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At an early age I had the unique opportunity to work at the corporate offices of two different Fortune 500 companies. One was number 37 on the list, and the other one 497. While there, I learned a few timeless strategy lessons. They might be useful as you develop the hiring strategy for your company or organization. keep reading…

Many years ago, the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, had more than its fair share of fires. Most of the buildings were made of wood, and the city literally burned down several times.

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! keep reading…

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.) keep reading…

Social media presents progressive organizations with a plethora of recruiting-centric opportunities. Every day, new ways to directly source talent, support the engagement of people with the organization, market employment opportunities, and influence the employer brand arise.

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 keep reading…

How well does your organization select and integrate talent for internal promotion? If you are like many organizations we’ve seen — not very well.

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: keep reading…

Over the past several months I’ve been advocating a strategic view of the recruiting function based on quality of hire as the metric of choice. In case you missed any of the missives, here’s a quick summary of what some would contend are blasphemous repudiations of the recruiting department of yesteryear. keep reading…

I have officially lost control of the remote on Sundays, Saturdays, and Mondays. In 15 years of love and marriage with a football fanatic, I haven’t learned a whole lot about the whole pastime, but I have learned that most men know a lot about football and care about it a lot more than recruiting. I also have noticed that most men use football to talk to each other on holidays, campouts, and soccer games. I would imagine it accounts for about 70% of all guy small talk. So I started thinking about using football as a metaphor for getting managers to do what I want, which is help me sell the company, the candidate, and get me hires. I didn’t come up with this idea, and it isn’t very original, but by golly, it works. Here’s how to do it. keep reading…

A deal announced Monday  between Twitter and LinkedIn makes it a snap now for users of both services to cross post status messages.

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. keep reading…

The proliferation of recruiting videos since the advent of Web 2.0 has been staggering. Candidates can review an abundance of organizational information in videos that previous generations of job candidates did not have the opportunity to view. A job candidate needs only to peruse career pages on organizational websites or go to Career TV, Social Networks, and YouTube to find information in this format.

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. keep reading…

The 21st century has opened with a flurry of disasters, economic crises, acts of terrorism, and wars that underline the need to adapt quickly. The skills of planning, goal orientation, and consistency that we taught and practiced widely in the 20th century are no longer success factors. Workforce planning seems oxymoronic, and a three-year plan is looked at with both skepticism and humor. Trying to predict who we should hire in February or May is most often a futile act, yet we are still required to produce the right people — fast!

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? keep reading…

Great people don’t make a job change for money. Great people have to be enticed to talk to a great organization. How I overcome this is by arguing that my “tribe” is a better fit for them than their current tribe. My tribe is cooler, funner, more interesting, faster, more successful, and contains less management-by-spreadsheet than their company. Come jump ship and work with us. This is the difference between “sourcing as selling” and resume mining.

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. keep reading…

You won’t read it in the newspaper, but it’s a fact that the New York Yankees were the world champions of recruiting long before they were declared the world champions of Major League Baseball.

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.

keep reading…

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…