No, seriously, I am — at least, that’s what www.humanforsale.com told me. I took their survey and the resulting value on my person was nearly $2 million. Of course, I’d like to think that I am priceless. (Waiting while you all vomit…) Try it for yourself and see what you’d go for on eBay…

But getting serious (and because that site doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a sourcer) — let’s talk about what sourcing is worth. What are you, as a professional people-hunter/sourcer/search ninja actually worth?

If we knew the answer to this question, we wouldn’t be asking you, our readers. It’s a question that comes up often and almost never receives the same answer. Some people think that sourcing is only worth about $6/hr. Others command a hefty $100+/hr billing rate for sourcing projects. Regardless of how you approach this question, the answer will almost never be accurate and I believe that is because there is no cookie-cutter framework in which “sourcing” fits. For instance:

• Some sourcers do lead generation
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach
• Some sourcers do lead generation + initial outreach + pre-screening
• Some sourcers do all of the above as well as strategic initiatives, including pipeline development and employment branding projects

…yet they are all “sourcers.” To say that each of these types of individuals should be paid the same since they are all classified as “sourcer” would be as incorrect as saying a person working in sales at a retail storefront should be making the same as a person working in sales at a multi-national ERP software manufacturer, because they both carry the same title.

In my personal opinion, sourcers’ compensation should be determined based on two main items and one sub-item:

• Level of expertise (usually determined by years of experience, but not always)
• Scope of function

If you want experience, you must pay for it. If you want more work to be done, you have to pay for that, too. And if you are not willing to pay for either (translated — you are looking for a “top-notch sourcer” at at $13/hr) then you will engage in a never-ending search — either because you’ll never find a sourcer willing to take your job, or you’ll end up hiring all the wrong ones.

Geography also plays a role in determining a sourcer’s compensation. Where you are in the world makes a big difference — for example, sourcers in the United States and Australia typically get paid more than sourcers in Asia. Cost of living in a given location makes a big difference in what a sourcer could/should earn.

With this in mind, I invite all of you who are sourcers to participate in our Salary Survey so we can get a snapshot of what the actual compensation of sourcers is today. Please follow this link and take a few moments to anonymously fill out the survey. Once we get a good sampling we will share this information on SourceCon.com to give everyone a better idea of how sourcing is compensated.

Let’s start with what Dice says.

Of nearly 850 HR managers and recruiters who hire IT employees, 46% say it’s taking longer to fill jobs than last year, with only 18% say it’s taking a shorter time. The most-often reason given for the longer time is the inability to find qualified people; in June, in comparison, the main reason was just caution about the economy.

The folks that Dice surveyed say these jobs and skills are their top hiring priorities for 2011:

• Java/J2EE developer
• .Net developer
• Software developer
• Project manager
• Mobile developer
• Web developer
• SAP
• Business analyst
• Business intelligence
• Security analyst

On to the TEKsystems survey of IT directors and other IT executives, which found that “while 30% of IT leaders indicate confidence in their ability to compete for talent as we emerge from the recession, most (70%) do not feel very prepared.”

Here are the jobs TEKsystems found are the most difficult to fill with “exceptional talent,” as judged by the percentage of respondents rating the difficulty a seven or above on a 1- 10 scale.

Enterprise Architect:67%

Security specialist: 54%

Network architect: 52%

Business intelligence specialist: 52%

Database administrator: 50%

Virtualization engineer 46%

.Net architect: 45%

ERP technology functional analyst: 45%

Java/J2EE architect: 43%

CRM technology functional analyst: 43%

Business process engineer: 43%

Network engineer: 39%

Project manager: 38%

Storage engineer: 35%

Systems administrator: 25%

Technical writer: 21%

Help desk/desktop support: 10%

Many ERE readers know that we at Rocket-Hire have a fanatical interest in the pre-employment assessment industry, and continuously comment about its trends and happenings. This interest in how end-users such as recruitment, HR, and line management actually use online assessment has led us to continue to run our Online Assessment Usage Survey, annually dating all the way back to 2002.

At the end of this article, you’ll find a link to this year’s survey. Please take a few minutes to help us and other members of our community learn more about assessment usage trends by providing us with information about your company’s screening and assessment practices (Don’t worry: all responses are confidential and we will only report aggregate data).

Given the steady increase in interest and the lack of information about this industry, we feel the results will continue to have value for the ERE community. We look forward to reporting our findings right here on ERE sometime this fall.

In order to provide some extra motivation, here’s a quick summary of the key findings from last year.

Summary of 2009 Findings

Last year’s findings were generally consistent with those of our past six years worth of data. Here is a quick summary. Last year, 148 end-users of assessment completed the survey, representing a very small increase over the previous year. Respondents represented a wide range of company sizes. The results confirmed what most of our previous surveys have found:

• Prescreening and assessment are continuing their gradual penetration into the mainstream of recruitment and hiring.
• Personality inventories and skill and technical certifications continue to be the most popular online assessment tools. Assessments of cognitive abilities as well as fit with the company culture have expanded as well.
• Respondents report a lack of understanding, weak budgets, or a general lack of support for online tools as their primary obstacles to adoption or greater use of modern prescreening and assessment technology.
• Those organizations that formally evaluate their hiring practices tend to support the use of prescreening and assessment, but a majority of assessment users are still failing to evaluate the effectiveness of their screening and assessment tools.
• Legal issues continue to affect the design and deployment of online hiring tools; however, a majority of pre-employment assessment users have not had any involvement in legal, EEO, or OFCCP proceedings.

There clearly is a growing interest in scientifically derived hiring tools. This trend is encouraging but not particularly surprising; these numbers will continue to grow as more organizations understand the value in properly evaluating the impact of screening and assessment tools, seeing for themselves how quality hiring tools can improve a workforce. We feel strongly that the current economic recovery is starting to drive a strong increase in assessment usage and we are eager to use this year’s survey to see if our hunch is correct.

This Year’s Survey

The goal of this year’s survey is to continue building on the information gathered from past surveys and to verify the fact that usage rates for online screening and assessment are increasing. There is tremendous value in the information your survey responses will provide. With your help, this year’s results will:

• Provide some reality to speculation regarding increases in the use of both online screening tools and online assessment tools.
• Provide a broader perspective on the evolution of the entire staffing process.
• Assist companies with some basic benchmark information about how online screening and assessment tools are being deployed.
• Likely confirm our speculation that while many companies are using online screening and assessment tools, few are collecting the metrics needed to help them understand the true ROI they are providing.
• Help us gain some insight into the assessment technologies that will be most popular in the near future.

All survey responses are confidential and individual responses will not be shared with anyone. We are not able to use information from individual vendors of screening and assessment tools or persons who may consult to multiple organizations.

Just click here and you’ll be taken to the survey, which should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. Please feel free to forward the link to any end-users of assessment. If you have any questions, contact chandler@rocket-hire.com. We look forward to sharing our results with you.

I feel so lucky that I am still working after 27 years with it and love every day I am alive.
–Jon Gundersgaard

Yesterday, my blog featured an interview of Jon Gundersgaard, a 30-year veteran of the HR/Staffing Industry. Jon’s compelling life story as someone who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and has been in a wheelchair since 1995 initiated a discussion with friend and mentor (pictured at right), Gerry Crispin, Chief Navigator at CareerXroads. Jon’s depiction of a life well lived, and intense productivity as a valued member of his staffing organization, missing work only six months in the last 30 years was provocative. Here was a perfect personification of an industrious, talented element of today’s workforce who served as a critical member of his team and was a productive contributor to society as a whole — despite a serious malady. As a paraplegic, his disability was a sidenote, to an otherwise determined approach to keeping his sourcing and recruiting skills up-to-date with the latest techniques and tools available. The story speaks likewise to a broader workforce effected by blindness, deafness, and other differently-abled categories.

A few days after meeting Jon, the thought of such inspirational people weighed on my mind at the airport as I was returning from the ERE Conference. I texted initial inquiries to Gerry in reference to other individuals within our industry with handicaps that have yet to be highlighted. The text evolved into an in-depth dialogue that broached related topics such as the candidate side of the equation; wounded veterans, deaf or blind software engineers, etc.

Gerry’s interest also stemmed from a gig he did with his colleague Mark Mehler with their client, National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology, under an IBM grant nearly a decade ago. NTID graduates were, at the time, not benefiting by the runup in interest in hiring new engineering and computer science majors. They conducted focus groups with recruiters, students, and working graduates and identified several choke points in the recruiting process that unintentionally filtered disabled candidates out.

As the saying goes, “the rest is history.” The end result was Gerry’s idea to develop a survey with Mark Mehler which was launched this week, designed to answer the following question:

‘Are employers who are approached by jobseekers with requisite skills, experience and knowledge but who happen to have a disability, prepared to assess their ability (and not be distracted by their disability) given the decade-long shift to digital protocols?’To be succinct, “How prepared are you for jobseekers who happen to have a disability?”

Corporate EEO statements routinely professes to focus on hire-ability and not be distracted by disability. The following survey developed by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, attempts to see what this “ground floor” looks like to someone with a disability.

We invite corporate staffing leaders and teams to participate in this worthy cause to learn more about industry efforts to address disability candidate experiences. Your answers to questions about how your firm accommodates disabled prospects in the hiring process (not the job itself) will absolutely be kept anonymous.

CareerXroads will be the only one with access to your contact info. Your firm will not ever be listed as having participated. We require your contact info however to ensure a) no duplicates, b) a representative sample is acquired and c) to invite you to a private webinar that will share the results before they are published.

Feel free to contact Gerry Crispin at CareerXroads to address any questions or concerns you may have.

Your assistance in enhancing the viral reach of this effort is to be commended. The special nature of this endeavor has attracted the combined forces of Arbita ACES, Starr Tincup, ERE, John Sumser, and Peopleclick. We thank everyone, including you our audience, for doing your part in forwarding a link on this story to your respective Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc. accounts. Old school email to your fellow co-workers and staffing leadership is always a sure fire way to attract with precision as well.

In the last few years the emphasis on new technologies and leveraging of social networks for sourcing and recruiting have become much more prevalent. There are now entire conferences dedicated to what is being termed “social recruiting.” Many of the dominant providers of applicant tracking systems are increasingly adding more “social” capabilities to their offerings, but in such a rapidly changing market, can any large software provider keep up? Are these “traditional” ATS tools destined to be replaced by candidate CRM platforms, talent communities, or corporate recruiting Facebook pages?

One thing is for sure: the simultaneous impact of reduced hiring, restricted organizational resources and budgets, and the emergence of social technologies as a viable, lower-cost alternative to traditional sourcing and recruiting practices have for the foreseeable future changed how companies find, attract, and incent both internal and external candidates. While qualified candidates are still seemingly more available than ever, many organizations still struggle finding top talent for many high-skill and technical positions. At the same time, companies are being forced by a fast-moving and changing marketplace and competitive environment to possess the capability to increase, reduce, redeploy, and re-train organizational talent much more rapidly and skillfully than even a few years ago. Job requirements will need to be redefined, and a more fluid mix of permanent staff augmented with contract and other contingent workers will be required. A better understanding of an organization’s entire talent community will be necessary to read and react to these complex conditions.

Many organizational leaders and professionals in the talent acquisition field are asking important questions, such as what tools, technologies, strategies, and networks can be used to try and meet these requirements, and ensure that the organization has the right talent to meet its objectives? What approaches are working? And what practices of the past need to be jettisoned?

To try and get the sense of how this rapidly changing economic, competitive, and dynamic environment is impacting the world of talent acquisition, we are pleased to announce the Third Annual ERE/Knowledge Infusion 2010 Future of Recruiting and Sourcing Survey.

Please take a few minutes to take the 2010 Knowledge Infusion & ERE Future of Recruiting and Sourcing Survey survey, and share your perspectives to help everyone in the talent acquisition community better understand and navigate this challenging environment.

–

Peyton Manning? Who dat? Who DAT! The Who Dat Nation has spoken. The Saints won the Super Bowl. Decisively, without a doubt, without a question, and in a game that was one of the rare ones that got better and better after every play.

But you didn’t come to ERE to read about the game. You already know the Saints whipped the Colts 31 to 17.

Now comes the other important scores: Whose commercials made it into the top best. For the details on each of the commercials that ran, go to USA Today and its widely watched Ad Meter. All the commercials are available there.

But in the contest between CareerBuilder and Monster for the best job board ad, the highly populist, if less-well-known ERE poll has Monster in the lead by a touchdown. The fiddling beaver commercial had 40 percent of the vote to 30 percent for CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad.

I’m reporting these results at 11:05 p.m. ET Sunday night, a little more than an hour after the game ended and four-and-a-half hours after our poll went live. The results may have changed by the time you check (just go to the poll and check the results), but since halftime, the percentages have held fairly steady.

If you missed the ads or want to see them again, just click here and you can check them out and still vote in the poll, which we, in a completely shameless attempt to kick up the hype, will leave open until no one cares.

You’ve also probably noticed (unless your Super Bowl party was a lot more fluid than mine) that the poll numbers above only add up to 70 percent. The other 30 percent of the voters said both ads were about the same. (I told you we were into populism.) You can read that to mean anything you like.

While you’re reading into things, here are a couple of coincidences I noticed that you might as well read something into as well.

Wildlife of one sort or another figured in several of the commercials. Like Monster, CarMax had a commercial featuring a beaver. Vizio did, too, though their beaver had a minor role. There was a squirrel in another ad and Bridgestone had a whale.

The CareerBuilder ad, featuring a nearly naked casual Friday office, was followed by a pantsless Dockers ad.

But we’re a recruiting-focused site, so we’re asking you to choose between Monster’s fiddling beaver and CareerBuilder’s (very) casual Friday.

If you’ve actually been paying more attention to the game than to the commercials , the two videos are below.  If you’ve been mostly watching the commercials, then you should know that as this is being written, it’s half time and the Colts are ahead of the Saints 10-6.

So much for the high scoring game me and everyone else was expecting. The Colts’ defense, by the way, is amazing.

But back to the poll. Conveniently, both commercials aired before the half. So take a look at the commercials, and cast your vote.

Here’s Monster’s fiddling beaver:

Here’s CareerBuilder’s casual Friday ad:

The following was written Friday, before the Monster ad was available.

Our poll, unlike the USA Today poll or those marketing professors at Western Michigan University is limited to only the two job boards whose ads ran during today’s Super Bowl.

As this is written on Friday afternoon, Monster hasn’t released its Beaver-themed 30-second spot. CareerBuilder, which offered a choice of three for visitors to its website to vote on, hasn’t said which it will run.

So even though we’re opening the poll at the kickoff, you really do need to wait until both ads have run. When the game is over, we’ll try to remember to find the ads online and either post them here or provide links.

If you can’t wait for us, then try going to Spike.com, which religiously posts all the commercials that run during the Super Bowl.

We’ve set the poll up to allow everyone one vote. And don’t waste your time clearing our poll cookie; we’re also tracking your IP. We’re wise to you.

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

In the report, Crispin and Mehler put it this way:

“… the significant increase in the proportion of internal to external fills in 2008 versus 2007 (28%) is at least partially due to the deteriorating economic climate during 2008. We think this conclusion is further supported by the survey respondents’ estimate that the number of contingent workers employed by their respective firms decreased from 18% in 2007 to 10% in 2008. Clearly the data reflects a shift in emphasis to filling internally and squeezing external hires.”

The report also notes that some of the surveyed companies are filling almost half their vacancies by internal promotions and transfers. That’s something those companies should report on their career sites, Crispin and Mehler say, since it evidences their commitment to career development.

The survey report also identifies a few new trends and strengthens trends first noticed in previous years. Most notably:

1. Third party recruiters and agencies as a source of hires have been in decline since their zenith in 2005 when the survey indicated 5.2 percent of hires came from there. In 2008 that number had fallen to 2.7 percent, a decline exacerbated by the overall drop in hiring.

   “Don’t place your bet on this side of the market having much of an upside when the economic climate reverses. It won’t,” the report says.

2. CareerBuilder has overtaken Monster among the job boards (28.9 percent vs. 23 percent of the total hires coming from job boards), but the report calls it a pyrrhic victory. “We believe this SOH has indeed peaked and predict it will diminish in the future.” However, the report suggests that all of the big, national boards are losing share to the niche sites, which collectively accounted for 36.2 percent of the hires coming from job boards.
3. Perhaps not surprisingly, not one of the surveyed companies said it planned to increase hiring in 2009. Showing the depths of the downturn, the companies collectively expect to hire 15.7 percent fewer employees this year than last.

Recruiters have come to regard the annual CareerXroads Source of Hire Study as a sort of guide by which to measure their own company’s sourcing. However, Crispin and Mehler caution that, “we seek to stimulate discussion about staffing issues rather than encourage blind acceptance of data at face value.”

The report is compiled from data reported by 45 firms (out of more than 200 invited to participate) who collectively filled 309,600 openings last year.

Note: The chart accompanying this post has been updated to include two categories omitted from the previous version.

Companies such as T-Mobile and McKesson are stepping up to the plate by establishing a formal workforce planning process with a designated leader in order to achieve results. So, what exactly is workforce planning? How can it help organizations achieve these goals? And why should you care?

Workforce planning can help you strengthen and empower your role in the company by doing exactly what recruiters have been trying to do for the past 10 years: get a seat at the table. Workforce planning is a set of business processes which analyze the supply and demand of talent, ensuring that the organization has the right people in place to execute its overall business strategy. An effective workforce planning process allows you to:

• Understand current talent gaps
• Plan staffing and recruiting needs
• Help business leaders forecast revenue and operating budgets
• Drive business to partner with recruiting

Sounds simple? Don’t be fooled. Embracing the idea of workforce planning and implementing a strategic approach to your current and future workforce needs are two very different realities. Workforce planning fails when it lacks executive support, a clear methodology and business process, and the necessary tools and technology to execute the process. The workforce-planning process needs to correlate business strategies with workforce requirements. No easy task but one you should not ignore.

One important aspect to consider in workforce planning is your companies’ current level of maturity and the steps you need to take to become more strategic in your process. Mitzi Adwell of The Newman Group compares these different stages of workforce planning to driving a car. At the basic level, you are getting in your car and starting to drive with pretty clear direction of where you’re going — a staffing and headcount plan. At an intermediate level, you are looking in your rearview mirror to get a better understanding of the landscape around you (workforce analytics). At the advanced level, you are looking ahead and using your dashboard to gauge how you should proceed (strategic workforce planning with predictive modeling).

Stage One: Getting in Your Car

In the most basic level of workforce planning, companies are looking at current headcount in their organization. Some companies even take it one step further and look at forecasted vs. actual headcount in order to build staffing plans that close their talent gaps and keep them on target with their budgeted headcount. One challenge is that this level of workforce planning is often decentralized, viewing talent from the bottom up versus a top down view that prioritizes talent-sets from the most to the least critical to the business overall. This headcount analysis is performed in the individual business units and does not connect with the overall organizational business strategy.

More often than not, companies plan staffing and headcount on an “as-needed” basis when facing major external pressures or changes in workforce demographics. Volkswagen Group of America used this type of planning process when the company relocated its headquarters from Michigan to Virginia. Given that it planned to replace three-fourths of its workforce within a short timeframe, it was important to include a precise plan in short order to ensure the pipeline of talent and the timing of hires met its operating goals. Situational workforce planning like what Volkswagen did might help companies think about how to handle business plans with major talent implications. Of course the more you know and the earlier you know it, the more effective you can be at using more sophisticated means of workforce planning.

Stage Two: Looking In the Rearview Mirror

At the intermediate level, workforce planning looks at quantitative data analysis, including forecasted skills and competency needs. Companies look at a regular workforce profile with key data variables including demographic segment, compensation, turnover, and performance rating. Looking at historical trends of these variables and relationships between them helps companies to better understand their talent patterns and trends so they can incorporate that information into their talent plans going forward. Companies such as T-Mobile will rely heavily on scenario planning or “what-if” scenarios this year.

Scenario planning allows companies to prepare for different internal and external business conditions such as retirement, economic changes, and workforce demographic changes, and think through what strategies they will implement in order to overcome challenges they see through the ‘what if’ exercises.

Stage Three: Using Your Dashboard

While other levels of workforce planning inform business leaders about talent plans, a strategic workforce planning process integrates these plans with the organization’s business and financial planning. At this level, companies gain a deep understanding of their talent pipeline and how it aligns with the overall business plan of the company. Companies use technology to help map the talent needs and make more informed business decisions with cost implications.

How You Can Help Your Company?

Bersin & Associates, an industry research and advisory services company, is partnering with The Newman Group to publish a comprehensive research report on this topic. The goal of this study is to identify the current state of maturity in workforce planning processes, level of ownership, range of maturity in audiences served, processes included, and level of integration with other business planning processes.

We would love to hear from you. The survey contains 23 multiple-choice questions. Estimated completion time is 20 minutes. As a participant, you will receive a copy of the executive summary to be developed based on results of the survey and scheduled for release in March 2009. This is an opportunity to share what you know and receive great insight in return.

In the past few weeks, you have read several articles with predictions about what to expect in the coming year. Now for your insights.

We are conducting our annual ERE Reader Survey. Take just a few minutes out of your busy schedule to help us out.

Why do we want this info?

All of the information on ERE.net is free for recruiters, and this would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. By completing the survey, you are telling our sponsors who is in the ERE audience, which helps them continue to support us.

None of the information you provide in the survey will be used in any way other than in aggregate, so your contact information and your feedback is protected.

Simply click here and take the survey. It will just take a few minutes.

I appreciate your help and look forward to sharing the results with you in a few weeks.

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

Here are some slightly out-of-the-box thoughts on how you can create a learning environment and stimulate discussion and change by challenging the traditional and by boldly acting differently:

1. Hire people from the same spectrum of countries you purchase raw materials from or where you sell your products. Whatever else these employees are doing for your organization, they are also eyes and ears for product development and for sales growth. They may have fresh ideas about uses for products or have ideas for new services you can offer. And, given the talent shortages, it may be easier to find certain skills in those countries than in your own. To make this work, develop a sourcing strategy that works in multiple countries and a career site that is in multiple languages and has different recruiting messages for different countries. Encourage leadership to embrace virtual employment and let employees work in their native countries.
2. Hire people from parallel occupations. Try and expand your hiring managers to think more broadly than they do now about the kinds of people they want to hire.  Too often I find job requirements that are narrow and way too specific. These descriptions often list very specific competencies and precise skills that a candidate must have, along with a certain level of experience, to qualify for a job. In a few cases this kind of specificity may be necessary, but for the most part it is wasteful and not creative. By encouraging hiring managers to think out the box (for example, hiring music majors and training them to be programmers as Cisco and IBM have done) expands your talent pool, can lower starting salaries, and makes it more likely that some creative new concept will emerge because these people have not been trained that something cannot be done. The time to productivity curve may be longer, but the quality of thought and the morale of employees will be higher.
3. Rehire retirees or retain baby boomers. Many organizations could realize gains in product development, time-to-market, and other areas by bringing back experienced ex-employees who have retired or by hanging on to experienced boomers who are thinking about retiring. Transferring knowledge to younger workers is a major undertaking for many organizations and the best way to do this is to utilize the older worker’s experience as mentors or coaches for younger workers. By putting a few experienced employees on a project with younger workers, learning happens automatically. No time is used in classrooms or seminars. Work remains the focus with learning a significant byproduct.
4. Get rid of job titles and levels. Put people into project teams with only broad titles such as engineer, planner, statistician, marketer, and so forth. Let the team collaboratively decide who does what based on the team’s goals and desired outcomes. Hire people with broad skills and experience or with only a little experience (e.g., new college graduates). Creativity and change most often come about when there is a significant contrast or gap between people, ideas, or needs.

If you are looking for greater satisfaction and commitment to your profession, be open to learning and actively practicing it.

You practice learning by taking chances, experimenting, measuring the results against a standard, and trying again. Being open to learning and making changes is what differentiates the movers and shakers from everyone else.

“More than any other function, recruiting shapes the future of an organization,” says Maureen Conn, U.S. staffing manager at Siemens VDO Automotive in Troy, Michigan. “Companies need to ask themselves where they want to be in 10 years, and they should remember that the future is driven by the people we select to have as part of our team. Some companies may view recruiting as a transactional department, but really, they should view it as a business partner to effect corporate strategy. The business world tends to view HR as incompetent police and that makes it difficult [for recruiters] to get a seat at the strategic table.”

In fact, Conn says recruiting should move to a department that focuses on consistently maintaining customer satisfaction, quality control, and continuous improvement in order to analyze both strategic and implementation approaches.?

“Because we’re viewed as a cost center and not a profit center, recruiting tends to be very under-resourced. For example, our recruiting staff?three people if you count me?has recruited approximately 600 professional-level new hires this year,” says Conn.

Sam Modi, senior IT recruiter with the Aspen Group, Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland, agrees that recruiting should be a separate entity. “Recruiters need to know more than timesheets and benefits, and they should have more time to research candidates and negotiate prices,” he says.

Meanwhile, 37% of respondents think that recruiting is a core function of the HR department. Jennifer Holtzman, staffing consultant for AppleOne in Scottsdale, Arizona, thinks recruiting belongs in the HR department because “sometimes it seems like you can kill two birds with one stone; the duties go hand-in-hand, so I do not think it should be moved.”

Although Holtzman says she can understand why some want to see recruiters removed from HR, she thinks the reality of that situation is less than ideal. In fact, she contends that some of the job duties could overlap, ultimately making things redundant. For example, she thinks juggling employee benefits and recruiting is part of the same job and quite manageable for one person.

“Knowing the details with changing rules and regulations and legal issues helps, and it makes it a more efficient working environment by having it all in one department,” she says.