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Find the right candidate and close the deal. When asked about their value-add to an organization, most recruiters will respond with the previous statement. However, the recent passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 has fundamentally changed the way the recruiting profession must view compensation. Now, not only must recruiters focus on finding candidates and closing deals, but we must more closely partner with compensation professionals to put the right deal together that will protect our clients from future litigation. keep reading…

How do you convince cynical executives to fund a social network recruiting effort?

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.

keep reading…

In all the brouhaha about great new sourcing initiatives and Web 2.0 tools, how much have your recruiters and hiring managers improved their ability to hire great people, not average people?

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.

keep reading…

Some numbers indicate failure so clearly that you can’t help but pay attention to them.

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.

keep reading…

Social networks are so hyped right now among recruiters that it is hard to separate their real value and purpose from often overblown marketing promises. By creating a social network specifically for your organization, you can differentiate yourself from the crowd, build your brand, and find most of the candidates you need without any other sourcing techniques. keep reading…

For more than a decade, I have worked tirelessly to maintain my status as a recognized global expert on employer branding. I have advised numerous firms; developed positioning methodologies now in use by many HR consultancies and recruitment marketing firms; given dozens of employer branding presentations; and have even written a book on the topic.

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.

keep reading…

Over the past few months I’ve been describing a new approach for determining quality of hire, and using changes in this to justify any new expenditures on an ROI basis. While the methodology is pretty slick, the pushback is coming not from the process, but from the idea that HR/recruiting is responsible for quality of hire at all.

If not HR/recruiting, then who? keep reading…

Here are two scenarios to ponder:

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? keep reading…

U.S. EEOC Assistant Legal Counsel Carol Miaskoff brought up a few points in her Florida presentation (see video, below) that raised questions among ERE members.

I caught up with her on the phone to go over a few of those questions. Mary Kay Mauren, senior attorney advisor, was also on the call. keep reading…

As anyone who has worked in more than one organization knows, in addition to job skills, successful long-term employees tend to act and think similarly. You can think of it as “culture.” Personal success depends on both personal and environmental factors, each of which is important in its own way. Personal factors include having the right skill-set to perform the job and the motivations to use them. Environmental factors include things like getting along with the manager and fitting into the culture of the organization.

Let’s begin with the assertion that having the right job skills is at the top of the food chain. keep reading…

Every vendor in the recruiting space touts their latest recruiting and sourcing tool as the next killer app. If you were there, you saw many of them at the last ERE Expo in Florida in September. As the economy recovers, there will be many more at ERE’s Expo 2010 in San Diego next March. Some of them will be superb and worthy of serious consideration.

However, while many will work as advertised, getting budget for them is a different matter entirely. In the past, the only way to get any significant new expenditures past the CFO was with some type of rigorous cost-savings analysis. However, this approach ignored any improvements in candidate quality as possible justification due to its “intangible” nature.

But as Dr. John Sullivan has been ably pointing out for these past 10 years, improvements in candidate quality dwarf potential cost savings. In fact, one could easily justify a cost increase if quality of hire could be proven.

In this article, I’m going to introduce a means to calculate the ROI of any new recruiting program on a quality-of-hire basis. Further, I’m going to suggest that once you have a means to measure quality of hire, you’ll shift your focus toward improving it, and consider cost per hire a secondary priority. keep reading…

Top-notch job candidates are tired of the recruiting mess we have created in the U.S. I would guess that well over half of all recruiting functions are dysfunctional. By that I mean they have no standard process for dealing with candidates, treat some candidates much differently than others, respond sporadically to requests and phone calls, fail to follow through on verbal commitments to candidates, and let themselves be constantly swayed by hiring managers who are unaware of the talent market.

I say this because I have recently talked to a dozen or more people who I know personally and have worked with over the years. I can vouch for their skill, professional abilities, and reputation. While they may not be a good fit for the particular job they were seeking, they were worthy of respect and of receiving a consistent and predictable response.

One particular friend of mine recently decided to switch jobs. He was not laid off and was not unhappy. He just felt the longer-term opportunity was better in a different place. Being a educated candidate, and with some advice from me and others, he laid out a plan. He started by asking friends about opportunities and also by choosing a few specific firms he might like to work at and finding LinkedIn friends who worked in those firms. The net result was referrals to a possible four or five potential jobs.

He then decided to check out the corporate websites of these few companies to see if the positions were listed. His first shock was at the poor quality of these sites. Most of them lacked good general information and offered nothing specific about the kind of work he was interested in. Only one of the sites listed the position he knew was open, offered little information about the position except the usual boilerplate, and then asked him to go through a tedious process of uploading a resume. None of them really learned anything about him or his referral. No questions, no interactivity, nothing. He didn’t know what they really wanted to know about him, and they certainly weren’t providing him much that was useful.

At this point he was already a frustrated potential candidate. While in no hurry to change jobs, he was the borderline passive candidate: sort of looking, interested, easy to recruit to the right situation, and totally unknown. He is also very competent and talented.

He had also given his resume to his friends to submit to the recruiting function and had even helped a friend upload his data into an employee referral site. Yet, after several weeks he had heard nothing at all of meaning. No email, no phone call. He tried to call several times only to receive a voice mail saying they would call back, but no one ever did. He kept checking with his friends and all the positions are still open more than six weeks later.

What is going on? keep reading…

Many aspects of a recruiter’s job remain the same as in the past, before the arrival of social media. We all review resumes, assess the matches, interview on the phone, and meet prospects in person. Social media has added and keeps adding new options on how to get there. To remain competitive and productive we must figure out and start using social media in recruiting. I’d like to highlight some aspect of how it can work for us.

Let’s talk about the very interesting phenomena of communicating with potential candidates in ways that have not been there before. For years, we have been discussing whether to call first or email first. Some gurus suggest that you first send a detailed email, then leave a phone message, and then send a short email mentioning that you had called. Fine, but here are your other options today: keep reading…

The growth, adoption, and momentum of social networking over the past 18 months brings another round of significant change for recruiting departments. The first question that needs to be answered is whether or not you believe social networking is all hype or if it will result in lasting change. Then you can answer the question, “If social networking is here to stay, is it right for our organization?”

Some look at the social networking trend and say that it’s all a bunch of hype. Some look at it and feel the need to, and will try to, be everywhere. Some will consciously decide to be nowhere — we have the phone and that works very well, thank you. Many are feeling overwhelmed by what’s happening, the pace of change, and the fears about transparency. In most cases you don’t need to be and shouldn’t be everywhere. And, you may decide to be nowhere, but make sure that’s a conscious decision and not just resistance to inevitable change.

As for fear of social networking, the pace of change and transparency, think of it this way — whether you engage your brand in the discussion or not, the conversation moves on — nothing stands still, except that eventually people may just not care about your brand at all, and, well, at that point you won’t need to recruit anyways. If you want to influence the conversation about your brand and if you want to engage people in your brand story, then social networking has a lot to offer. The complete article featured in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership October issue, will delve further into that, but here are my more brief thoughts for the time being. keep reading…

Shopping for a car? Need groceries? Want new clothes? Looking at trying a new restaurant? Whether we are actively searching for a given product or not, we form opinions and make decisions based, at least in part, on the marketing messages we receive about them.

The world of employment advertising is no exception. Attractive logos, extensive benefits packages, flexible schedules: all these can be used to make an impact on job candidates and affect how many people read and reply to your postings. When considering how to initially attract readers to your employment ads, the key opportunity may lie in your job title and/or headline statement. These prominent statements give advertisers the chance to attract the attention and readership of job seekers, and motivate them to respond.

According to marketing legend David Ogilvy, five times as many people read a headline as do the entire ad. Therefore, without a strong headline statement, your ad may be skipped entirely. Another source (copyblog.com) says that while 8 out of 10 people will read a headline statement, only 2 in 10 read the entire ad. By designing a strong, compelling lead-in, you’ll increase the number of candidates who do go on to read your ad, and apply to your job, while your competitors’ ads get skipped over.

Creating Job Titles or Headline Statements

What makes a good title/headline? keep reading…

Recruiting the best candidates – something I’m writing a book about, and have a much longer version of this article in the November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about — starts with a few basics.

The most important aspect is to understand who you are targeting. I’m not talking about recognizing the technical skills or requirements you want to see in the candidate. Temporarily, throw the job description out the window. Then conduct an early reference check. This is a performance check you can cash.

If the results confirm a prized candidate, think of him or her as a pearl. The Encarta Dictionary defines a pearl as “somebody or something highly esteemed or valued.” The gems themselves take years to develop and the art of pearl cultivation is a long and delicate process. As it relates to candidates, we all recognize the best as valuable. But we often overlook what it took for them to become who they are and therefore do not treat them accordingly. In many cases, we are talking about years of dedication and hard work to perfect their craft. Those who rise to the top of their profession are a select bunch. They are select but not scarce and are very much open to being recruited. But unlike any other, it takes a dedicated, specific plan to successfully recruit them.

Another thing to keep in mind in the initial approach is that many of the finest desire a certain amount of recognition that comes with their achievements. They take great pride in their accomplishments and want you, the recruiting or hiring entity, to pay attention to it. Still, there is a fine line between preferential treatment and the acknowledgement of greatness. The latter commands the stage without demanding that it be so. Those are the most sought after “pearls.”

However, there may be friction if the top candidates are required to follow a set of routine guidelines without explanation. A greater amount of latitude should be given when scheduling interviews, for example, as their time is of the essence. It will be difficult to control the process if a certain amount of patience and flexibility are not demonstrated.

Selling must be at the foundation of any strategy designed to capture the best. Why do so many fail to recruit top talent with any consistency? The lack of sales skills and persuasive techniques are the bane of otherwise successful organizations. Essentially, they are unable to convincingly sell the talent on the opportunity or the company. At best, they produce a half-hearted effort expecting a job description or the company bio to suffice. Or they rely on a formulaic hiring process to do the trick. This does not work. Each candidate should be individually courted. Studies suggest that there are staggering numbers of top performers who are not recruited because they are not “sold” on the recruiter or the position.

There are three important dimensions to selling as it pertains to recruiting top performers: keep reading…

One of the worst-kept secrets in recruiting is that source of hire data is inconsistently gathered and rarely accurate. To many corporate recruiters, the validity of source of hire data is a non issue; after all, once the hire is generated, their role is over.

However, if you view recruiting as a marketing and sales job (as I and many strategic recruiting leaders do), knowing what channels brought the prospect to the organization and what messages led to conversion (talented individual > applicant > candidate > hire) are by far the most critical bits of data the function can collect. Without this information, it’s extremely difficult to scientifically budget for sourcing or build strategic sourcing systems capable of impacting organizational performance.

Luckily, however, there is a simple approach that ensures much more accurate and helpful information that doesn’t rely on transaction-minded recruiters documenting the source of hire.

keep reading…

Many years ago, in the land of Spamalittle, King Rter lived in a tiny castle near a pond. It was a noisy pond filled with the sound of croaking frogs, day and night.

In his quest to maintain rule over his tiny kingdom, Rter needs mighty knights to fight dragons, battle anarchists, fight off industrial demons, and fully document all expenses in a timely matter.

However, there is an economic slowdown in Spamalittle, and most would-be knights were unwilling to leave their stable employment. This would make finding enough brave and bold applicants willing to fight for any cause, however noble, quite difficult. A recent survey conducted by the town crier showed clearly that while employee dissatisfaction was on the rise, few of the best, and even the worst for that matter, were willing to risk leaving for other seemingly more attractive endeavors.

Having one’s daily bread seemed to be a powerful incentive indeed.

However, the survey also seemed to indicate that tidings of a near recovery would encourage even the most satisfied to ponder alternate opportunities. In times of want, stale bread is enough; however, in more bountiful times, one’s daily bread can seem less pleasant, especially when thy neighbor is now having his with organic raisins. keep reading…

You head HR for a regional hospital that has a 21st century career site and a vigorous branding and outreach program. Your jobs are posted to one of the major job boards, to niche and diversity sites, and to the free distribution services.

You follow all the rules, keep great records, and even passed an informal EEOC inquiry a couple years ago.

But lurking in your ATS is proof you’re breaking the laws of Germany, or maybe France, or possibly Canada. Maybe all of them. You never wanted those resumes (CVs, if you prefer), wouldn’t sponsor the candidates, and had no interest in hiring anyone from outside the region, let alone the United States. But now that you have applicants from countries with tough privacy laws, you are bound to follow them. keep reading…

It is my privilege to be the chairperson for the upcoming #socialrecruiting summit on November 16th in New York City.

I was lucky enough to speak at the last event in June at the Googleplex where I shared a venue with thought-leaders such as Joshua Kahn, Shannon Seery Gude, and Chis Hoyt. We made the case for using social networking tools and platforms, and we discussed the growing importance of these tools in our roles as recruiters and HR professionals. Our sessions covered topics such as mobile recruiting applications, employee brand management and monitoring, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and enhanced career websites.

As the chairperson for the next #socialrecruiting summit, it is my goal to bring a community of recruiting professionals together to discuss the real-world applicability of social recruiting. keep reading…