Some business concepts worth considering when developing a hiring strategy:

1. When business conditions change, your strategy has to change along with it.
2. Tactics don’t drive strategy; strategy drives tactics.
3. Strategy drives the planning process. The plan drives the tactics.
4. Plan. Don’t react.
5. If you have the time, worry about the forest more than the trees.
6. You can’t push on a rope.

With this as a backdrop, it seems that most HR/recruiting departments don’t have a fundamental hiring strategy in place that ties directly to their company’s business strategy. If they did, it would seem, as a minimum, that requisitions would be categorized by the impact the job has on the company’s strategy. Some jobs would be more critical than others. Workforce plans would be developed to build pools of potential candidates for these critical jobs long before they’re needed, and hiring managers would be intimately involved and trained on how to find, assess, recruit, and hire the best prospects.

A description for this type of hiring strategy resembles something like this:

Maximize Quality of Hire Strategy: hire A-level talent for all strategic and critical management positions and the top-third for all other positions, without compromise. As part of this, offer careers, not jobs, at every level in the company.

While this is worthy, it seems that most hiring managers react rather than plan, and most don’t have a clue about how to assess and attract the best. HR/recruiting exacerbates the problem by focusing more on cost than quality, giving recruiters so much to do that they become mere paper pushers, and/or jumping from one sourcing idea to another in the vain search for the silver bullet.

Few companies are immune. While defining this type of hodgepodge hiring strategy is not easy, the one being used at your company probably resembles a combination of one or more of the following:

1. The transactional, minimize cost per hire strategy: find anyone who is actively looking who meets the job description at the lowest cost in the shortest period of time using the cheapest approaches possible.
2. The silver bullet strategy: try out every new sourcing idea with the hope that it works better than the last, and now tarnished, silver bullet.
3. The eliminate-the-worst strategy: put as many barriers as possible to eliminate the worst with the expectation that good people will be attracted and persevere because we have a great employer brand and an easy-to-find career site.
4. The proprietary talent pool sourcing strategy: build a talent pool of diverse talent and hope that a few people raise their hands when they’re emailed a boring job. (Note this is actually a pretty good sourcing strategy if coupled with better messaging and a career-focused assessment and recruiting process.)
5. The vendor-driven (aka the comp- or OD- or legal- or IT- or OFCCP-driven) strategy: let’s forsake all our responsibility for hiring and let our vendors tell us what to do, or let some bureaucrat, technocrat, or lawyer tie our hands.
6. The post and pray: post boring jobs on as many boards as possible with the hope that a good person inadvertently sees it.
7. The incomplete strategy: let’s do something really well, but then mess it up by not completing the process. Example: finding top-notch prospects who opt-out of the process early due to one of the following: application process is burdensome, recruiters don’t know the job, managers who are weak interviewers, offers that are uncompetitive, etc.
8. The “I’ll know it when I see it strategy” — aka the hiring manager-driven strategy: let hiring managers do whatever they want to do with heavy reliance on the job descriptions and the manager’s good sense of what success looks like. As part of this, recruiters are just told to send over as many candidates as possible who meet the specs.
9. The knock-out question or survivor strategy: this is a version of the “eliminate the worst” strategy, but starts by asking people a bunch of silly questions that only leave the desperate as survivors.
10. The hide-and-seek arrogance strategy: make it extremely difficult to find job postings, make it more difficult to apply, and require all candidates to bow down to the hiring manager if they’re fortunate enough to be granted an interview.

Of course, no one every starts out with this type of hiring strategy in mind, but somehow, piece-by-piece, this is what it evolves into. Part of the problem is letting the idea of the moment drive activity. As a result, we can often unknowingly affect the final outcome for the worse. This is called sub-optimization. For example, in today’s paper I just read that Orange County (California) is planning on widening its main freeway system into Los Angeles. Unfortunately, LA County is not planning on expanding the junction, with the result just moving the traffic bottleneck north by 10 miles.

Something like this happens every time a new sourcing process is implemented without considering the end-to-end impact. Problems like these can be minimized when there’s an overarching maximize-quality-of-hire strategy in place that everyone adopts. Then every subsequent action or decision can evaluated on how it impacts this strategy.

If you want to implement a maximize quality of hire strategy, you should first go through each step in your current sourcing, interviewing, and recruiting process and see if it’s counterproductive in some way or preventing the best people from consideration. With this as a framework, develop a two-pronged action plan. The first part involves stopping doing the things that prevent you from hiring the best. The second part involves implementing new processes based on how the best people look for new careers, how they compare different opportunities, and the criteria they use to accept an offer.

While I’ve been contending that HR/recruiting must take full responsibility for quality of hire, developing the strategy, plans, and processes is at the core of this. Of course, getting managers on board is the most difficult challenge here, requiring executive-level vision and support to be successful. A strong metrics and feedback program tracking everything pre- and post-hire is the essential piece that ties it all together. Developing, implementing, maintaining, and monitoring this maximize quality of hire strategy is what I mean by ownership. In my mind, maximizing quality of hire is the most second most important function of HR/recruiting. The first is developing and maximizing the talent already on board. Everything else pales in comparison.

Then, in the year 1405, it got smart and created a position of a night watchman to keep an eye on the city and identify fires.

The watchman’s job was to climb the 153 stairs to the top of the cathedral tower and at each hour from 10 p.m. until 2 a.m., he would call out in four directions, C’est le guet; il a sonné l’heure (”This is the nightwatch; the hour has struck”).

Apparently the night watch was effective, because the tradition still continues today!

The buildings in the city are no longer made of wood, and technology has largely eliminated a fire risk. So why does the city still employ a night watchman?

There are probably a few reasons to keep the tradition in place, but I believe that the main reason can be summed up in one word: reassurance.

I’ve never met someone who didn’t enjoy a little reassurance. In this case, the people of Lausanne like the safe and comfortable feeling of knowing that someone is out there keeping an eye on their city.

From a recruitment context, candidates in your hiring process also want reassurance. They’d like frequent updates on the status of their application. They want to know that their resume hasn’t been lost in a black hole. They want to understand the next steps in your interview process. They want to know when they’re no longer being considered.

If you believe that reassurance is important, how can you use that knowledge to improve the candidate experience? What technology can you implement to provide candidates with self-service access to check the status of their application? How can you clearly set the expectation with candidates so that they understand the timetable and steps within your recruitment process? How can you improve your communication with candidates as they move through the stages of your process?

I encourage you to implement a “night watchman” strategy within your recruitment process to provide reassurance and to offer an added level of service to those candidates with an interest to join your team.

I don’t need to fight

To prove I’m right

I don’t need to be forgiven.

–Baba O’Riley

“Why is this taking so long” is one of my favorite hiring manager questions. The best answer is to not have it asked in the first place. Sadly, it makes the recruiter have to justify their existence with a flurry of undocumented and ill-prepared remarks on past activity while feeling awkward and flat-footed. All in all, it is not a fun time.

I believe that we can avoid this awkward question in almost all cases, but before we discuss how that is done, let’s look at four sample answers to that question. These answers are not good ones and should be avoided. (The answers below might be accurate, but we need to be sure that candor and objective conversation take a back seat to organizational politics.)

1. It is taking so long because it took you four weeks to finalize the position profile. Not a great answer. Managers like to see themselves as decision-makers (especially those who so clearly are not) as opposed to individuals who need input from 37 team members before they approve a position profile.
2. It is taking so long because you take forever to respond to the candidates I submit. Not so good either. Managers have endless reasons for taking too long in terms of response time, but personally, I do not care what those reasons might be. Twenty four to 48 hours is all it should take. If you need more info on the candidate, I will get it for you. If you do not need more info, make a decision; do you want to see the candidate or don’t you?
3. It is taking so long because you do not get back to me after candidate interviews. Avoid this answer! Having the candidate die of old age waiting for the manager to think, discuss, compare, contrast, evaluate, reflect, confer, plot, map out, or my personal favorite, “sleep on” is pitiful. (DOD, big pharma, and biotech can be glacially slow). Once again, 24 to 48 hours to make a decision. Do you want to move forward or not? (A client once told me he had to “ponder.” I hate ponderers.)
4. It is taking so long because you change the position profile twice a week. Once again, no good! I have far more respect for managers who tell me they are not sure of what they want or they need assistance in defining the position or whatever. Under those circumstances I can help in a host of ways, but don’t keep changing the profile because hitting a moving target makes recruiting all the more difficult. (Beware of the manager who tells you the profile changes endlessly due to the “fluid and changing needs of our organizational objectives.” Those people are clueless.)
5. Bonus Answer! It is taking so long because of all of the above! This is the worst possible answer because it simply points out the horrific shortcomings of many managers that do not seem to go away. Recruiting is a partnership, and partnerships do not work unless both parties pull their own weight and come to an understanding of what must be done, when it must be done, who is going to do it, and a clear sense of urgency.

As you can see, the answers to this question are not pretty. With this in mind, let’s look at some ways to avoid it.

1. Agree to a contracted time to fill. Meet with the manager to discuss the position profile and set an agreed-upon time to fill. Agreed upon means that you and the manager agree to a timetable. For example, if 45 days to fill an engineering position is agreed upon, that’s fine, provided nothing foreseeable will interfere with progress. On the other hand, 45 days is not OK if the manager is taking a thre-week vacation during that agreed upon time-to-fill window and will not be available to interview. Make sense?
2. Start aggressively. If you have a 45-day agreed time to fill, don’t wait 30 days to begin to source candidates. Start fast and start hard. Keep in mind that it is always easier to slow things down than to speed thing up. No one is ever sorry they are ahead of schedule.
3. Keep it moving. In recruiting, the ball is always in someone’s court, so do your best to see that that ball is not in yours. Do whatever you need to do as quickly as possible without compromising quality. Be sure that you are always waiting for the manager as opposed to the manager waiting for you.
4. Document activity. In my career, I have learned that I was never sorry that I documented activity even if I never needed it. In a world where data points can be very helpful, it is a great idea to just keep a simple running log of key activity on candidates, timetables, and anything you deem as important. Not a ton of work; just 4 or 5 minutes a day. You might not need it, but if you do, it will be a great thing to have handy.

Now, why not seek out and ask your most uncooperative hiring manager my favorite question:

Why is this taking so long?

Pretty cool, eh?

The sheer volume of potential directions to follow is confusing, daunting, and at times, just plain overwhelming. While some organizations have stuck a stick in the sand and are pushing forward with a defined approach, the majority of efforts currently underway will fail for one key reason: they rely solely upon a small handful of individuals attempting to maintain visibility in a sea of content growing exponentially.

Relying upon a social media coordinator, online brand ambassador, or a team of recruiters dedicating only a portion of their desk time to social media initiatives dooms such efforts to stumble and underperform. Such efforts produce corporate fan pages on Facebook, where the only comments ever visible are sanitized “PR” posts and boring job announcements! (I actually viewed one such page last week where the only wall post visible was a notice from the organization’s legal department advising visitors to the page not to post negative comments!)

Delivering an engaging, interactive, authentic, and personalized experience requires a scale of participation that the limited resources of the recruiting function simply cannot provide. The alternate approach, the one most likely to drive success, is an employee-centric approach that relies on your employees to build and manage relationships and the recruiting resources to coordinate, influence, and support their efforts.

The 12 Most Common Social Media Strategies

Most recruiting managers fail to think strategically when they develop their approach to social media recruiting. In fact, if you want to test someone’s depth of knowledge of social media recruiting, simply ask them to list the range of strategies that corporations can pursue. Most recruiting leaders will respond that they either don’t know enough about social media yet, or ramble off how they are adapting historical marketing efforts for delivery via social media.

As a corporate advisor, I’ve seen what a lot of organizations are up to, including initiatives already live and others currently in development. To help frame the discussion about this topic moving forward, I’d like to categorize the efforts into the following strategy categories:

Limited Scope Strategies

• The “laissez-faire” social media recruiting strategy — a do-nothing strategy where efforts are not managed or coordinated.
• Reference-checking strategy — a strategy that employs social media solely as another source of information during the reference-checking process.
• Post-and-pray strategy — a strategy that leverages social media as nothing more than another channel to broadcast employment opportunities to.
• Employer brand management strategy — a strategy that focuses on using social media to evaluate and influence the perception of the organization as an employer by distributing content about the employee experience via social media channels.
• Hybrid strategy — A hybrid strategy recognizes a need for different approaches to drive different types of activity supporting unique aspects of the organization. It uses components of nearly all strategies presented here.

Broad Scope Strategies

• Centralized social media recruiting strategy — a common strategy that employs recruiters as the sole agents of the organization and relies upon them to carry out full-spectrum activities including direct sourcing, relationship recruiting, employment marketing, employer brand assessment, and employer branding.
• The employee-centric recruiting strategy — a powerful “full spectrum” approach that exponentially increases the visibility of the organization in social media by using all employees as the agents under the direction/influence of the recruiting organization. (This strategy is the primary focus of this article.)
• The “talent community” strategy — a variation of the employee-centric strategy that has a longer-term focus on building communities and relationships based primarily on professional learning.
• Outsourced management strategy — A strategy that employs a third party such as a marketing or PR firm to manage a significant portion of the effort.

Organizational Strategies

• Banned social media strategy — a strategy that seeks to minimize the impact of social media for better or worse by blocking or severely restricting access to social media throughout the organization.
• Social media committee strategy — this strategy recognizes that where social media is concerned, the needs and wants of numerous organizational stakeholders may cross and seeks to coordinate efforts and more effectively marshal resources.
• Distributed social media strategy — a strategy that provides organizational guidelines on social media usage, but that permits units/groups within the organization to plan, develop, and execute initiatives without oversight.

Organize Your Employee “Army”

Few would argue against the fact that implementing a program to manage and increase the organization’s presence on social media is a hot topic among managers and executives. While the most advanced work is being done in customer service functions, marketing, product development, and HR leaders nearly everywhere are at the very least exploring the possibility of using this new channel of communication.

The majority of early efforts by recruiting leaders struggled to produce meaningful and measurable results, but from experimentation comes innovation and learning.

The primary driver of failure among early adopters wasn’t lack of interest or individual effort, but rather lack of scale!

Social media erupted as tools to facilitate interaction, and interaction in too many aspects of one’s life can be time consuming and exhausting! Fortunately there is an answer to this problem: don’t do it alone. Use employees to build relationships, and then take advantage of those relationships! It’s the same principle that makes employee referrals the No. 1 source of hire at most firms. Both programs rely on harnessing or leveraging other people’s time (OPT) to contribute to recruiting results. Because the ratio of employees to recruiters is extremely lopsided, using employee’s time results in a quantum increase in network size, visibility, and professional relationships that can drive future recruiting successes.

The added benefit: employees are better able to communicate in ways and on topics more valuable to their peers, which makes it easier for them to build successful relationships.

Microsoft’s industry-leading long-term community-building approach, which relies heavily on employee efforts (highlighting employee blogs, displaying ERP advertisement on employee profile pages, etc.), illustrates the direction that recruiting managers should take. Large firms like Google already rely heavily on their employees, and smaller firms have resorted to this employee-centric or employee-centered approach because they simply don’t have a significant recruiting team.

Before you waste a lot of time and effort and become frustrated, shift your recruiters away from doing most social networking and instead toward orchestrating and managing it. Organize your employees, managers, corporate alumni, and even your vendors to become an “army” of social media brand builders and recruiters.

A Close Tie-in With the Employee Referral Program Is Required

The foundation of any social media effort that is employee-centric must be a seamless tie-in with a world-class employee referral program. Without a direct connection, the majority of great prospects your employees identify will never make it into your recruiting process. Nothing frustrates your employees more than putting maximum effort into identifying a superstar who is interested in your firm and then finding out that the organization that asked for their help failed to follow up.

The handoff from employee to recruiter must be smooth and seamless so that the candidate isn’t “dropped” or doesn’t feel like they have been transferred from a caring and highly interested employee to an uncaring recruiter or recruiting process from hell.

To ensure that the back office is ready for your social media effort, audit your referral process for major flaws and ensure that social network referrals are processed in a way consistent with social network users’ expectations. The employee referral process should also be modified to allow employees to provide online profiles in lieu of traditional resumes when they’re not available. You might also add a feature that offers a small reward to network contacts who refer highly desirable names to one of your employees who are part of their network.

Up next week, I’ll discuss why recruiters cannot and should not be on the front lines of your social media army, and offer some tips on how to engage employees in your effort.

When promoting from within, do you select the person who is doing the best job in their current role? Do you promote the person you like the most, the person who has the most seniority, or the person who gives you attention and deference? It is not unusual to promote a good technical person or a good clinical person into a management position. Technology companies and healthcare organizations do this frequently.

If this is your current practice, then you are missing out on the opportunity to improve business performance. You may also be dramatically and unnecessarily increasing your cost of operations. This is hardly a good strategy in the current economy.

Look at the cost of a bad (mismatched) promotion:

• Time to become productive in the job
• Time to separate from being a peer to being a boss
• Time to learn the new political aspects of the job
• Turnover cost resulting from a bad promotion
• Lost productivity resulting from the turnover
• Recruiting cost to replace employees lost to turnover
• Time to become productive for the new hire

While cost is obvious, time is a valuable and non-renewable resource. A poor promotional decision is expensive.

Internal promotions should be approached the same way you approach external hires: formally. There are distinct advantages when promoting from within. The candidate knows the business, knows some of the politics (politics at the managerial and executive level, however, are different), and is familiar with the culture. But this knowledge alone does not qualify them for promotion. What qualifies them for promotion is a positive performance track record and a demonstrated ability or high potential (versus just interest) to take on additional responsibilities and succeed.

Here are five actions that organizations can take to prepare internal candidates for promotion:

1. Have a formal (or at least an informal) succession plan. Identify individuals in your organization who can fill current senior positions should the incumbent retire or leave, or new positions that are created due to growth, new product or service introductions, or new projects critical to the success of the company.
2. Implement a management development program to provide future promotable candidates the opportunity to take on additional and more challenging responsibilities. A management development program will serve to identify employee strengths, preferences, values, and potential derailers (risk tendencies) that will enable a best fit for positions available.
3. Introduce a valid and meaningful 360-degree evaluation. This will ensure that the candidates identified for promotion are truly qualified and not just good at managing up and managing their image.
4. Provide the future promotable candidates with a mentor to help guide them through both the tangible and intangible aspects of achieving success within the company.
5. Provide the newly promoted employee with coaching support to support the transition from a functional and technical focus to a manager with broader responsibilities.

Once the candidate is selected and promoted, their transition must be supported. It is reckless to assume that a candidate promoted from within the organization will automatically succeed and needs no further attention. Yes, they know the organization. But do they know how to manage and perform at a new level within the organization? Promotion doesn’t result in instant competence. A mentor or a coach are excellent ways to support the transition and prove to be a good investment.

Some candidates, however, will not have had the advantage of participating in a management development (i.e. “grooming and growing”) process. Some may never have held a management position. Some may have agreed to a promotion reluctantly.

Creating a formal talent integration process for newly promoted managers is a wise business practice.

Talent integration involves:

1. A formal transition plan to help the manager/executive integrate into the new position. Formal and purposeful discussion between the new manager/executive and their immediate supervisor on how best to work with each other and to define clear expectations regarding job performance and expected results.
2. Internal mentorship to help the manager/executive better understand how to deal with peers, how organizational politics work at the managerial level, and “how work gets done here” from a manager’s perspective.
3. Coaching (best done with an external/neutral executive/performance coach) — to help with the transition, especially for developing the management skills required in the new position (i.e. technical/clinical person being promoted to manager)

Recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, 26% of managers aren’t trained to manage, according to the Rasmussen Report. Now consider the even greater likelihood of this when technical people are promoted to management. For internal promotions to be highly successful, a rigorous internal promotion process must be established and a formal transition integration process must be put in place. The cost of not doing so is simply too great. Unless your funding and talent are abundant and not a concern, you can’t afford not to.

1. Cost per hire is a misguided metric that is at best useless, and at worst, can harm the organization. While tracking costs and spending wisely is essential, to divide that cost by the number of hires makes no sense. Instead, track costs in total and focus on reducing them if you’re not hiring as many people, or you can prove an improvement in productivity without a degradation in quality. Reducing quality while reducing costs is a strategic mistake for the sake of a tactical gain.
2. The HR/recruiting department must take company-wide responsibility for quality of hire. Forget the mantra of shared responsibility. If some line manager blows the hiring decision, who has to clean up the mess and find a replacement? While HR/recruiting doesn’t make the hiring decisions, it needs to make sure that the proper decisions are made. This is comparable to finance owning the budgeting and investment analysis process. Finance doesn’t spend the money, but it makes sure the money is spent wisely. Having an audit function in place to validate that the right hiring decisions were made is one way to make sure the process is adhered to.
3. Measure quality of hire on a financial basis. The financial benefit of hiring someone in the top third vs. the bottom third is at least twice the compensation of the person. (Here’s a recording of a recent webinar with a handout including the actual calculations for this.) This benefit is due to increased productivity, less management effort, higher-quality work, and far less turnover.
4. Calculate the ROI of any new recruiting or sourcing initiative on an ROI basis. To do this, figure out how many people you’ll be hiring in the top-third instead of the bottom-third. (Email me if you want to walk through this calculation.) If the minimum financial impact of a top-third person is two times his or her compensation, it’s pretty easy to figure the gross financial gain of this. Compare this to the cost to obtain the gain in order to determine the ROI of the program.

I’d like to add a fifth topic to this list of quality of hire maxims: make your vendors prove quality of hire improvements before you spend any money. No one should be excluded, whether it’s a new ATS or investing in web 2.0 social media or whatever product-of-the-month comes along. If it doesn’t improve quality of hire on an ROI basis, don’t waste your time or money.

Proving a quality of hire improvement is no easy thing, but just going through the effort will get you to think about it at a strategic level.

For example, talent hubs, prospect pools, CRM, and social media are the current craze, and some actually can improve quality of candidate. However, getting better candidates doesn’t mean better hires. I advocate an early-bird sourcing strategy. This means getting candidates before they enter the job-hunting market, or during their first week looking for a new job. This is a huge competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, if you wait a week to call or you make them jump through hoops to talk with someone, you’ll lose them. Now add into the mix hiring managers who blow the interview or who can’t recruit top performers to join the team. So even if a new program offers better candidates, if your backend processes aren’t changed, you won’t improve your quality of hire.

To improve quality of hire, consider everything collectively: sourcing, screening, recruiting assessing, and closing. For now, and for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume your backend is in great shape, and just consider how you could make your sourcing vendors prove an improvement in quality of candidate. The premise is that if you invest in the vendor’s offering, the candidates you’ll be seeing are of a superior quality than what you’re now seeing or you would see by using some alternative.

The ROI calculation would be performed based on the assumption you’ll be hiring more people in the top third than the bottom third. If they can’t justify a quality of hire improvement, which is a strategic impact, then you’re left with the more tactical approach of using cost savings or productivity enhancements to justify the effort.

With the focus on quality of hire improvements, here are some ways you could get your vendor to validate their programs:

1. The smell test. The idea behind this is that it doesn’t make much sense to conduct any type of rigorous analysis unless the vendor’s approach seems logical. For example, one major job board vendor told me at Onrec (Chicago, November 2009) that candidates from her board had lower turnover than from the other major job board for the same job. Not surprisingly, she didn’t know why. This fails the smell test. On the other hand, one vendor told me that candidates in their network were more passive than those in the most well-known network since a person couldn’t join to get listed. The CEO then went on to say that people could only get listed in their network if they were mentioned at least three times in some independent Internet article. This passes the smell test. Of course, you still have to do the analysis to prove that the candidates are better.
2. The before and after biggest stack test. Before you decide to consider any vendor, take 100 candidates at random from your current sourcing process and divide them into three piles. Pile A is comprised of those you absolutely would consider in depth. Pile B is filled with the maybes. Pile C is filled with those you wouldn’t ever consider. Now measure the height of each stack. In a pilot of some type, take another 100 candidates sourced based on the proposed process and divide them into the A-B-C stacks. If the A stack has increased in height and the C stack has decreased, you’re on your way. Now calculate the percent increase in the size of the A stack by the financial impact of each person to determine the total impact. From this you can easily calculate the ROI of the new process. Of course, you could conduct some type of rigorous statistical analysis to validate the results between the two groups, but if the A stack grows significantly, you’ll probably get the same result. If you don’t want to do this yourself, have your vendor show you the statistical results of other clients they’ve done this for.
3. The side-by-side stack test. Using some type of quick pilot test, select 100 candidates at random using the new process and 100 candidates using your current process. This is better than the before-and-after test above, since more things are the same, especially labor market conditions. Now divide the candidates in the A-B-C stacks as above and compare them as before. If the A stack is significantly bigger using the new process, you’ve got a winner. You can compare competing vendors the same way. Find out who has the biggest stack of A-level candidates.
4. Use metrics that indirectly measure quality of candidate. This is a variation of the A-B-C stack approach. If you don’t need to review as many resumes to find someone worth interviewing, it means you’re seeing a higher percentage of better candidates. So start tracking this. Also, track the percent of candidates sent to your hiring managers who are actually interviewed. This is one way to track the quality of your sourcing programs and the quality of your recruiters. Start asking your candidates how long they’ve been looking. If you’re seeing them a few days after they’ve started looking, it means your advertising is highly visible. Now compare the quality of these people using the A-B-C stack approach to determine if the best people are seeing your ads first.

There are many other ways to measure quality of candidate, but the point is that you should make your vendors prove it before you proceed. This is still just the first step. Even if the vendor has proven a quality of candidate improvement, you still must do at least two more things. First, compare the offering of competing vendors who claim the same quality of candidate improvement doing the same thing. There might be a newer approach that is less costly, more efficient, or more effective.

In this case, go with the vendor that brings in the best candidates most efficiently, rather than most cheaply.

Second, ensure your backend processes, including the interview itself and your hiring managers, are capable of reeling in and hiring stronger candidates. This is where most sourcing programs and new recruiting initiatives fall flat. That’s why it’s important to consider quality of hire from an end-to-end perspective, not just at the quality of candidate level. If you ignore the rest of the process, you just might wind up with a lot more great people you won’t be hiring.

1. Instead of going to a career fair to find your next top tier hire, get your manager to realize that great people have to be recruited. “If you needed another QB like Tom Brady, would he stand in line at a career fair, or answer a want ad online, in the paper, or on your website? No, you have to call his agent who gets him interested and to the table to talk. I’m that agent.”
2. When a hiring manager and HR want to make a lowball offer because the recession has made everyone more desperate, but your candidate is employed, here’s what you say to get them to reconsider low-balling. “When a kid is getting ready to go out high in the draft, do you think about what the lowest package is that he will consider? No, you make him the best offer you can afford to make or you pass on the pick. No one who is good is going to be happy or accept a low-ball offer.”
3. When a manager wants to look around at all resumes and candidates on the planet even though the very best candidate just interviewed and wants the job: “It’s kind of like picking a starter instead of second string. When you see someone who is going to be the key to your bench, you don’t hesitate to look around in case someone else might be better; you add them to the team in the first string. Just because he is first doesn’t mean he isn’t the best.”
4. When a manager wants to change the position or add unrealistic job functions to a new role: “It’s not like there aren’t people like Deion Sanders who can play offense and defense and the entire length of the game. It is just extremely rare to find someone who will do both. It would be better to find a great cornerback than an average cornerback who can also return a kick.”
5. Instead of letting a team do too many jobs for too long and asking them to double that for the “good of the company,” consider this: “Even the best players need to feel like they have back up, have time to recover, and like to play one position very well. Do you think that you may risk losing your best players if you play them too long?”

I know a lot of people who will think it is very funny that I would ever remotely write about football because I don’t give a hoot about it. And I also know that managers don’t want to be talked down to or reduced to silly analogies. But there is some truth to the fact that language and cultural barriers account for the majority of miscommunications. Finding the common ground in what interests them may be the entry point toward showing them what you got.

You can choose to have some or all your tweets posted to your LinkedIn groups and vice versa. This is a boon for recruiters who now can more easily reach their entire network with news of jobs and opportunities, while job seekers can use it to enhance their personal brand.

“More and more, people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a video he made with LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman.

Stone likened the deal to “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination,” which explains our use of the otherwise inscrutable graphic from the LinkedIn site.

The two services, of course, serve different purposes and different constituencies. Twitter users tend to be younger and tweet about social activities. LinkedIn is very specifically focused on business networking.

The integration takes these differences into account, giving Tweepl a choice where there tweets go. Use either #li or #in to post your tweet to your LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn messages will generally go to all your Twitter followers, unless you choose to post only to LinkedIn.

I tried to set this up several times last night and this morning, but got error messages. Some of them were the usual Twitter overloaded kind, but the others were likely the result of the rollout. According to the original announcement, the integration will take a few days to complete, accounting for the lack of a setting on Twitter itself for the LinkedIn connection.

You can also set up an account on Ping.fm. This is a free service that lets you organize all your social media sites so you can post to some or all simultaneously. In addition to LinkedIn and Twitter, the Ping network includes Facebook, Diigo, Yammer, Plaxo, MySpace, and 39 other sites.

The LinkedIn/Twitter integration comes on the heels of announcements over the last couple of weeks that Twitter messages will now be indexed by Bing and Google. Search results now include tweets.

There is no question that in many instances a video for job candidates can convey a message to potential employees. What I do question is how effective the message is conveyed. Is the right message in the right video? The answer to this question is often unclear when viewing a real job preview video. Unfortunately, quite often the real job preview video will miss the mark in delivering a real job or position preview and instead incorporate the goals of the recruiting video.

Two Videos Two Audiences

The best way to think about the differences in these videos is to consider the analysis most consumers process when they are looking for a new car. On any given night, there is no shortage of car and truck commercials on network television. These commercials focus on selling the most attractive features of their model and attributes related to their brand to reach a very wide demographic of potential consumers. The most striking aspects are highlighted to a target demographic. A typical commercial contains messages on saving energy, safety, reliability, GPS and satellite radio, and warranties. The viewer is provided several features with few details, given the focus and time constraints. A recruiting video is not all that different. The organizational brand is showcased along with values, community involvement, and the mission of the organization, to attract potential candidates who will have an affinity to the messages being presented.

When a consumer is interested in researching specific features of a car model, a manufacturer’s site will often provide several brief videos that address those options in more detail. You can find out how the components operate alone and as part of the vehicle. A real job preview video should follow the same format. An ideal preview video should break down several of the key aspects of the job that is being discussed. The discussion should present a candid discussion an idea of what the day in the life of the position is like. Focus on a specific aspect of the job; talk to someone in the field actually doing the job. There should also be some discussion on how the job fits into the mission of the organization.

Wrong Message, Wrong Audience

A real job preview video will lose its utility when it is diluted with too much branding. There are certainly elements of branding that can coexist within an real job preview video, but the focus must be on giving the viewer a clear understanding of the job being displayed. You should communicate what the employee will be accountable for in the job. This is often done in a “day in the life” format for the position being discussed.

A recruiting video also runs the risk of delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience. Some videos fail to take advantage of their brand, and assume that viewers will make the connection. Other videos fail to discuss their culture and mission and how employees play a vital role in their organization. Some videos communicate the culture and mission well but focus on just one business unit to the detriment of others.

Two Goals of Two Videos

Keep in mind the goals of each video. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the goal of a recruiting video is to recruit employees. This is usually achieved by selling the brand, communicating the culture and values of the organization, as well as the mission. The goal of the preview is to match the right people with the right jobs as well as increase retention and lower turnover. The preview should be performed in a style that generates interest while discussing the realities of the position being discussed. Genuine real job preview videos discuss both positive and some challenges of the position. Giving a realistic glimpse of the culture and the mission of the organization will go a long way in retaining talent.

Whether we are talking about corporate strategy, HR strategy, or talent strategy, we are talking about probabilities. And the closer the desired outcomes are to today, the higher the probability that they will actually happen. But, rapid change makes planning less and less relevant, and recruiters, planners of all types, and organizations are trying to find ways to cope with the lower and lower probability of being able to predict anything.

Historically our plans have been based on an assumption that is increasingly in question: that most things are going to be the same or at least similar in the near future to what they are today. Planning has relied on consistency and stability and to some extent a simple world.

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote a poem about the fox that knows many things, and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. His point was that some of us — the hedgehogs — are inclined to hold one big idea or view of things and disregard all others. But some are more likes foxes that go from one thing to another easily and hold many divergent ideas at the same time. This seems to be the winning approach for this part of the 21st century.

The world is not consistent, stable, or simple. Three-year and five-year plans are at best general, low-probability indicators of goals deemed desirable at the moment of creation. Any event might change those goals. The recruiters you hired in last year’s frenzied market weren’t needed months ago and may never be needed again. No one wants those HTML programmers who were in high demand just months ago. The sudden failure of banks, the quick economic fallout of 2008, or the seemingly sudden surplus of workers has changed many organizations’ plans. Falling home prices have made unaffordable property affordable. Fat savings accounts have become slimmer, changing retirement plans. And something as simple as the CEO leaving or the arrival of a new VP of HR can change the best laid plans.

So how can we deal with constant change and the need for fast action?

The best approach may be twofold: (1) develop an accepting attitude about change and a belief that change will lead to winning, and (2) design systems and approaches to deal better with change. Building skills that improve your ability to adapt is important to both personal mental health and to organizational success.

The change competencies are agility and resilience. A book that I highly recommend is called The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo. This short video will give you a sense of his perspective. In it he outlines why Al-Qaida is successfully beating the U.S. in Afghanistan and how Hezbollah is winning over Israel. Both of these groups have learned that they cannot succeed head on against a powerful foe like the United States or Israeli military, but they can win by being able to move fast, adapt to changing situations, take advantage almost instantly of any advantage, and break all the rules.

So what does this mean to us in recruiting?

Accept Change/Gather Information

Today everything from hiring managers’ needs to recruiting technology are a river of change. Wherever you step in today, it will be different tomorrow. Old rules are suspect; old thinking about competencies and job requirements need to be rethought. Part of a recruiter’s responsibility is to educate managers and candidates and encourage flexible approaches.

Social networks are a good example of flexible, readily tapped sources of candidates of all types — if you have mastered how to use them and have developed your own network. Rather than seek only people with particular narrow skills, include people with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and skills so that you can respond quickly to any request.

By using statistics and by gathering data about people and what competencies and mix of skills is most successful in particular applications or situations, recruiters and hiring managers can make better decisions about who to hire, who to keep as a regular versus contract employee, and so forth.

Develop Agility

Develop multiple scenarios that balance people against costs against expected outputs with consequent resources allocations, time requirements, and costs.

Invent processes that are flexible. Instead of planning a candidate’s interview schedule days in advance, explain that she will interview with a variety of available people. Get hiring managers to agree to accept opinions of a variety of potential interviewers. Or, let the interviewee and interviewer schedule themselves for mutually convenient times whether face-to-face or virtual.

Have on tap not-needed-now talent so that when needs arise suddenly, you can meet the demand with part-time, contract, or sometime workers. Know everyone internal to your organization so you can encourage them to move or use their network to find what you are looking for. Build networks and use them to create a workforce with multiple levels and a variety of skills that can be used when needed.

Insist that plans, procedures, and your own schedule are as flexible as possible. Use virtual tools blended with office-based and face-to-face tools and options. Blend, flex, and act quickly.

Remove barriers or policy. Reduce signatures and permissions. Put the candidate in control as much as possible and get out of the way. Act as a guide and coach, not a clerk.

Build Systems That Respond Rapidly

Instead of encouraging your firm to hire lots of regular employees, take a look at the current workforce and make some quantitative decisions on which roles add the most value.

Leverage all the Internet tools available to you from email, IM, and Twitter to your applicant tracking system.

Encourage departments and people to self-manage and organize. Provide resources to support a variety of directions and options.

Hedge Your Bets and Experiment

What-if analysis is a powerful tool for uncertain situations. Take time to develop a variety of possible scenarios for possible future talent needs. Try to incorporate unlikely possibilities like Shell did in the 1960s when it postulated that a cartel (later known as OPEC) might emerge and corner the world’s oil supply. Consequently, Shell developed a scenario (which was executed) of always preserving an exploration function within Shell and thus maintaining the ability to deliver oil without reliance on other shippers. This led Shell to be the only competitor to OPEC for years and added billions to its profits.

Hezbollah is perhaps best at experimenting. It tries a wide variety of tactics against the Israel army and then quickly adopt those that are successful. No one wastes time trying to fix things that didn’t work nor on improving those that do. The attitude is simple: use it as is until it stops working and then have several other approaches to try.

Nothing is stable or predictable, so neither should you try to be that way. Learn to thrive on change because it is the way of this century.

I chose the word tribe because it is a good, short noun for the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” And top managers can be a destination. They have their own posse and peeps who follow them wherever they work. I know: I work for one. But even the most incredible managers eventually run out of people to call when rounding up the usual suspects. This is where I come in. I sell the manager and the team. I look at the group that I am headhunting for and try to find some common denominators.

1. Get the existing team’s resumes. Use LinkedIn, resource managers, or go to their portal and search the bios. Look for common schools, themes, associations.
2. Ask the manager where he found them. Who is his best hire? How did he find them?
3. Take a look at the companies they worked for, and when. Is there a theme?

You figure out that Java developers in Europe like Twitter, W.O.W., Ruby games, and Stockholm. To get them to leave their company to come to yours, build your own tribe’s membership theme. To get a pitch, figure out what membership privileges are:

• Ask the people who work for your “chief” why they worked at three companies for him.
• Ask them what they like about the company.
• Ask them how it was different than the company they came from.

You can build a message from this, like “we still have Peet’s coffee! We still have Thirsty Thursdays! Conference Calls longer than 17 minutes are forbidden!”

That is the message. Not “Java Consultant — EMEA.”

• If they are doing the exact same thing, why would they leave one software company to come to another? To come back to a tribe like them.
• Examples of common denominators might be, “worked in start-ups,” “went to MIT,” “plays W.O.W.” or “brags about Platinum status.”

Here is a thumbnail of my tribe:

Bay Area Software Company. Managers who are Java experts. Peet’s Coffee. Thirsty Thursdays. “It’s-It” ice cream bars. People from Cal and Stanford.

I get that tribe. It’s the tribe of the Bay Area software engineers.

If you have ever been a worker bee or a headhunter in the Bay Area, which I have during several waves (1990, 1999, 2009), you know that there are companies with handbooks containing phrases like, ‘Managers must wear shoes. Beer Me Fridays are mandatory, and don’t get Folgers or you’re fired.” They stock Peet’s coffee; everyone is a Stanford and Cal grad; and now, It’s It (a Bay Area ice cream bar with a cult following) is in the breakroom. These people swarm to the new “it” company and they don’t stick around when Folgers makes its debut.

Call them and/or connect with them on Twitter, LinkedIn groups, user’s group meetings, industry associations, however, whenever. I may even ask an Internet sourcer to find some profiles to add to the pile. I look at my Rolodex. I put the whole lot of them into one big pile and I begin to air out my message that “we want you eventually and this is why.”

This is where the Tweetups come in. If I can get the manager/chief to ask the real qualifying questions that I mention above, it is not a stretch to get to the next piece. “If I find someone from Cal working at XYZ company, would you buy him a coffee in Stockholm?”

Or even better, “Tweet me before you go to Stockholm … and let’s find a place to meet … and if you have time, let’s send out a TweetUp to all of the Java developers in Stockholm who are following me on Twitter, and get them to meet you somewhere. We’ll Tweet that the first round of Guinness is on you at The Rusty Nail pub across the street from our client.”

That way I can put real live candidates who don’t have resumes in front of a real, live “chief” and without a lot of wasted time. Sounds expensive? Twenty five rounds of Guinness is a helluva lot cheaper than 35% of an annual package which the agencies are charging us, and you get to meet a real live person and do the puppy dog close.

For those of you with ADD, here is the upshot:

1. Analyze the tribe. Who are these people and what do they do and care about?
2. Evangelize the message of the tribe through your grapevine — Twitter, LinkedIn, your company’s career page, user group meetings — heck, anywhere you can.
3. Sell the manager on selling his job on the fly.
4. Always be closing the candidate on why your tribe kicks their tribe’s ass. Ask: “When they can come have a look see?”

There are going to be accountants and HR people who read this and say, “how does that fit into $10,000 cost per hire, and how do we know that this will work, and why do we have to do anything since everyone is unemployed and is dying to work here?”

But top-tier people are always taken out of companies. There are some things that just can’t be automated and outsourced and cost-optimized, such as building a A-team, building a tribe, and building loyalty.

The Yankees are perennial winners (many call them a dynasty) not because of their superior equipment, IT processes, or their financial or marketing prowess, but rather their extraordinary recruiting and talent management strategy.

Discover How to Learn From Other Industries

If you are a corporate recruiter, you might think that it’s silly to learn lessons or emulate practices from professional sports, but you would be wrong. Ignoring the many valuable lessons the sports industry provides could cost your organization millions! While sports analogies are not loved by all in HR, it’s hard to find a CEO who doesn’t like them or who has not used them in their memoires.

All leading organizations strive to learn and improve by benchmarking against other organizations in and outside their industry.

The New York Yankees, like Sony, Disney, Apple, the Los Angeles Lakers, and GE (NBC), are a corporation that produces an entertainment product. They book revenue by selling a wide range of products and services that extend far beyond the playing field. As a corporation, the Yankees operate under the watchful eye of shareholders, unions, customers, and regulators.

In my experience, the key resistance factor that keeps corporate recruiting leaders from applying sports lessons is not whether they would work, but rather a lack of courage or aggressiveness.

The most common excuse offered is that the scale of recruiting solutions employed by professional sports simple doesn’t align with that possible in your typical organization. While it is true that even the smallest Fortune 500 company dwarfs the Yankees with regard to employee count, most organizations are organized into organizational units much more on par, making the application of approaches at the unit level more than feasible.

If you expect to generate a quantum increases in performance, seek out successful practices in places where few others would think to look. Then, you must have the courage to adopt some approaches that, at least initially, will make some in HR cringe.

16 Lessons That Corporate Recruiting Leaders Can Learn From the Yankees

Listed below are numerous recruiting and talent-management approaches used by perennially successful sports franchises. These ideas are relevant and have been applied by leading talent management organizations:

1. Make the business case for great recruiting — the Yankees have built the strongest business case for great recruiting anywhere! Almost everyone agrees they have an abundance of extraordinary talent in literally every position. They routinely have the highest player salary expense of any MLB team. But the team owners are willing to pay such extravagant amounts because player personnel executives have successfully made the business case demonstrating a huge ROI in attracting the very best players. Although it’s expensive to recruit and retain top talent, the Yankees have calculated that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, they have learned a valuable lesson which is that the most costly mistake that a team can make is to “save money” by placing an average player in a key position.
2. Recruit top talent away from competitors — while many teams try to build their talent pool by recruiting and developing entry-level talent, the Yankees have learned the value of tracking and then recruiting away the top talent from other firms. Rather than seeking out “hidden talent,” they instead continuously identify obvious top performers on other teams and directly recruit them away (we call it poaching). Direct poaching has an added advantage in that it helps your team immediately, while simultaneously hurting your competitor.
3. Stars attract other stars — The Yankees have learned that working alongside other star players and having a significant chance at winning a championship are at least as important as money is in attracting top performers. Corporations should also focus on attracting noteworthy talent because they are a key attraction factor for top performers with many career choices. Firms should also publicly boast about their successes so that they build up their external image as a winner and an industry leader.
4. Prioritize your positions — an important lesson to learn is that all positions do not have an equal impact. In reality that means that a starting pitcher or the cleanup hitter might be five times more impactful on the team’s winning percentage than a right fielder, a first baseman, or the batboy. Corporations need to realize that if they can’t recruit the best for every position, they need to focus recruiting resources on the 20% or less of that can be classified as high-impact openings.
5. Prioritize individuals — a related lesson to learn is that top performers need to be prioritized and treated differently. Top performers might produce five times more than the average player, so as a result, they are given more playing time, are put in critical games, and sometimes they are even shifted into the most critical positions. For corporate recruiting leaders, this means that first of all they need to focus their recruiting resources on top-performing departments and managers. It also means that they must shift their best recruiters to priority candidates and also to change their recruiting approach and temperament dramatically when they encounter a star candidate. It’s a mistake for corporate HR to even attempt to treat all employees the same.
6. Identify their decision criteria — in sports, the relative bargaining power of top talent is immense. If you don’t realize upfront that the power has shifted toward them, you won’t win many recruiting battles. The Yankees have learned that it’s not enough to simply plan to attract the very best, you need to institute a sales approach where you identify and then meet each of the factors that cause the top player to accept a job. It’s equally important for corporations to stop acting arrogantly, as if they possess all of the power in the hiring relationship. At least for talent that is in high demand, they need to realize that the candidate is the one who holds most of the power. This requires corporations to develop a more candidate-friendly recruiting experience and in addition, a formal process to identify and then to completely meet each one of a top performer’s job acceptance criteria.
7. Global recruiting is required — if you look at the significant percentage of Yankee players who come from Japan, the Caribbean, and Latin and South America, you would realize almost immediately that it’s a mistake to recruit exclusively in your backyard. Corporate recruiting leaders must learn they can’t just recruit locally; maybe as much as 50% of your talent must be global.
8. Recruit team players — over the long run, you can not win unless everyone works together. In addition to raw performance, every individual must demonstrate the capability of working alongside with and developing others on the team.
9. Hire them, so your competitor can’t — rather than hiring just enough to fill your needs, follow the Yankee approach, which is to occasionally hire top talent just to prevent your competitors from having it. The goal is to get an “unfair” talent market share.
10. Recruit rather than train — no one would even attempt to argue that Alex Rodriguez became a star as a result of classroom training offered by the Yankees. In fact, rather than taking the risky approach of relying on training to develop skills, the Yankees almost exclusively recruits individuals who are already fully trained, proven performers who only need minimal guidance and coaching in order to excel.
11. Performance over loyalty — the Yankees are notorious for attracting the best, but they are equally famous for heartlessly dropping those who fail to live up to the required performance levels. The best organizations make it clear to all that they put current performance first and thus they use a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? approach (in lieu of rewarding loyalty or tenure). Assume upfront that a certain percentage of new hires and employees will fail to produce. This approach requires that you have a quality of hire measure and then a strong performance tracking system. In addition, have the courage to admit when you’ve made a hiring mistake so that you can quickly swap your mistakes for new outstanding recruits.
12. Lose your tolerance for hiring mistakes — if there is a differentiator between sports recruiting and corporate recruiting, it would be the fact that in sports, every talent decision is highly visible. Unlike corporations, if you make a significant recruiting or retention mistake, it will be made visible and amplified by countless newspaper headlines, sports talk shows, and bloggers. The visibility of their personnel errors forces them to develop recruiting processes that are significantly more precise and error-free than their corporate counterparts. Becoming more precise, more data-driven, and recognizing failures early on are also excellent goals for corporate recruiting leaders.
13. Continuous workforce planning is needed — even before the Yankees won the World Series this year, they already began the process of workforce planning for next year. The process includes internally identifying surplus or duplicate talent, potential voluntary turnover, and individuals whose performance is declining. External planning requires identifying and courting desirable external talent at other teams for vacancies or to swap for current players in order to improve the overall performance at a particular position.
14. Continuous recruiting is required — even though the down economy has affected revenues at the Yankees, the recruiting effort hasn’t been impacted at all. The lesson to be learned is that recruiting needs to be a continuous process that is independent of the short-term revenue fluctuations. Organizations must adopt a long-term funding model that allows an increase in recruiting when top quality talent is available. The recruiting process for key jobs must also start a year or two ahead of when you actually must-have the talent in order to build relationships and to more accurately assess the talent. If top talent unexpectedly becomes available, you must have a “speed hiring” process so that you can hire it immediately, even if you don’t have an open position.
15. It’s not the location — many corporations argue that they can’t recruit the best because of their physical location. Yes, the Yankees are located in New York, but so are the New York Mets, a team that stinks almost every year. In fact, both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia won sports championships last year in spite of not being located in a most-desirable city. The key lesson is that if you have great players, great managers, and a great product, you can attract the best to any location.
16. Great managers are also needed — the Yankees are equally as willing to recruit great managers because they realize that top talent can only get you close to a championship. They realize that if you want to win continuously, you need a great manager to integrate and manage the egos that many top performers develop.

Final Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that in the sports world, recruiters are treated as heroes? They have huge budgets, and their managers spend a great deal of time and resources on the continuous identification and recruiting of top talent. Everyone on the team knows who recruited Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or A-Rod.

In sharp contrast, the typical corporate recruiter is rarely respected and woefully under-resourced.

I hope that the recent recession has taught every recruiter that getting a significant increase in budget, or respect, will require that you dramatically improve both your business case and your observable and measurable business impact.

You can’t reasonably expect more than a 5% to 10% improvement if you limit your benchmarking and copying to the firms that are similar to yourself. A dramatic improvement in results might require you to examine practices that are dramatically different than your current ones. In short, if you want to have a “major-league impact” you might need to study the recruiting practices of the major leagues!

In late January, despite opposition from the Society of Human Resource Management, President Obama & Congress eliminated the 180-day statute of limitations for filing an equal pay lawsuit regarding pay discrimination. “This is a game-changer,” said Gerry Crispin, recruiting industry icon, at a recent conference, referring to this new legislation. “Companies need to pay attention to this.”

Crispin is right. Just last week the Wall Street Journal reported that a former Anheuser-Busch executive sued the beer giant for discrimination, saying she was paid less than male executives. Francine Katz, a former Anheuser-Busch vice president of communications and consumer affairs, filed a lawsuit last in a state court in St. Louis, “accusing the brewer of maintaining a corporate culture that ‘adversely impacts women,’ resulting in lower salaries and bonuses and fewer opportunities.”

This well-publicized lawsuit is the first of many more such suits to come. As a result of this legislation, companies are now required to meticulously document pay decisions and retain detailed employment records to ward off lawsuits like Anheuser-Busch is facing. This legislation is forcing you as a recruiter to more closely consider factors beyond what it takes a candidate to accept an offer. In light of this legislation, as a recruiting professional you need to advise your client on compensation best practices beyond closing the deal. Before constructing any offer for a candidate you should:

• Analyze comparables. Run the numbers on all your employees’ compensation packages, including starting pay, merit raises, cost of living increases, and benefits. Individuals who perform the same jobs and have the same qualifications should be paid similar rates. If your candidate requires a significantly larger package, you must ask whether this one deal is worth the risk. If you do not have access to this type of data — you probably should.
• Analyze market data. There are many tools available to research what professionals are earning in any given area. Consult Towers Watson & Co or other leading compensation market research data. Any offer you prepare should be close to what market data suggests is appropriate.
• What is your candidate earning now? Any significant pay increase beyond their existing package often triggers additional scrutiny. Be ready to defend this type of decision with detailed documentation.
• Ensure there are demonstrable business reasons for any disparities in compensation with an offer you are preparing.
• Keep everything. Because there is no longer a statute of limitations, you need to indefinitely retain records relating to compensation. Remember, there is no longer a 180-day statute of limitations, an employee can go back years. This type of data gathering is protecting your organization in the future.
• Most important: have your compensation director on speed dial. When’s the last time you paid him/her a visit? Schedule an appointment and partner with that organization to ensure best business practices.

Now go find that perfect candidate and close the deal.

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

Managers of recruiting functions seem to struggle continuously to obtain more budget and resources.

Most, unfortunately, rely too heavily on building relationships in order to maintain or increase their funding levels. If you’re tired of the up-and-down funding cycle, maybe it’s time to master the science of building an effective business case. It’s sad that recruiting is still struggling to prove what we already intuitively know (i.e., that recruiting top talent into key jobs has a huge dollar impact).

We have one of the largest impacts and ROIs of any function in the corporation, but we fail miserably at presenting it in such a way that a CFO would find it believable.

In my opinion, we’ve downplayed what it really takes to be successful in our profession — recruiting, counseling, and closing top people who have multiple opportunities, and making sure our hiring manager clients don’t blow it.

To start refocusing on the right stuff, I’d like to nominate quality of hire as the metric to assess recruiting department performance, and relegate cost per hire to the second page.

I believe cost per hire is a misguided means to judge recruiting department performance. For one, it rewards the wrong things and ignores quality of candidate and quality of hire. For another, it’s far too tactical and narrowly focused. Worse, improving costs could degrade quality.

This is a strategic mistake of huge proportions that too many HR and recruiting managers miss entirely.

These problems go away if the focus is on measuring quality of hire first and quality of candidate as a subset. Even if recruiting is reluctant to take on the responsibility of maximizing quality of hire, it must be responsible for setting up a system to measure it. While important, measuring quality of hire is not straightforward.

Here are some ideas on how to get started on thinking about how to do it:

Yves Lermusi, the CEO of Checkster, believes good reference checking before (external) and after the hire (internal 360°) might be the best way to measure, monitor, and improve quality. He might be right, but from what I’ve seen, if the measure of candidate quality pre-hire is different than after the hire, you’re not measuring the same thing. Regardless, Yves’ point of measuring candidate quality post hire and monitoring are absolutely essential. So you should check out Checkster as a means to do this.

Here’s another perspective. I was speaking with a senior recruiting manager with a Fortune 100 company the other day. She told me her company conducted exhaustive post-hire performance reviews at the 90-day, 6-month, and 9-month time periods for new hires. These reviews were based on comparing the new hire’s performance against the performance objectives of the job. If the person fell short here, the review was expanded to include an in-depth competency evaluation. This approach seemed spot on to me. However, the recruiting manager told me under-performance was generally attributed to lack of understanding of real job needs before accepting the offer and problems with culture, especially with the working relationship with the hiring manager, once on the job. This strengthens the argument of measuring pre- and post-hire quality on the same performance standard.

However, some differ on this view. For example, after a recent ERE article I wrote on a related quality of hire article, someone sent me a detailed LinkedIn message describing his company’s approach to measuring the quality of their candidates by sourcing channel. It consisted of a detailed scorecard examining a set of criteria that mapped to the traditional job description. This included things like quality of the academic background, quality of the experience, depth of industry knowledge, and the like. This is probably not too bad, but I suspect that this was not the focus of the interview. But none of this gets at the issues involved in a post-hire quality assessment. For example, the person could be a fine person with all of the experience and academic requirements noted, but someone who was no longer motivated to do the type of work required, or someone whose style was not compatible with the hiring manager’s.

From a pre-hire standpoint, some might argue that the traditional competency or behavioral-based interview is a great way to measure pre-hire quality. My 30-year concern with this is that it still ignores job performance and managerial fit. Being competent to do the work doesn’t mean being motivated to do the work. Nor does competency or behavior measure a person’s ability to prioritize the work, handle too much work, work under pressure, work with different resources, work with comparable teams in similar situations, or work with a weak manager.

For me, it’s pretty easy to conclude that if you want quality of hire to become a useful measurement tool, you must start by measuring pre- and post-hire on the same basis. Further, the measurement standard you should use must be made on some comparison to real job needs. (Send me an email if you’d like a copy of a performance-based talent scorecard from my book, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007).) This means candidates need to be measured before they’re hired on their ability and motivation to perform the actual work required, including fit with the hiring manager.

If pre- and post-hire quality measures are different (up or down) it means that the assessment process is flawed. So it’s important to use feedback from the post-hire quality assessment to change how candidates are assessed. I suspect that few companies do this; regardless, that’s a major reason and benefit for measuring post-hire quality. Then once pre- and post-hire quality assessment are the same and you have a good system for tracking quality of candidate and quality of hire, you can then move on to the more strategic quest of maximizing quality of hire. This includes improving your recruiting and sourcing skills in tandem, and tracking quality by sourcing channels, recruiters, and even hiring managers.

The whole point of this article is to suggest that quality of hire is a much more important measure than cost per hire in measuring recruiting department performance. While cost is important to track, it shouldn’t come at the expense of quality.

Focusing on the internal budget of the recruiting department is insignificant in comparison to the impact the thousands of people the recruiting department hires has on their company. What’s more exciting is that the tools are now available to actually measure and maximize hires, rather than just talk about it.

For a minute, assume the role of a senior executive who has just been handed a business scorecard containing performance numbers in five critical business areas. After looking at the numbers below, would the data make you cringe?

• 70% of users are dissatisfied with the process.
• 50% of customers regret their buying decision.
• 46% turnover among new buyers.
• 46% failure rate of process output selections.
• A mere 19% are unequivocal successes (less than 1:5).

It’s Time to Face the Numbers and Facts…

Almost any senior executive would be alarmed upon learning that users were dissatisfied, failure rates approached 50%, and a significant percentage of your customers regretted their decisions.

Obviously, if the numbers listed above came from an important profit-impact function (supply chain, finance, customer satisfaction), everyone would be screaming for a complete rethinking of the entire process.

Unfortunately, the above metrics represent failure in the recruiting and retention elements of the talent management function. I have encountered no other business function that more completely avoids defining and measuring process failure than talent management.

Selection decisions are often about as accurate as a coin flip.

–The Recruiting Roundtable

Talent Management Failure Metrics Are In*

Here are more details on the five numbers provided above.

This data can be taken together as a clear indicator that we might have numerous failures in talent management:

• 70% dissatisfied — 70% of the external customers (applicants) and 28% of the internal customers (hiring managers) indicate they are dissatisfied with the hiring process (Source: Staffing.org).
• 50% customer regret — 50% of the processes users (both managers and new hires) later regret their “buying” decision (Source: The Recruiting Roundtable). In addition, 25% of new hires later regret taking their new job within one year (Source: Challenger, Gray)
• 46% turnover — 46% of new hires leave their jobs within the first year (Source: eBullpen, LLC) and 50% of current employees are actively seeking or are planning to seek a new job (Source: Deloitte).
• 46% failure rate — 46% of U.S. new hires must be classified as failures within their first 18 months (fired, pressured to quit, required disciplinary action, etc.) (Source: Leadership IQ). In addition, 58% of the highest-priority hires, new executives hired from the outside, fail in their new position within 18 months (Source: Michael Watkins).
• Only a 19% success rate — only one out of five of the process output can be classified as unequivocal successes (Source: Leadership IQ).

Some additional data points to consider include:

• 66% regret hiring decisions — Nearly two-thirds of hiring managers come to regret their interview-based hiring decisions (Source: DDI)
• 50% new executive turnover — nearly half of new executive hires quit or are fired within the first 18 months at a new employer (Source: Corporate Leadership Council).
• Newly promoted executives don’t do much better (40% of newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting a new job (Source: Manchester, Inc).
• Less than 50% are qualified — a majority of managers surveyed (59%) believe that less than half of all candidates they interviewed were qualified (Source: eBullpen, LLC).
• 65% lie on resumes — the key data source that we rely on to source and narrow down applicants contains untrue information more than half the time (Source: The Risk Advisory Group )
• Resume-sorting failures — Of all the “perfect resumes” sent out by mystery shopper candidates, only 12% were actually scheduled for interviews (Source: Hodes’ Healthcare).
• Bottom performers produce less — hiring and retaining below or even average performers have real opportunity costs because top performers can increase productivity, revenue, and profit by between 40% and 67% over average performers (Source: McKinsey & Co.).

* Note: I have purposely chosen publicly available sources that cite these research results. To find the material, you may use a simple Google search, but please don’t contact me for detailed references.

The samples in each case varied, but what if they were an indication of how poorly your organization’s talent-management function was performing?

Only 30% of organizations measure quality of hire, and only a handful specifically define and measure recruiting process failure. It’s time to adopt a business process management approach; start to measure successes and failures in the same way that other business processes already do.

Plan B, of course, is to ignore this warning and to continue to assume that existing processes are either error-free or on par with the Six Sigma standards of production, quality control, and customer service.

My Goal Is to Get You to Pay Attention

You can conjure up arguments about the validity of the research done by outside consulting firms, but that’s not the point. The key learning is to take a moment and ask yourself these key questions:

1. Have you clearly defined what “hiring failure” is? What failure rate is acceptable?
2. Can a process be properly designed so that so many that are involved in it do not have remorse or regrets about their decisions?
3. Is it ever acceptable to have a process where the dissatisfaction rates exceed 25%?
4. Has the time finally come where you bite the bullet and calculate the quality of hire, failure rates, and the ROI of your function?
5. Is it time to move beyond simply calculating output metrics (i.e., 22% are dissatisfied) and in addition to begin to use metrics to identify why your failures occur?

After viewing these research numbers, I hope you’ll agree it is time to rethink most talent management processes and metrics.

Do not concern yourself with the accuracy of any particular external study; their primary value is simply to stimulate you to do your own research within your own firm to find out if these problems and failures identified by others are currently occurring.

Action Steps to Consider

There are a handful of firms (DaVita quickly comes to mind) that have adopted a business process approach to their recruiting function where they clearly define and target failure.

If you’re interested in adopting this approach, here are some action steps to consider.

• Clearly define failure — include top candidates you failed to identify or attract; top candidates who dropped out early; the quality of candidates you didn’t hire; offer turndowns; good hires but bad initial placements; poor-performing new hires; legal costs; delayed time to initial productivity; dissatisfied or disillusioned candidates; frustrated hiring managers; and early turnover among new hires.
• Adopt a business process management approach — work with experts in supply chain, CRM, Six Sigma, etc., to learn about business process improvement tools and approaches.
• Shift to data-based decision-making — shift away from the approach where you assume that things are working; instead, rely on hard data to meet decisions and to continually improve every key process.
• Mystery shoppers — use mystery shoppers to identify process problems.
• Change your assessment approach — a significant portion of recruiting process errors occur because of an over-reliance on subjective tools like interviewing. A superior approach is to increase the use of validated skill assessment tools and to ask candidates to solve real problems.
• Conduct failure analysis — whenever you have a major process failure, use a failure analysis/root-cause identification approach to move beyond symptoms and to identify the real underlying causes of the failure.
• Assume failure — even when the process is made more objective, there will still be significant number of failures. Accept that fact and develop a process that allows you to identify those failures early and to minimize your losses.
• Calculate the cost of each error — work with the CFO’s office to calculate the costs and the business impacts of all major errors.
• Assume that all sub- processes are suspect — assume that bad hiring decisions are a result of poor design features in a multitude of sub-processes including job descriptions, resume sorting, interviews, reference checking, hiring manager monitoring, and onboarding.

Final Thoughts

Throughout my career, whenever I have had the opportunity, I ask recruiting and talent management leaders a simple, straightforward question:

If you hired 100 people, what percentage would turn out to be failures?

Not surprisingly, 99% of the time all I get in return is a blank look. In direct contrast, if I ask the same question on failure rates to those who lead other business functions like supply chain, production, sales, customer service center, etc., I get an immediate numerical response coupled with the costs associated with each increased percentage point of errors. It is my hope that the data referenced in this article will cause you to increase your focus on identifying failures and failure rates in each of your major sub-processes.

Rethinking how we source is not easy. But the unrefined tools such as search engines, job boards, advertisements, and even referrals are slowly giving way to far more powerful social networks of candidates. These networks can be shaped for specific types of candidates and for specific skills and competencies. They can be the only source of candidates you have so that your focus can be on your brand and building awareness of your organization and the kinds of work you offer.

Does this sound a little pie-in-the-sky? Maybe given today’s level of understand and technology, it is a stretch to give up all other forms of sourcing, but I predict these networks will replace 90% of other sourcing techniques with in decade.

What Is a Social Network?

For those of us in recruiting, a social network may be better thought of as a pool of potential candidates or as a community of talent. This is not the same as a static database of candidates. It is an ever-changing, expanding network of people who have chosen to associate with one another virtually. I often make an analogy to a network being like a series of circles rippling out from a center. Those people at the center of the circles are your most valuable and most likely candidates. Each successive ring of candidates gets further from you, is less known, and therefore less valuable. LinkedIn denotes this by giving priority to those people you know and who know you and then giving lower priority to people who you know through others.

Why Create Your Own Social Network?

Most of us rely on the established networks for sourcing candidates. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and many others depending on your geography and specialty. These will always have some place in recruiting, but by creating your own network you can have much more impact and get better results.

The purpose of creating a social network is to bring the best people into your innermost circle. By building a relationship through frequent communication via whatever means make sense (telephone, email, Twitter, SMS, or IM), you get to know more about each other. Potential candidates can make decisions about whether they like you, the organization you represent, and the positions that are available. You get to screen candidates and select people who closely match your needs.

Creating the infrastructure for a social network can be demanding, but free ones such as Ning are available and provide some level of customization. Others are built from scratch or by using open source tools and modules. ERE.net’s community of users (you and me) is a good example of a social network of practitioners. We have common interests and any of us can find other recruiters who we might like to recruit or help to find a new position. This is an example of an open network, but it could just as easily be available only to people who answer some questions or pass through a filter of some sort qualifying them for membership.

With your own network, you can build in tests, require certain information, or in many ways decide if someone is the right person for your organization. By doing this you eliminate hundreds of unqualified people and reduce the time your recruiters spend screening out the unwanted.

A social network, or talent community, is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting website and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who answer questions in a certain way or who achieve certain scores can be referred to the most suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate followup. No one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

What Do Candidates Think?

Given these economic times, candidates are stressed and unhappy, as I have written in past articles. They are keen to find organizations that are responsive, friendly, and where they can showcase their own unique qualities. A social network allows this, and the candidates I speak with respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements. They are pleased to be invited to be part of a community they have an interest in and they are also glad to know right away that they are not a good fit and won’t be considered. No news is not good news to a candidate who is trying hard to refine his or her knowledge of different organizations and different positions, and who wants to maximize her time.

I am surprised that the hype about social networks revolves almost entirely around the public networks rather than on building your own. If you are in the planning stages for next year, set aside some of your budget to explore creating your own branded social network. You might be surprised at how well it works and at how it creates a far more efficient and candidate friendly environment than you probably have today.

Despite many successes, it’s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image.

The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived.

It was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now.

While it is still possible to heavily influence perception with well-managed efforts, significant growth in social media, peer-to-peer content publishing, and online rating services have shifted a majority of the power away from the corporate employer brand manager to the masses. The shift in power renders all but the most strategic and well-executed efforts virtually ineffective.

To those who actively engage and publish their story, their perception is reality, even if the experiences that led them to their perception are not common. Their points of view are often emotionally charged, personal, and therefore, significantly more trusted as fact by those you need to influence than corporate, generic dribble.

Odds are, the people most influencing your employer brand are people you have never met.

Other People Now Own Your Employer Brand Image

Control provides comfort to senior talent management executives, and for years, they have been comfortable. No matter how much the employee experience differed from the overly positive perspective they sold to candidates and organizational stakeholders, they could get away with pushing out their message.

While many product brand marketers learned long ago that if the experience with the product didn’t match the brand positioning, consumers would revolt, few in HR were paying attention. Many HR leaders may ignore or discount the facts, but the truth is that a fundamental shift has occurred, and like it or not, the years of putting forward a brand identity not tied to reality are over. Some organizations have been successful in silencing organizational critics through threat of legal action, but the majority of attempts backfire, ultimately making the criticisms even more visible.

The New Owners of Employer Brands

The new owners are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance. The array of contributors grows more complex daily, and the most prominent groups of brand influencers include:

• Bloggers – blogs have been around for quite some time, and while it used to hold true that only 1:100 people active online were contributing original content, a vast array of new online services has significantly reduced that ratio. Today, thousands of independent-minded individuals are posting comments about their day at work, their boss from hell, the idiot that just got hired, the stupidity of HR actions, the lunacy of senior leadership, and all those little liability secrets corporate security would like to keep buried. They communicate without fear and without purpose. Psychological studies have shown that we are nearly three times more likely to consume negative information than positive information (there is a reason the nightly news focuses on the negative), which means that we are significantly more likely to share the bad stories versus the good ones. We are also prone to exaggeration and sensationalizing, but rarely does that fact get considered when folks are reading peer-produced commentary about life at XYZ Corp.
• Social media users – Social media isn’t a regional thing, it isn’t an economic thing, and it isn’t a political thing. It is, however, a technology concept that is enabling a fundamental shift in how people learn and communicate. From sites like Facebook and MySpace in the United States to QZone in China or Hyves in the Netherlands, millions of people are sharing the details of their daily lives with friends, family, coworkers, and virtual strangers. In minutes, users can spread facts, rumors, pictures, or innuendos to thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Negative videos like “Comcast sucks” that would have in the past been seen by only a handful of close friends are now seen by millions. Social media users can exert phenomenal pressure by using the grapevine to highlight stories many organizations would rather people not hear about.
• People active on Twitter – Twitter deserves special attention among the social media outlets because it is so instantaneous. Just as political events in Iran were instantly Tweeted about, so are the negative experiences of your employees, and even your customers. Individuals being laid off can now provide a “blow-by-blow” account of the badly handled termination process and share their pain instantly with thousands.
• Texters on mobile phones – these individuals utilize this omnipresent 24/7 channel to both receive and send news about your firm, its employees, and your practices.
• Commercial websites – there are numerous “what your employees are saying” sites like Vault, the forums at Indeed, or glassdoor.com, that specialize in sharing messages about what it’s like to work at a firm with individuals considering employment. While most make some attempt to validate that the comment contributors have worked or currently work for the organizations in questions, not all do. Prominent firms like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Starbucks have been targeted by unfriendly “anti-firm” websites that exist merely to spread a combination of real, half-truths, and untruths about the firms.
• Industry and profession-specific forums – current employees, former employees, investors, and individuals who have merely read about your firm can post questions about what it’s like to work at your firm (or answer them) on numerous and quite active professional association website forums or independent listservers.
• Internet groups – Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow individuals with similar interests to form groups that can help to connect individuals who share common interests and likes/dislikes about your firm.
• Internet show hosts – there are numerous Internet voice and video casts (some associated with traditional media outlets and others that are just independent). These shows frequently include interviews with individuals who, without your knowledge or permission, say both good and bad things about what it’s like to work at your firm. Videoblogger and avid social network user Philip DeFranco demonstrated the power of the approach to take on even the most powerful litigation-bound employer, Wal-Mart, in response to fine print in Wal-Mart’s self-funded insurance plan that allows the employer to cease damage awards received by plan participants.
• Social bookmarking service users – individuals who tag a story with a “Digg” or related online bookmark can proactively increase the visibility of any negative story, whether you like it or not.
• Search engine managers – these individuals differ in that they probably don’t have a particular bias toward or against business or any particular firm; however, the design of search algorithms influence what type of messages about your firm that others can readily see.

Individuals who are likely to be the most active in shaping your employer brand on these communications channels include:

• Current employees – hundreds or even thousands of your employees who sometimes innocently and sometimes purposely post Tweets or wall postings provide insight into what it’s like to work at your firm. Even something as innocuous as a LinkedIn profile might lead some to make assumptions about your firm as an employer.
• Former employees – you may have thought they liked you, but what they say after they leave is more likely the reality. From disgruntled alumni to employees recently laid off, the information collective is alive with former employees recounting their experience.
• Vendors – those current and former vendors who have had both a positive and negative business relationship with your firm can now easily spread their perceptions and experiences over the Internet to anyone that will listen.
• Anti-business types – individuals who are looking for opportunities to blame corporations for a variety of economic and environmental problems are quite active on the Internet. Some are actually quite effective in not just spreading Internet messages but also in creating mass letter-writing campaigns and even actual face-to-face meetings or protests.

Peer-Produced Content Is More Credible

If you were to fact-check most blogs, Tweets, or YouTube videos, most would be considered fallacious. Yet survey after survey shows that most individuals in general (and net-generation individuals in particular) believe peer-produced content over traditional news or print media content.

You can bemoan this fact all you want, but statements on your corporate website, in your employment ads, or in press releases will almost always be viewed as less credible than a comment from a blogger who is passing along an innuendo that might have no basis in fact.

Messages from Others Are Extremely Hard to Counter

As Internet users become more prolific, the ability of corporations to monitor and respond to every channel is significantly diminished. If several hundred people outside the organization are producing content, like it or not, there is little your small team can do to match that scale (short of building a brand army of employees inside the organization to push positive commentary).

Responding to negative commentary online isn’t a good idea, as your response makes the original content both more visible and more charged.

Final Thoughts

Given the bleak picture and the almost daily erosion of control over your brand image, you might consider just giving up, but I urge you not to make that mistake.

While you no longer control your employer brand, you can become more aware of your actual brand — especially the negative comments being posted about your firm. Learn to use tools like search engine alerts, blog search sites, and Twitter archive searches. Use search engine optimization techniques to ensure the content you want to be most visible becomes most visible, and work to hide negative comments.

Smart brand managers can use employees who are active on the Internet to increase the number of positive brand messengers. Develop plans to influence key opinion leaders by making more authentic and candid (read: less perfect) stories and examples available to them. I’ll cover the approaches you can use to proactively influence your brand in coming articles.

If you have corporate experience operating an employment branding function, I solicit your additions on this loss of brand control topic. Also, if you have questions you would like answered on corporate employer branding, you are encouraged to post them in response to this article.

If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Most HR/recruiting execs would suggest hiring managers themselves as the likely assignee. Others would contend that HR/recruiting is responsible for the quality of the candidates, but managers are responsible for the quality of hire. Others would suggest there are too many variables to assign it to anyone.

Further confusing the issue is determining when quality of hire should be measured. If you do it before the person starts, you’re measuring the sourcing and selection process. After the hire, you’re measuring the hiring manager’s management and leadership abilities as much as you are the candidate’s ability to perform the job needs. Compounding the time variable is the measurement standard. If you use a different measurement technique for before and after, then you’re left with a comparison between oranges and cell phones, or more likely, experience and qualifications vs. performance.

It’s because of these complex issues that I believe that HR/recruiting must take responsibility for quality of hire. If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Here’s my rationale behind the nomination.

1. Maximizing quality of hire is the most important strategic role HR/recruiting can play. Other than maximizing on-the-job performance and retention, there is no more important role for the HR/recruiting department. Not wanting responsibility for this seems odd to an old recruiter like me. All the executives I’ve placed thrive on this type of challenge. Why would HR/recruiting be reluctant to take on — even demand — this responsibility?
2. The CFO is responsible for the capital acquisition process, so why shouldn’t HR/recruiting be responsible for the talent acquisition process? While the financial department doesn’t select, install, and run the capital equipment it approves, it still manages the approval process and strongly influences the ultimate decision. This parallels the role HR/recruiting should play in the talent acquisition process.
3. Having responsibility means the process is adhered to, not the decision itself. Developing and monitoring the hiring/selection process is the role of HR/recruiting. This means developing and implementing processes that ensure that the best candidates are seen and hired. There should be an audit process as part of this to ensure that the best decision has been made, and that if it has not been, the process is modified.
4. There is a huge tactical and strategic cost to making mistakes. HR/recruiting needs to deal with all the mistakes, including finding replacements and dealing with the legal and employee relations issues. The opportunity costs of bad hires alone provides the rationale for some type of vigorous and auditable selection process. Who else could possibly lead this type of cross-functional effort?
5. If not HR/recruiting, then who? Hiring managers should police themselves on quality of hire. Some do it, most don’t, and even those that do, don’t do it well. Regardless, there should be one standardized process that works and is used company-wide. This is the primary reason why hiring managers can only be held responsible for the successful performance of the person hired, not the process used. If some managers want to use their own process, they need to be held 100% responsible for mistakes, including the costs associated with this. This is one way to convince them they should use the approved process.

Of course, if HR/recruiting is given the responsibility for maximizing and measuring quality of hire, there comes some programs that need to be implemented to pull it off. Here are some quick recommendations:

1. Stop using job descriptions to source and select candidates. If you describe the work that needs to be done and assess candidates on this, before and after the hire, you’ll solve the dual measurement problem and reduce turnover dramatically. The primary reasons new hires underperform and/or leave is lack of understanding of real job needs and a poor fit with their hiring manager.
2. Develop sourcing programs that target high-quality candidates, rather than eliminating the worst to see who’s left. This is not insignificant. It means you must stop asking knockout questions and stop posting boring ads. The only reason companies ask knockout questions is to eliminate weak candidates who apply. If you change the sourcing paradigm to target great candidates, rather than hoping great candidates fall through the cracks, you eliminate the “eliminate the weak candidates” problem at the strategic level.
3. Use a performance-based talent scorecard and evidence-based assessment system to measure pre-hire quality. Competency models and behavioral interviews are too generic and do not measure a candidate’s ability and motivation to perform the actual tasks required for success. Instead, candidates should be evaluated across all real jobs, including their ability to work effectively with the hiring manager. Quantifiable evidence of consistent and comparable past performance needs to be the basis of the yes/no decision.

With this type of process in place, HR/recruiting’s role then becomes one of ensuring that the process for maximizing quality of hire is being followed — not making the hiring decision. This is comparable to the authority given, or taken, by the CFO, in ensuring that capital expenditures are justified in some reasonable fashion. Maximizing the quality of every single hiring decision is the primary strategic role of the HR/recruiting department. If HR/recruiting wants a seat at the strategic table it should demand this responsibility.

1. You walk in to a car dealership that doesn’t have any salespeople on staff. No one is available to answer your questions. No one will describe the features and benefits of the cars. The only person there is a 17-year-old kid working at a cash register. Test driving is prohibited. If you want the car, you simply buy it … like a pack of gum.
2. You are interested in buying a certain house and there is no real estate agent or home owner available. You are told that the process involves first making an offer without the opportunity to see the interior or take a tour. After you make an offer, then you can enter the home.

The reason why these scenarios seem funny is because when making a big decision, information gathering is critical. In these situations people need information, reassurance, and probably even some hand-holding to feel comfortable.

And, for big decisions, it’s helpful to gather information from another human being (i.e.: car salesperson or real estate agent, etc). We want that personal connection to help guide us and answer our questions.

For most people, finding a new job is another big life decision.

If the human connection is so important, then why do many companies take the cash register approach regarding their talent acquisition strategy?

These companies:

• Require that candidates submit their resume online as the first point of contact.
• Offer no personal contact for a potential candidate to ask questions.
• Will not allow for a site visit until a candidate is already at a final interview stage.
• Never respond to candidates emails or phone calls
• Do not list a contact person on job postings

All of this builds to our questions of the day:

1. How can a candidate be genuinely interested in an open position without having an opportunity to fully research your organization?
2. How can you possibly attract top talent if you don’t offer a real person to serve as a recruitment contact?

Don’t treat your recruitment process like that car dealership with a cash register. Rather, incorporate your recruitment staff in the front end of your process to fill your funnel with enthusiastic candidates.