This past week more than 400 ERE.net community members tuned in for a webinar on college recruiting with a shoestring budget.

Despite sour economic conditions, many organizations are continuing to hire, albeit maybe not with the gusto or resources they used to muster. Those organizations that continue to augment organizational capability and capacity with new college grads are doing a very smart thing, as several organizations that stopped college hiring following the economic collapse in 2001 can attest.

Entry-level hires from colleges and universities play a vital yet often undervalued role in many organizations. Cutting college intake even for a short time can have disastrous unplanned impacts.

Recent college graduates bring with them new skills, the ability to question tired thinking by asking “why,” and remain malleable enough for organizations to mold into entry-level management and core-contributor roles vital to the organization’s succession chain.

Organizations can cut costs, but they can’t stop time, so choking off college recruiting can lead to:

1. Acceleration of aging workforce issues. If you have an aging workforce now and you choke off hiring of younger talent, statistically speaking, the average age of employees in your organizations is going to grow at a significantly faster pace. While that may not seem like an issue in the short term, letting your workforce gray significantly may impact your ability to recruit college grads when your organization does restore its interest in college recruiting.
2. An empty succession pool. Many organizations cut college recruiting budgets entirely following 9/11. Due to a slow economic recovery following that tragedy, college recruiting budgets didn’t recover quickly. The result today is a number of organizations that have no choice but to spend millions poaching talent with 5-7 years’ experience from other organizations or hiring talent with 2-3 years’ experience and investing in rapid development programs. For organizations in that boat, they are realizing that it would have been more economical in the long run to have maintained investments in college recruiting.
3. Slowed innovation. Possibly the best thing about hiring recent college graduates is the fact that they don’t know anything. Well, that’s not entirely true. The truth is that they don’t know anything about why you do things the way you do, so they are more apt to ask why. When such discussions erupt, that’s often when new hires can introduce new thinking, new technology, and new approaches. Choking off the supply of individuals not subject to historical group think can stifle an organization’s ability to evolve and be innovative.

What follows below the webinar insert are the questions raised by those attending and our answers. If more elaboration is needed on any topic, use the commenting function below to not only engage us, but the entire ERE community!

Join me, along with talent management strategist Dr. John Sullivan, for tomorrow’s webinar as we explore college recruiting during a recession.  We’ll be taking a look at why you should continue college recruiting despite the economy, the financial impact of your efforts, and how to attract the best talent using a variety of mediums.

Dr. Sullivan will be taking questions at the conclusion of the presentation to address your thoughts and concerns regarding college recruiting. Don’t wait until it’s too late to find out why and how you should continue your college recruiting efforts in 2009. We still have plenty of space so sign up today!

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Wednesday, February 11th
2:00 – 3:00 PM EST
Register Here
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If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brendan@ere.net.

Many employers in return can count on employees’ feeling less connected to the organization, and being less productive. But even in a crisis where 2.6 million jobs were lost last year, there are organizations that will seize the opportunity and achieve a significant competitive advantage by continuing to build and sustain employer brand strength.

In an outstanding webinar delivered for ERE this week (and embedded at the end of this article), Frank Lane, author of Killer Brands, offered this definition: 

A Killer Brand exists when an entity derives a disproportionate amount of success in its category because of a compelling and differentiated expectation that comes to be associated with its name.

A quality employment brand strategy proactively and appropriately manages expectations, reputation, and image, all toward what you’re trying to do — attract and engage a skilled and productive workforce, which is the most critical driver of business success. Even in today’s environment, “A” players will exercise careful choices about where they come to work and what they want out of the employment relationship. Many will also be preparing for change as that market recovery presents new opportunities. Every category-leading “brand” is focused on two primary channels to grow share:

• The attraction of new customers
• The continued loyalty of existing customers

While attraction/recruiting needs have certainly lessened (although in some sectors critical skills are still in high demand) the brand loyalty of existing employees will certainly be an issue into the foreseeable future. And while many people may be thankful or merely satisfied to have a job today, that level of brand equity will not necessarily translate into productivity, engagement, and retention tomorrow. That’s why forward-thinking organizations will use this down cycle to prepare and deploy a strategy to grow and sustain a true talent advantage.

And it represents an opportunity to consider what “disproportionate amount of success” your organization derives because of the desire among A-level talent to apply their skills to your business?

In evaluating your organization’s employment brand strength, consider these four primary objectives:

Authenticity

Employment branding is an inside-out strategy, and an ultimate reflection of the day-to-day work experience inside the organization. The job experience needs to be consistent with the expectations, or you’ll have an immediate disconnect. More organizations are working to shore this up, particularly in the assimilation of new talent into the organization, by building highly interactive, high-touch, high-engagement, onboarding experiences over the critical first 12 months of employment.

Some organizations continue to exceed employees’ expectations not just when employees start the job, but over and over again. The ultimate litmus test of brand strength exists inside your organization, among your existing workforce — especially the stars. If they champion the cause internally and extol the virtues of working for your organization externally, home run!

Differentiation

To successfully attract the highest quality, critical skills in a market space and sustain high employee engagement, it has to be clear what gives your organization a competitive advantage. Without very specific differentiation, you will compete to win and keep talent primarily on the basis of compensation. Be very focused about what makes working for your organization different and better.

Compelling

The differentiation must be compelling enough to command attention, motivate change, and drive loyalty. Achieving high levels of authentic, compelling differentiation requires you to carefully analyze the culture, leadership, work experience, and engagement levels in the organization. You’ll also need to understand existing external perceptions — what candidates and potential candidates think of you.

Consistency

To deliver a consistent, quality brand experience, you’ve got to test out different things and measure how they’re working. And you’ve got to find people who’ll spread the word. Smart organizations are proactively building advocacy through employer-brand-ambassador training programs to ensure stakeholder buy-in and broaden awareness across the organization. And organizations are incorporating new tools, technology, and better resources to extend the brand externally, create improved experiences, and validate outcomes through intelligent reporting and data.

Employment branding 2.0 will be increasingly more experience- and relationship-driven as better networked candidates are exposed to more opportunities faster, across an ever-evolving platform of constant communication. Social media will mean employees know a lot more about your company a lot more quickly. Employer branding will need to become more authentic and be driven inside-out from current ambassadors (employees/stakeholders) whose influence impacts talent management across the organization.

Those organizations that are preparing now can widen the gap and yield a significant gain advantage.

For instance, companies have been able to compensate for a reduction in placements by insourcing what is typically outsourced, unbundling packaged services, and conducting internal assessment to weed out inefficient practices. Sometimes practices are so steeped in tradition that it takes a step back to realize they are no longer working. It’s a time to optimize your business and resources such as applicant tracking systems to be as efficient as possible.

They also discussed how difficult recruiting passive candidates has become as people have become afraid of leaving the security of their current jobs. There are still pros and cons to passive recruiting, but the dangers of exclusively recruiting passive candidates in the current economy were made clear.

At the conclusion of the presentation (about 45 minutes into the video) Jeremy and Dan fielded questions from the audience. I found their thoughts on recruitment process outsourcing and passive recruiting to be particularly interesting. View the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!

I spent most of it freaking out as I tried to connect to today’s webinar and listening to busy signals and dropped audio on my laptop’s speakers. The rest of the time I spent on hold waiting for technical support at GotoWebinar, the company whose technology we were hoping would power future ERE webinars.

We will not be using them again.

The virtual meeting room that we used was supposed to hold up to 1,000 people, and since we regularly get large groups of 500 or more on our calls this was important. This time, we hit 250 listeners on the call when the problems began.

GotoWebinar has no emergency line, and when I finally got through to them I was informed that they were “already investigating issues with that phone number.” When I asked to speak to a manager and said that it was urgent, I was asked for my number and told that I would get a call back. They did not ask for my name, and I am still waiting for the call.

My apologies to every person who was on the call and experienced the poor audio quality.

My apologies to those who could not even make it on to the call because they got busy signals when they dialed in.

Especially, my apologies to Jeremy and Dan who soldiered on through the webinar in spite of the technical issues — they behaved like the pros that they are and did not miss a beat.

Update: 1/29/09

Jeremy and Dan have been gracious enough to offer to repeat the webinar on Friday, February 6 at 2:00 PM EST. Register here.

Also make sure to check out the slides and a re-recording of the presentation below!

As we all know, the recruiting industry is always changing and we can certainly expect more new developments in the months to come. We’ll be taking a look at trends to see what kinds of big picture changes we can expect this year, and more importantly what this means for YOU.

Jeremy and Dan will be taking questions after the presentations to address your thoughts and concerns for what awaits us in 2009. We already have over 400 people registered but still have plenty of space so make sure to sign up today!

____________________________________________________________
When: Wednesday, January 28th
2:00 – 3:00 PM EST
Register Here
_____________________________________________________________

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at brendan@ere.net.

He also covered how social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and newer developments like Twitter and TouchGraph, can help to understand your network better and make more efficient placements.  Ed also fielded such tough questions as “How to organize a successful social event to help hiring managers initiate” and particularly interesting to members of Gen Y like myself “How to separate your personal and professional life on Facebook and other social networking sites.”  See the slideshow and archived video of the presentation below to learn more!

It is now more important than ever to be able to effectively find top talent. While it may be tempting to start with a large pool of potential candidates and narrow them down, this method is hardly efficient and uses up valuable time. Join us for this free webinar as Ed Newman addresses this problem and offers effective talent acquisition solutions for the new year and beyond.

Beyond the Funnel Mentality — How a Shift in Thinking Will Transform the Way Companies Engage Quality Candidates.

Over the past two decades, companies have strived to become more efficient in the way they handle talent acquisition. Traditionally, that has meant reaching out to large numbers of candidates and sifting them through the largest funnel possible in the hopes of identifying a few top choices — but the funnel mentality has its limitations. The process is cumbersome, and it does not always yield the quality candidates an organization seeks. The good news is companies have many options for breaking out of the funnel mentality.

Ed Newman

In this session, Ed Newman provides insight on an approach to better understanding available talent; building networks; measuring, managing and improving those networks; and creating a talent acquisition culture that is focused on delivering known, high-quality candidates. This is a chance to learn about an approach that is practical, results-driven, and promises to transform the way companies drive talent acquisition in the future.

Hope to see you there! Check out our other upcoming webinars as well:

• January 28: 2009: Corporate Staffing & Recruiting Trends and Predictions.
• February 11: College Recruiting on a Shoestring Budget — Low Cost Ways to Land the Very Best.

• Talent management technology will be to the next five years what the ATS was to the last;
• Recruiters need to engage with line supervisors on a regular basis, and not just when a req comes through, because you will be measured on how well your hires do;
• For the same reason, recruiters need to play as big a role in the selection of HRMS tools as every other HR division;
• All HR professionals must become more proactive in identifying and implementing tools to help workers better engage with each other and the company and, for that matter, with their peers in the wide world.

The need for HR to take a more aggressive role was made so very clear in a conversation I had with a bank personnel officer on the last day of the conference.

We were chatting casually after Gerry Crispin’s presentation on “The Growing Power of Private Social Networks” when our talk turned to how her various branch managers network.

Her bank, one of the biggest in her small (by population) state, didn’t offer a formal social networking tool of the kind Crispin had been demonstrating. Nor did it have so much as a discussion list, which, back in the old days, we called a Listserv.

How do branch managers share ideas, get help with sticky problems, or offer guidance to each other? The phone still seemed to be the tool of choice; emails also fit it there somewhere. But the short answer seemed to be that it was up to them and their division to figure that out.

Despite all the evangelizing for proactive HR by the thought leaders who blog and write here on ERE.net and elsewhere, despite all the conference workshops that teach how to make a business case and how HR can earn a seat at the grownups table, there’s still the need to declare “You are expected to lead,” as Crispin exhorted during his presentation.

If there was any doubt, Prof. Peter Cappelli (pictured), director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School, made a compelling case for HR professionals to take the lead in developing new approaches to talent management.

The predictability of demand is so uncertain in today’s world market that it is nearly impossible to estimate talent needs on anything approaching a long-term basis, Dr. Cappelli told the audience, surprisingly large for the final speaker of the 2 1/2 day conference. Instead of even trying, HR needs to take a different approach.

He offered a variety of suggestions, but the heart of it is that HR can lead by inventorying the skills and capabilities of existing staff, implementing development programs that have shorter payback periods — tuition assistance programs are a favorite because the employee shoulders some of the costs and they tend to attract only the most motivated and hardworking — recruiting strategically to develop talent pools that are internal, and using a mix of worker types.

If some of this sounds elementary, pat yourself on the back. But judging from the rapt attention Cappelli got, there are plenty of acolytes left for whom analyzing the economics of layoff versus the cost of future hiring is a mystery. Measuring the costs of the salaries and benefits is easy enough. That’s what HR does.  Calculating the lost opportunity from not having critical workers in place is far more challenging and not something many HR people would even attempt.

Talent management systems can help with that, which is why Cappelli’s closing keynote was entitled “What You Should Know About Talent Management Before Buying Software.” As you’ve probably figured out, his comments weren’t about features, but about what the expectations should be for talent management and the role HR can play in helping their company perform more efficiently.

Talent management, as he described it, is “Getting the right person in the right job at the right time.” If that sounds so much like recruiting, it is. Instead, though, of the outward focus most recruiters have, talent management looks inward at least as often as a recruiter looks out.

To make better use of their human capital, companies are looking at talent management and complete HR management systems. For the first time since the HR Tech conference has been asking the question, the straw poll showed a majority of those voting were not shopping for a new ATS system. What was the top priority to buy or implement?; 21 percent said it was an HRMS. That was followed by 18 percent who said a performance management system was their priority with 16 percent declaring a recruiting system to be theirs. Interestingly, for 10 percent a learning system was their priority.

While accurate forecasting of talent needs beyond the near-term may not be possible for any system, no matter how well designed, efficiently managing the human capital inventory is possible, and these systems can help do that. But in shopping for them, HR needs to take a leader’s role in pressing the business case for its involvement in managing the workforce.

Already, the more progressive companies measure recruiters on the quality of their hired candidates as well as on the traditional metrics of time and cost to hire. And every recruiter of worth should be looking at the sourcing metrics that tell them the most effective spends. Good talent management systems, those that integrate performance management, will expand the usage of the quality-of-hire yardstick. Thus recruiters have a selfish interest in the systems their companies acquire and in promoting the adoption of tools that will help the candidates that get hired perform as well as they can.

Which brings us back to the bank’s personnel officer. I don’t know her involvement in hiring branch managers, but helping them network more efficiently can improve their productivity and effectiveness. It’s worth investigating. And that’s just the kind of HR leader Gerry Crispin was talking about.

Hmmm…this left me wondering if we needed to revisit e-sourcing and find someone with expertise in this area. We often find information on what methods and tools we should be using to identify and attract candidates. We often hear what benefits we would achieve if we did. What I wanted to know was how to see results in e-sourcing methods. And I knew just who to ask…Glenn Gutmacher, one of America’s top sourcers/trainers.

Glenn shared his knowledge with us on June 5 during ERE’s most popular webinar.

“The Sourcer’s Daily Dozen – A Top Recruiting Research Guru’s 12 Favorite Free E-Sourcing Methods to Fill Your Pipelines”.

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Marty was kind enough to share his success story in obtaining spending and advertising metrics for T-Mobile. To that end, Marty discusses how they used that information to make better recruiting decisions and validate their recruitment strategy. His presentation includes:

·      Implementation of online tracking and management tools.

·      Analysis of metrics and quality of hires.

·      Results (improved negotiations with media, diversification of spend, reduced costs, and enhanced employment brand exposure).

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