledge and wealth as if it raises the overall ability of staffing within a company and the industry on the whole.
• This kind of attitude shows you as a team player who is willing to help others become great as well.
• Fundamentality as human beings, it feels good to give and see others benefit from our wisdom and knowledge.
• By bringing others up to your level of expertise, you are seen a strong leader.

And then there’s the “hold your cards close” camp:

• They share very little of their intellectual capital, believing that this is what sets you apart from other recruiters. As long as other people view you as the expert, then you have something to offer a company that other recruiters might not.
• By not giving away your strategies and how you execute them, you gain a competitive advantage that might get you to a candidate first or close a candidate before other recruiters can, since they do not possess the same knowledge and expertise. As it becomes harder to find great candidates, you find yourself in a better competitive position.
• People come to you because you are the expert and that can make you feel important and needed.
• If the information you give out starts to bring others up to your level, then you might not stand out as one of the best anymore.

Both these approaches are not mutually exclusive to just the recruitment profession and how we deal with other recruiters in other companies. This issue exists as much in teams and departments within companies outside the recruitment profession. In larger organizations, you might have individuals or departments that focus on competitive intelligence who look not only at corporate structures and products but also at who and why individuals in that particular company successfully do what they do. Why does company X have a decentralized recruitment function while company Y outsourced all recruitment? Why is one recruiter successful at sourcing “purple squirrel” candidates (impossible-to-find candidates) and how does he or she do it? These are all questions that we ask ourselves, particularly management, and ultimately one of the ways to get the answers to these questions is simply to ask them. But for this transaction to be completed there must be someone on the other end of the questions who is making the conscious decision to share on not to share. What about the sharing of information with other recruiters who play in exactly the same space as you do, particularly when the companies or agencies they work for are seen as strictly competitive, so that sharing could lessen your completive advantage? This may seem on the surface to be a potentially dangerous activity. But there are advantages when recruiters who play in the same competitive space share candidates and knowledge with each other, since a candidate who might not be a fit for company A could be a perfect fit for company B (this practice exists quite actively today in candidate/fee splitting). Their view of the world is that they are being paid to find the right talent by their client or company, and if the sharing of candidates and knowledge helps them achieve their goal then they will gladly do it. The other side of this debate is whether what you share in a public forum is your knowledge or the confidential intellectual property of the company that you currently work for or a previous employer. This could be an article in it’s own right ó probably best written by a lawyer rather than someone who is just a recruiter ó so I won’t go into great depth on this final point. But it is still worth considering further. Since I could not think of an exceptional way of ending this article I will take the easy way out and leave you with a few quotes from some semi-famous people which you can use to draw your own conclusions on the subject. “Whatever we possess becomes of double value when we have the opportunity of sharing it with others.”

ó Jean Nicolas Bouilly “Keeping a little ahead of conditions is one of the secrets of business.”

ó Charles M. Schwab “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.”

ó Margaret Fuller

1. Identify who you are and why you are calling.
2. Convey the nature of your request of that person (to network, connect with an expert, etc.).
3. Secure permission to email them in future.
4. Get off the phone.

The same steps can be achieved over email (my personal preference as first contact, but not all the time), but in this case you’d remove steps 3 and 4, of course. Your email should be to the point; it should not be longer than two small paragraphs. Don’t include job descriptions or anything else at this stage. Number three on the above list is critical, as I will point out in a follow-up article how to maintain and manage your network by letting technology automate a lot of the process, since we all know that successful networking can be a heavy time commitment especially once your network gets bigger. If you do your homework, leverage your existing network, and think carefully about your first connection, you will be well on your way to creating a new network within 30 days. I have built a career (even outside of recruitment) around these three principles, and I believe nearly all successful recruiters have leveraged some or all of these points in a professional way as well.