How, you may ask, am I going to tie my collegiate Greek experience with recruiting? Well, my friend, with two small words: "rush party".

I'm involved in planning a recruiting event with one of my teams, and we are discussing the format that has worked well in the recent past. As the other event planners are going over the event, I'm struck by the realization: Oh, my, gosh, it's a  RUSH PARTY.

Now, for those of you that lacked the Greek experience or scoff at it and considered yourself a "Gamma Delta Iota" (otherwise known as "Go- Da*ned Independent") let me tell you that I learned valuable skills as a member of the Greek community, I have made lasting friendships that are still alive today, and I now am giving back to Sigma Kappa by volunteering my time at my local chapter house by helping on resume workshop and career panels for the young women getting ready to graduate and enter the workforce. My alma mater, Miami University, was (and still is) a fairly heavily Greek campus, also being the alpha (or founding) chapter for a number of the fraternities. When I refer to a rush party, I'm talking about the process whereby new members are recruited for each organization. Each Greek organization has a goal, or number of new members, it is hoping to pledge. The panhellenic council and the leadership team of each organization works on planning the parties. Usually there are a large number of incoming freshman (and sometimes sophomores) looking to join the Greek system. Often family members will have what are called "legacy" candidates (think of them as the equivalent of employee referrals). Each Greek chapter then hosts a series of "parties" where the interested candidates get a chance to talk to members of the chapter, and after each party, the candidate decides on a set number of organizations s/he would like to return to for the next round. Each round gets longer, with first meetings being anywhere from a short chunk of time (15+ minutes) onward, depending on the logistical needs of the school (number of chapters, number of rushees). From my first rush season, I remember we had our first set of parties was 20 minutes for a full day. Then the next round was 45, then 90, then 2 hours. Each set of parties was smaller because the rush candidates and the chapters were going through an elimination process to try and match up interests.

We had training in conversation topics, learning to evaluate a person based on how they presented themselves (verbally and non-verbally), mnemonic exercises to remember the young women so that at the end of each party we could "take notes" and compare them with the other women that spoke to them. We were grouped together in a carefully coreographed entry-exit strategy so that a maximum number of women had a chance to speak to each candidate without her feeling overwhelmed.

Returning to the recruiting event in planning, we were discussing the exact same things. Who should be available for the candidates to speak with, how many people and for how long, best ways to remember key facts about each candidate to compare notes later. Let's face it, as recruiters we are all looking to make the best hires for our clients. It needs to be a match of technical skills, cultural fit, and a genuine synchronicity between the candidate and the members of the team. There are more commonalities than disparities between Rushing and Recruiting.

It would be an interesting study to find out if Greek alumnae make better interviewers overall, and how many of them move into recruiting.

Most corporate recruiters (and some agencies, I'm sure) get bombarded with "new", "innovative", "money-saving" recruiting products and services. I've looked at a few lately, and seen some innovations so I'm going to examine a few of them.

I recently tried BountyJobs.
https://www.bountyjobs.com/

Basically, it is an online recruiting marketplace connecting corporate recruiters with agencies/independent recruiters. The nice thing about it is that it allows corporate recruiters to interact with agencies to fill positions without having to put a contract in place, and to set the direct placement % you are willing to pay. It works on all positions from low to executive. I gave it a shot on a couple of positions we had open and was very pleased with the results. Some of the things I liked about it:

-Serves all of North America (Canada as well as US)
-You pay BountyJobs, they hold fees in escrow for you with a money-back guarantee
-Recruiters submit "bounties" on jobs you have listed. Easy interface to accept or deny the bounty
-Profiles that you can decline or accept
-Communication can take place completely online

This is most decidedly an advantage for corporate recruiters. So I'd say, yes, giving an "auction" business model to recruiting is positive, and innovative step forward.

NotchUp
http://notchup.com/?q=i

OK, this has got to be the most perplexing stab at a "new" recruiting business model I've ever heard of. Companies *pay* candidates to interview? Are you serious? Their FAQ section gives some interesting statistics, but I wonder where they truly *got* them? 

Here's an interesting read about this bizarre offering.

http://www.cheezhead.com/xtra/2008/01/29/more-thoughts-on-notch-up/

My thoughts? Yeah, not so much for me. It really makes no sense as a business model to *me*.

theLadders
http://theladders.com

OK, when the Ladders first came out a few years ago, it was actually an interesting business model. Basically the premise was that job seekers pay for job postings from employers, and employers could post their $100K plus jobs for free. I actually got some great candidates from the Ladders.

And then...

At the end of 2007 the Ladders changed their business model (probably due to lack of funding). I had signed up for a free trial when I commenced my new position, and at the end of it the sales rep gave me a really *hard* sales pitch. The company had started charging companies for job postings, and it was a hefty amount. At this time, it was for unlimited postings for a year. Now, here's the problem with this.
 
1) The sales pitch was "sign up in the next 48 hours and we'll give you this hefty discount but only if you sign up during this limited time offer period." Not so enticing.

2) Not all of the jobs I have are over $100K.

3) Their subscription fee has no provisions for single postings.

4) Not built into my recruiting budget for the year.

And to me, the really duplicitous part of the business? They are still charging applicants those fees to have these jobs sent to them. Yeah. It's now just one more job board, the only differentiator is that you know the salaries will start at $100K. I queried my local recruiting community when I got the hard line sales pitch and found that they'd done the same thing and that the subscription amounts and "trial period" varied *vastly* from company to company.

Final analysis: leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

Honorable Mention for creativity:

DevSelect Recruiting

This is a local recruiting agency, and I'm impresssed with something they have done which takes advantage of the local recruiting economy. Here in the Seattle area, one of the biggest employers is Microsoft. They employ a *lot* of contractors (in fact, yours truly has made a career out of it, you might say.)

Now, due to a nasty co-employment lawsuit MS found themselves in a few years ago, they have some very strict guidelines for contractors. As a contractor through a temp agency, I have 12 months that I can work at MS. I could do one year in one group, or several smaller contracts within that year. But at the end of that twelve months, I am required to take my "100 Day Break". This is exactly what it sounds like. I cannot work in any capacity at MS for that 100 days (unless I'm hired full time; no limitations on that.) During that 100 day break I have been known to: travel, get another job, go on unemployment, take classes, etc. In fact, it was after my last contract ended that I started at my most recent employer.

There is a whole local lexicon about the whole MS Contracting lifestyle. While on campus during your contract, your email alias starts with "a-". So, my email alias has in the past been "a-kfife @ microsoft.com". It's also been a couple of variations on that.

So, at any given time there are a pretty significant number of contractors on their 100-day break. DevSelect has come up with a program to work with them. I asked Bob for a summary for this blog and hey, it's a free plug:

“What if … you knew precisely when Microsoft’s top “ay-dash” contractors were coming off contract?  And (because you’re special), you could “cherry pick” people from the list to fill positions at your company before the rest of Seattle knew they were available?  Program, product and release managers, on-line marketing specialists; development & test; even internal IT lab managers and tech support.

You should know about DevSelect’s new experiment – code-named “Preview”.

DevSelect (http://www.devselect.com) has been in the NW contract staffing and recruiting business since 1999 -- usually associated with high tech and telecom.  In October, DevSelect began compiling a list of Microsoft contractors who were nearing their ‘break in service’ dates and quietly looking for their next assignment.  In January, DevSelect began publishing the list – with weekly updates - to a small number of favored clients.  The weekly updates are free – DevSelect makes its money when clients contract or hire someone through the program.

I've been pondering the myriad industry pieces of knowledge needed in a recruiter. Account management, marketing, sales, industry analyst, legal, human resources. Our profession truly does touch on many aspects of any given business model.

In the last five years or so, I have seen a proliferation of recruiting and HR titles, some of which seem redundant to me, and some which are way too broad. So I posed a couple of questions on LinkedIn Q & A just to see what people had to say, and the responses were very interesting. The first was generically about "titles". Let's face it, people constantly try and re-invent not only themselves but their industry as well. Consider it a marketing paradigm. In recruiting, I've seen a proliferation of titles delineating different functions that have evolved. Sourcer, Internet Recruiter, Staffing Consultant, Staffing Partner, Talent Acquisition Specialist, Sourcing Specialist, Name Generator, Recruiting/Staffing Researcher.

The overall response I got was that many people are confused about some of the delineations. For example, is a "Talent Acquisition" professional any different than a "recruiter"? How is a "Staffing Partner" different than a "Staffing Consultant"? Is a "Name Generator" closer to a "Sourcer" or a "Researcher"? Does "Acquisition" bring to mind the image of forcefully "getting" something through the leverage of greater resources, as in mergers and acquisitions"? Is this a good or a negative connotation? I can see both sides of this. In today's market we have a much greater number of tools at our recruiting disposal, by virtue of the fact that technology has allowed us to expand into different mediums to identify and pursue talent. I see that there truly is an advantage to those entities with greater resources, be they money or personnel. I also believe the good recruiter knows how to leverage his or her resources, whether great or small, to the best of their ability. Even taking into account the bedrock of great recruiting, which is networking, fewer resources mean fewer ways of connecting. Email, phone, instant messaging, social networking sites, face to face meetings all have different levels of involvement. If you work for a company with a strict policy on activities such as instant messaging and internet usage, you may be crippling your effectiveness and putting yourself that much further behind the rest of your competition.

If we break up the recruiting lifecycle into two distinct parts, sourcing and closing, we can start to see a better delineation between some of the myriad titles and the views implicit within this. My belief is that most professionals know what a "full lifecycle" recruiter does...sourcing, account management, negotiation, closing. Simplified, perhaps, but no less accurate. We interface with our managers to define the jobs; we find the candidates, screen, interview and pre-close them, then negotiate. "Recruiter" has taken on some new identifiers in the last few years, but I think we all recognize the basics of the responsibilities.

Which brings us to the interesting proliferation of the "sourcing" role. In the last five to ten years, I've seen a marked upswing in the division between the sourcing and closing roles. I started my own career in an executive research role, finding that I have a talent for truly finding obscure tidbits such as contact information, articles, building out org charts, etc. But having this talent and even experience utilizing it doesn't do me much good without "full lifecycle" recruiting. It is interesting that the Sourcing role is either perceived as a strategic role, with an emphasis on passive candidate generation OR as a junior role. Those who considered sourcing to be strategic understand that it involves a talent that not all recruiters have, but it does require an understanding (preferably through experience) with the full recruiting lifecycle. The difference between sourcing being a junior or more senior role seems to lie within the context of candidate contact. If a sourcing recruiter actually reaches out to a candidate, then they are a "recruiter". If they just scour job boards, resume databases, LinkedIn etc for names to pass off to "senior recruiters" then this is the more junior role, and the comments I received indicated that this skill is perceived as being much easier to teach than account management and closing.

I find this mindset disturbing in some respects. Recruiting is a *people* and *sales* business. Understanding your industry niche/s is probably the most important part, to me, of recruiting. Understanding the profile/s you are looking for indicates to me that you are learning to communicate with your client, the hiring manager. Shadowing account reps or other recruiters to understand what they are looking for by way of requisition reviews and phone screens with potential candidates seems a much better training activity than just sitting someone down with a list of keywords to search on. Yes, it's important, but I feel that only through understanding the position requirements and the screening parameters and how the two interrelate, can someone learn to become a "recruiter". 

The one phrase that popped up consistently was "can't we get along?" Why is there even any sort of rivalry? Sourcing is just as important as closing and account management. If an organization has the resources to have this function separated out, then it should be given *just as much* respect and weight as the "closers". To me, it seems that finding a passive candidate and engaging them to consider a new opportunity can be more difficult than closing a candidate who has been through a full interview loop.

We, as recruiters and staffing managers, need to give serious weight to all the roles that encompass this industry we call "recruiting", and that such skills should be acknowledged, respected, and compensated fairly.

How do you, as a recruiter, define "thinking outside the box" in the recruiting realm? In my recent rounds of interviews, most of the questions were pretty stock and I could answer many of them "in my sleep", as it were.

Tell me about your most difficult hire. Tell me about the worst hiring manager you have had; why was s/he the worst and what did you do about it? Whiteboard diagram for me: how you would source for xyz position; the recruiting lifecycle; a search string for abc position. What ATS have you used? Tell me about a time you forged a particularly good relationship with a hiring manager? Why do you like recruiting? What's the most creative sourcing strategy you have ever implemented, and what were the results? What is your hire:requisition ratio?

Just once I'd like to see corporate hiring recruiters show *me* that they are on top of the industy. I'd like to see questions like: What is your opinion on video resumes? Have you used Facebook or SecondLife for recruiting, and what were the results? Have you thought about using SMS/cell technology to tap into the Y generation?

I recently attended a symposium called "Hire America's Heroes". It was aimed at corporate recruiters, trying to educate them on the value veterans can bring to the corporate world, and ways to overcome stereotypes. I was a "Table Captain", which meant facilitating conversation between the attendees seated at our table. I was sitting next to a young army professional who is in a platoon that helps "wounded warriors", those that have been wounded  in combat and are transitioning back to civilian life. Part of this process involves a lengthy medical evaluation (both physical and mental), and there are specific active duty soldiers that help with the process. I asked him his title and what he does. He rattled off some military title designation, then proceeded to tell me that he is the liaison for the various stakeholders (care providers, the soldier in transition and his family, administrative personnel, etc). I looked at him and said, "Oh, a lot of project management and coordination? Getting all the various pieces of the process to work together and then being accountable for getting it back on track if it isn't working?" He was a bit flabbergasted. "Yes, is that how I would message it for the civilian world?" This brief interaction was one of the key reasons for the entire event, trying to bridge the gap for both parties.

The symposium got me thinking about a lot of things, not just recruiting veterans. The presenters were all very interesting and had a lot of expertise to bring to the table in various ways. Too soon to tell if it's outside the "box" but maybe I can translate my ideas that way.

I have been pondering this question lately. Recruiting is a very diverse industry, with everything from free-wheeling high performance "mavericks" to low key HR generalists that act as the recruiter for their small organization. Recently I have been observing someone enter to the world of corporate recruiting coming from a vastly different background. This person is taking over an internal client organization from someone with a much different recruiting style. I think about the best recruiters I know, and the commonalities they have that make them successful, both at the agency and corporate level.

I did a stint as an agency recruiter, and wasn't very thrilled with the experience, but it *did* teach me about fast turn-around and high volume recruiting. When I went into the corporate arena, I saw non-agency experienced corporate recruiters buckling under what I considered to be a relatively light workload. I truly believe that an agency is a great training ground and that almost any good recruiter should have some experience in that respect. That being said, what are the personality traits that make a good recruiter?

Obviously, people skills. Dealing with both candidates and hiring managers. Attention to detail and being able to handle multiple demands at once. The ability to prioritize and move in a changeable environment.

So then we get to process. Agency recruiting, be it either contract or direct placement, has a much different set of needs than corporate recruiting. Often that includes a sales or business development aspect to it, which isn't a factor in corporate recruiting. So along with generating new business, there is the need for quick turn around and finding candidates that are going to fit the general position profile. I think even with high-end clients it's less about a "good fit" than a "generally good fit" (with the exception of the Executive Search). Does this person, on paper, meet the basic requirements as laid out in the job description? This is where the high volume component comes in. Learning to read resumes quickly, define in general terms what the client seems to be looking for, getting resumes in front of the hiring manager. In my agency days, the phrases were "turn and burn" and "Give me seventy" (percent), screen in versus screen out. For me, this mentality was not a good fit, because I'm more interested in getting quality over quantity in front of a hiring manager. I worked hard with my managers to understand what they were looking for, and I tried to make sure that my candidates felt that they were going into a job interview for a job they really wanted and would excel at, rather than a warm body to fill a short-term contract need. I also didn't do well in the highly competitive environment where recruiters "hoarded" their candidates. I'm much more about doing what's best overall rather than what's best for *me*. There were some great recruiters that thrived in that environment, and are still there today. But the lesson I learned for myself is that it's much more important for me to feel as if I can do a good job for my two clients - the candidate and the hiring manager.

Being a contractor myself, I've been sent on interviews by agencies that have no idea what the actual job is, or they don't give me the right job description, or even where eveyrone on the interview loop has a different idea of the role they want me to fill. (My favorite is the one where I met with five people and each one believed I would be a 50% of the time resource for them each...yeah, the math doesn't compute.) This particular experience has taught me invaluable lessons as a candidate that I can apply as a recruiter. I hope that empathy makes me a better recruiter in the end. 

How many times have you heard that Recruiting isn't *really* an HR function? As a recruiter, do you feel that you should be separate from your corporate HR department? How many times have you heard a disgruntled employee disparage Human Resources but exclude recruiting from their diatribes? Why the distinction?

As a recruiter, I deal with talent acquisition, and believe that I am the very first link in the Human Resources chain. Perhaps it is because recruiters are seen to have at least slightly more interest and a stake in making sure that the candidate/potential employee is being "taken care of", that their interests are of immediate concern as much as the hiring team.

How many times as a recruiter do you hear from a candidate you recruited a few years ago that has a problem, and they went to HR and were frustrated with the lack of resolution? Or maybe not even a former candidate, but a co-worker or former co-worker that is in the same position, and hopes that somehow you can give them an answer to the "Why?" behind HR's actions, or perhaps even to see if you can help them make the right contact.

I think that part of the perception of Recruiting as a profession as being not *quite* a part of HR has to do with the fact that we straddle both the internal and external business line. We work with our internal business partners, but we often also interact with other vendors and even other local recruiters, so we are more well-connected than some of our internally-focused colleagues. Because of that perception, I think that sometimes HR sees us as being less committed to the internal "bottom line". I would dare say in some instances there may be underlying professional resentment as well. We have the professional "power" to say "no" to our internal business partners, and to advise them not only on issues such as internal equity, but also in local and national compensation trends.

But with this greater flexibility comes greater responsibility to know the broader picture. We need to understand not only our internal policies, but also the ramifications of our business practices to the external world. We are more responsible for the outward-facing image our company presents to the world, and if we work in a large corporate setting, we need to understand how different business units approach not only recruiting, but also retention, training and development, forecasting etc. We need to know legal issues not only in hiring, but in interviewing; let's not even *mention* OFCCP. I think that BECAUSE we need to be aware of these issues in *addition* to our regular recruiting functions, this makes us very much a part of the "human resources" organization. I believe that in an ideal world, Recruiters would not see their HR counterparts as only doing what's best for the company and neglecting the individual, and that HR would understand that recruiters are *quite* aware of the fact that we consider the impact our hires will make on the company as a whole, and that we are not just out to fill the req.