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Most of the media coverage these days about recruiting is devoted to social networking, mobile recruiting, and blogging, but the recruiting technology likely to have the most impact if it continues to catch on at the current rate is interviewing candidates “live” from remote locations. The approach I call “interviewing from anywhere” takes advantage of widespread broadband Internet access and inexpensive webcams, two factors that severely restricted videoconferencing as a feasible alternative to face-to-face interviews a decade ago. keep reading…

Over the past six months, I’ve worked with dozens of major companies and some of the latest new recruiting and sourcing technologies. Based on this, it’s not a reach to contend that how companies will find, recruit, and hire top talent in 2010 and beyond will be far different than how it’s been done in the past few years.

I’ll also make the contention that only a few companies are ready for this shift and none of the predictions below are far-fetched.

For one thing, they’re now being successfully tried out today in some form by big-time companies. More important — they work, especially on a recruiting-ROI basis. I define this as the quality and impact a candidate makes divided by the cost and effort to find and hire the person. (Email me if you’d like to review this Recruiting ROI calculation.)

To further validate some of the more “off the wall” predictions, I’ve tied the major points to an online survey. The results are currently posted, providing an instant view of where your company stands in comparison to your competition.

With the idea of getting ahead of the recovery, here are my 2010 New Year’s predictions for sourcing and recruiting: keep reading…

For many people on the job market, the Art of Interviewing seems like a mystery. That’s why I decided to demystify it a bit by offering a few clues that will hopefully put the whole experience into perspective. I’ll start by looking at a few common words that hold within them a hidden clues about what it means to join an organization. Keeping these words in mind will help both recruiters and the candidates they are working with. keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.)

No matter how enthusiastic your employees are about participating in an internal movement program, they are bound to be somewhat frustrated if there aren’t a wide variety of assignments available for them to choose from. Even if you successfully excite your managers and other rotation program participants, you can’t automatically assume that they know how to identify or develop exciting assignments or rotations.

As a result, the rotation program manager needs to design a process and provide managers with a variety of suggestions and tips in order to make it easy for them to create internal movement projects, assignments, and rotations. This section highlights over 20 of the approaches that I have found to be effective in helping managers create more and better rotations. keep reading…

For you who have created social networks, what do you do to drive activity and success on your networks?

I recently asked that question over on LinkedIn. Let’s put the answers I got in groups, and talk a bit about them. keep reading…

Unemployment is an ugly thing. It not only injures people financially, but socially and emotionally. I was reading a fascinating article by Arthur Brooks entitled “I Love My Work.” He chronicles what happened to a small town in Austria in the 1920s when the local factory closed and most men were unemployed. Despite being paid unemployment insurance, their lives began to take on a very different — and not a happy — shape.

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

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

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is keep reading…

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission in which the world witnessed the first human to walk on the moon. This event was an historic moment for mankind and one that will live on as one of the most triumphant moments for the human race. keep reading…

What’s so great about hiring someone you’ve connected with through social media? Certainly nothing greater than if they were hired from an employment agency, a job board, or a career fair, if they turn out to perform well. But with a hat tip to Sacha Chua, some of the advantages of social media are: keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, Part III., and Part IV.)

In this part of the series on job rotations and stretch assignments, I will highlight three key tools or approaches that rotation program managers can use to make an organization’s job rotation program more effective. These approaches include: 1) the critical elements of a well-designed individual job rotation; 2) tips for increasing employee participation in the program; and 3) a checklist for assessing whether your organization is a good “fit” for implementing a job rotation or stretch assignment program. keep reading…

Whenever I need an idea for an article I call Doug Berg, the CEO and/or founder, or something like that, at Jobs2Web. So to meet this week’s need, Doug suggested I write about my reticular activator. I thought this was a bit personal, and while initially offended, it turned out to be great advice. I think you will, too. keep reading…

Many contract recruiters wish they had taken that internal recruiting position offered to them two or three years ago. As in every recession, being an internal employee is viewed with envy. It seems only logical that as layoffs and cutbacks greatly reduce the number of contract recruiters, the interest in being a regular employee rises. The lure of a regular paycheck, benefits, and the sense (although false) of security score high.

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

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

“It’s a really unique situation where you have someone who is at a crossroads personally and professionally.” — Elliot Wilson

If living and working in this economy of disappearing jobs, tiny budgets, and little recruiting is getting a bit old, then perhaps you have arrived at your own personal crossroads. This metaphorical location is the intersecting point where what used to work for you in the past ends and what you will need to change in order to be successful in the future begins. As I see it, you have only two options:

1. You can continue to do what you are doing and wait for the economy to “get back to normal.”
2. You can make some fundamental changes to your core assumptions of how businesses that survive will operate so you might survive as well.

Personally, I have grave concerns about Option 1 because no one knows exactly what the new “normal” might be, and for all we know, this aberration might be the new “normal” and will remain such for years to come. If you share my concerns, please consider the following thoughts: keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, and Part III. Next week, installment five of this series will address tools and tips you can use to improve your job rotation program.)

This series of articles started out listing the pain points that many organizations are experiencing today as a result of rotation-based development initiatives rooted in history and antiquated by Henry Ford’s standard.

It then progressed into program goals and key elements that characterize more modern second-generation programs under development. Last week’s installment explored the many program variations that are expanding the scope of rotation programs, making them more relevant as tools capable of addressing retention, motivation, and productivity improvement.

This week’s installment looks at emerging best practices and program metrics that can be used to assess your program’s performance.

Best Practices in Job Rotations and Internal Movement

Over the years, many firms have used job rotations in a variety of formats.

The most famous firm that has used internal movement for development is General Electric, but other firms have developed some best practices that can also provide learning.

keep reading…

If you’re like some corporate recruiting leaders before the current downturn hit, you had your staff balanced with a solid mix of regular full-time staff, supplemented with contract staff to get you through the hiring peaks.

But maybe you weren’t quite as fortunate, and your crew was heavily loaded with regular staff recruiters, who were going full steam to keep up with the incredible hiring requisition load. Or maybe you have shed the contractors, but even your remaining staff is struggling to stay busy. Unfortunately, now that the economy has gone south, they’re running half the req loads they once did. Not only are they questioning their own job security, but you’re constantly fending off queries from your boss, the rest of HR, and maybe even the CFO as to just what the recruiters are doing, and why should you be maintaining the same staff you had when the current workload has shrunken so dramatically. Sounding familiar?

Hopefully, back in January of this year, you took Lou Adler’s sound advice that “hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.” Perhaps you’ve done just that, and are now well positioned to address any coming business increase. Or possibly you didn’t get that opportunity, or your business still hasn’t begun to bounce back.

In any event, you do have alternatives — methods you can use to gainfully deploy your staff resources in ways that clearly, and measurably, demonstrate their ongoing value to the business. The challenges will be different, depending on the size of the company you’re in. In a small firm, you are likely to have more latitude in initiating change — but possibly fewer resources available. In a larger firm with more resources, you are likely to need to build a support coalition of colleagues, business partners, or executives to create the right atmosphere for change. But in either situation, it’s critical that you build the “business case” — show the ROI through well-tracked and supportable metrics.

In my more than 20 years of recruiting leadership, predominantly in hi-tech, I’ve had ample opportunity to face this challenge, given the cyclical nature of that business. And as you can imagine, I willingly responded to a blog posting earlier this year asking other recruiting veterans for their experiences in facing the same issue. 13 of us shared our stories, from a variety of industries and backgrounds. The following are a few snapshots of some of the proven practices and strategies that have been successfully implemented by others to preserve their key recruiting assets during previous business slowdowns.

Some of these are creative twists on previous themes, while others represent really out-of-the-box thinking. [NOTE: All of them are predicated on the assumption that you know your staff --- their skills, strengths/weaknesses, and backgrounds. If you're new in the role, you might want to begin with a resume review and light career discussion with each of them.]

I do hope you find some of the suggestions below fascinating, creative, and useful. I will be presenting a seminar/workshop on this very subject, and with a lot of additional detail on implementation, at the upcoming ERE Expo in Florida in September, and we’d love to see you there. keep reading…

Our recruiting team has been examining its existing processes. This evaluation discovered that even though a firm foundation existed, each recruiter managed the recruiting life cycle differently. With this realization, each recruiter was charged with blueprinting their individual process. They presented their findings and through a collaborative workshop, developed a uniform recruiting workflow that created standardization at each critical recruiting touch-point. They also focused on increasing and improving dialogue with the hiring managers.

The impact of these changes, which I’m writing about in the July/August issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, resulted in the team’s ability to deliver a consistent and recognizable recruiting experience, facilitate increased communication opportunities with hiring managers regarding their position/candidate status, deliver a consistent approach from which accurate and objective metrics can be applied, and allow for dynamic job postings (which increase candidate interest more than standard static postings).

With the process reengineered and hiring managers fully engaged, the recruiting team had a better understanding of the positions they were working on and are able to more quickly respond to the managers’ needs. This positioning allowed for the final phase of the process improvement effort: pipelining talent. With a better understanding of our business owners’ needs and a process that dramatically shortened our time to fill, the recruiters were able to become proactive instead of reactive. keep reading…

What makes a good candidate different from a bad one? What defines a high quality candidate? I can’t count the conversations I have had with recruiters on these questions, and few have had answers.

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

This, however, has begun to change. keep reading…

Hiring salespeople from the competition always seems like a no-brainer, but there are many pitfalls with this hiring strategy.

Life would be grand if we could sprinkle a few seeds in the ground, fertilize, add water … and a great salesperson would sprout. This is truly a pipedream, but one often pursued by small business owners and sales management executives in their quest to find great sales talent. Rather than grow their own, they attempt to steal the crops from their competitors. Why not — their competitor is much better at growing a sales organization than they are. They will grab some magic from their competitor’s land and they too can enjoy great success.

When did the competition begin building a better sales organization than your company? Before you harvest their crop, consider these five myths when hiring your competitor’s salespeople. keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is Part III in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1 and Part II; next week in the conclusion to the series, look for best practices and program metrics.)

When corporate revenues are down or stagnant, talent managers typically shift their focus away from volume hiring to developing and improving existing employees.

Executives are always challenged to make the correct “buy or build” decision, but when hiring is frozen, organizations must place an increased emphasis on internal movement and job rotations to close critical gaps in talent supply and demand.

Unfortunately, many rotation programs are doomed from the start to produce mediocre results, because they employ a “one-size-fits-all” model that guarantees lower program participation rates.

As with most products and services, offering different program variations makes it more likely that your target employees will find a job rotation that fits their needs as well as the organization’s. Since the war for talent began more than a decade ago, the type of job rotation formats have expanded dramatically. It’s important to be aware of the various development opportunities available and the benefits and risks associated with each.

Here is a list of 26 different types of internal movements to consider.

Obviously, not every firm can offer employees all of these options, but it is not uncommon to develop programs that incorporate a handful.

keep reading…

If it wasn’t for hiring managers, recruiting would be so easy. But, alas, this is not to be. Instead, we can either confront them head on, or put our heads down in despair, and find still other perfectly qualified candidates they still won’t like. Unfortunately, too many recruiters fall into this endless productivity-draining black hole, and wonder why the latest new sourcing wonder drug quickly loses its effectiveness.

If you’re like me, I don’t like doing searches over again. Early in my recruiting career, this was the driving force behind the creation of Performance-based Hiring — a tool for taming hiring managers. I offered its use to hiring managers for free by suggesting a simple trade-off: they’d see better and fewer candidates from me if they followed some simple steps. Most agreed. As a result my search firm got as many assignments as we could handle, since we were the only one using this performance-based hiring process. It also worked.

With the goal of taming hiring managers in mind, here are some of the basics of Performance-based Hiring. Try them out if your hiring-manager clients want to see too many candidates, can’t decide among the best, or exclude these best ones for bad reasons: keep reading…

Subtle as it may seem, there is Grand Canyon of difference between a database of prospective candidates and a community of talented prospective candidates.

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

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