In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

Obviously, this state of bliss doesn’t come about without some important processes in place. Here are the big ones:

1. Getting enough high-quality prospects into the database. This is where aggressive consumer marketing concepts need to be implemented. Much of this involves Web 2.0; targeting behavioral marketing; proactive employee referral programs; highly networked recruiters; pushed advertising to blogs, social networks and niche sites; and the development of candidate personas. (Check out our free resource library if you’d like to understand these concepts in more detail.) If you don’t have good people to start with, JIT sourcing will just enable you to hire average people very quickly.
2. A CRM technology that automates the nurturing process. Most CRM (candidate or client relationship management) systems require heavy involvement by the recruiter to send out a series of compelling sourcing messages on a regular basis. Making matters more difficult is the need to send out targeted messages rather than all-purpose generic messages. So without the right nurturing technology the drip marketing program becomes difficult to manage. We’re now exploring automated CRM system that eliminate this burden. Email me (lou@adlerconcepts.com) if you’d like to participate in some beta evaluations of these systems and find out what types of compelling messages you need to use to maintain and attract your prospects’ attention.
3. A short- and long-term forecast of hiring needs. The idea of workforce planning still seems to be anathema to most recruiting departments, yet this is what drives the CRM/db engine. Knowing who you’re going to be hiring 6-12 months out allows you to implement the recruitment advertising programs necessary to fill the database. While rough estimates allow the process to work at a fundamental level, knowing who, when, and where provides the raw material to keep the process running smoothly on an ongoing basis.
4. Targeted and sophisticated messaging. If you want to fill your prospect database with top performers, don’t use traditional skills and experience-based job descriptions as the basis for your ads or drip marketing emails. Traditional job descriptions filled with generic boilerplate will preclude the best from even considering being a prospect. As important, the nurturing messages need to consider your target demographic. This requires some market research up-front to get the complete series of messages done right. For example, a job appealing to a college grad would not highlight the same things as a working parent, a committed up-and-comer, or a baby-boomer looking for a healthcare plan. For an example, here’s our outrageous ad contest winner for last year, which emphasizes the culture and type of work, rather than the skills required to do the work. (Make sure you enter this year’s contest for most effective ad to get some practice with this new form of advertising.)
5. Strong metrics and reporting. Just like any business process, JIT sourcing requires constant monitoring and updating. Ongoing monitoring of factors like quantity and quality by class of candidate, the effectiveness of different sourcing programs, the productivity of each recruiter, and candidate response rates to different messages, among others, are the drivers for ensuring the program quickly delivers the best candidates when needed.
6. Implement a “just looking” mentality and eliminate the idea of “buy now.” Forcing people to apply to even talk to someone requires too big a commitment for those on the margin or just starting their job-hunting process. This blockade-mentality precludes the best from even becoming a prospect. For example, most company career sites make it difficult to find a job, or chat with a recruiter to get more information. Worse, most hiring managers are equally unwilling to just talk with a prospect on an exploratory basis. They typically want the candidate highly committed and interested before the first interview. The problem here is that the best people are generally open to talk even if they’re not looking, and many are willing to become prospects if it doesn’t require too much of a commitment. To build a big hot prospect database of high performers, companies need to eliminate every possible barrier to entry.

Even if you don’t achieve a complete JIT demand-pull sourcing program right away, proactive recruitment advertising designed to fill your prospect database will provide a significant competitive advantage. Getting prospects into the database is a science in-and-of-itself, and a good place to start.

The best way to do this for high-volume jobs (developers, sales reps, customer service, engineers, etc.) is to develop a series of talent hubs by job class. These 2-3 page microsites offer prospects an introduction to the job class (e.g., power engineers) providing information about the company, the types of jobs available, typical projects, learning opportunities, and a means to connect with the company, all without applying for a specific job.

You can add Web 2.0 interactive features to this microsite, including chat, RSS feeds, video podcasts, and a means to be first to learn about upcoming opportunities. As part of the talent hub design, make sure it can be found first by those Googling for jobs or pushing the link to appropriate blogs, networks, and social sites.

This is where search engine marketing becomes critical. Jobs2Web and Shaker Recruitment Advertising are leading the effort on creating these prospect portals.

It’s difficult to imagine the idea of advanced consumer marketing combined with state-of-the-art supply chain management as being the foundation for the future of recruiting.

Despite the non-HR emphasis, the most progressive companies are already moving in this direction with great success. Who knows? We may be able to win the war for talent after all with some true cross-functional thinking.

A common theme that I usually hear when I discuss recruiting in Second Life is “Second Life is great for technical organizations recruiting young IT talent like Java programmers, but it really would not address our needs.”

There are many reasons why non-technical organizations can benefit from recruiting in SL. Most organizations would agree categorically across industries that there is a growing demand for a technically proficient employee base outside of the IT department, especially as more baby boomers head off for retirement and web 2.0 applications proliferate in the enterprise. There is a compelling benefit to having access to a geographically diverse pool of candidates during these tumultuous economic times, when fuel costs are exceedingly difficult to manage as well as travel budgets. Value is also realized by branding and screening in a virtual world that is typically the domain of leading organizations.

There are also numerous arguments that can be put forth as to why non-technical organizations will not be successful recruiting in SL. There is limited information on either technical or non-technical employees who have actually been hired through an interview conducted in SL. There should be more information readily available if this was a frequent occurrence. Virtual job fairs and islands of employment are not well-known, and I’m sure many job seekers have no interest in engaging in a virtual world. Even if a non-technical person did find a job fair and decide to participate, there is the challenge of operating within SL. It takes time to become adept at controlling your avatar and getting the right appearance for an interview.

What type of employees if any are being hired in SL?

Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy engagement at EMC, discusses a recent experience EMC had with career fairs in Second Life. EMC generated two hires for its effort. One hire was a developer with an accomplished IT skill set and the other a financial controller who had experience with large, global organizations. An article by ThinkBalm mentions the Accenture Career Island in SL paid for itself after five or six events, which I am guessing focused on recent college graduates.

The foodservice firm Sodexho is probably one of the last organizations one would expect to be recruiting at job fairs in for IT talent. MSNBC published an article on “How your fantasy life can get you a real job.” The article follows the journey of Ray Giordano, a job candidate rather new to SL, as he prepares to participate in a Sodexho job fair at the suggestion of a Sodexho recruiter. This is a caveat to others that it might be worth the investment to learn the basics of SL in case you also end up in this situation. The job candidate’s efforts in learning the nuances of SL eventually paid off and led to a job as a chef in the senior services division of Sodexho.

The Vancouver Sun wrote about the efforts of the Vancouver Police recruiting talent in SL. Inspector Kevin McQuiggin, in charge of the department’s tech crimes division, notes almost every major crime has a technical aspect to it. “Any new media that comes out, any new form of communication, crime is going to migrate there. As we move into the future, we’re going to need people who understand technology — that are conversant with it, that understand the impact of it, and understand how to use it,” McQuiggin says. Given the prevalence of identity theft and various cybercrimes that continue to challenge police departments not often equipped for the technical challenges, McQuiggin has an excellent point. I have yet to see any hard data on how many hires this effort has generated.

Toronto law firm Davis LLP is also open to recruiting in SL. The SL office was opened by the law firm’s Video Game Law & Interactive Entertainment Group. “The virtual world of Second Life gives us the opportunity to interact with our current and potential clients in a unique way,” says Dani “Lemon Darcy” Lemon at Davis LLP. “We also aim to generate business leads and attract job candidates for our bricks-and mortar business through Second Life.” SL may prove to be an ideal location for finding attorneys adept at defending the misappropriation of the intellectual property of others in the virtual realm. Still, given the specifics of practicing law in a specific locale, I would guess this is a very difficult area to recruit talent in.

The potential of recruiting talent in SL is vast but there is not a large amount of information suggesting this has been highly successful yet. The growing demand for technical talent may eventually lead others to leverage SL for connecting with talent as the generational shift in the workforce accelerates. SL may one day become a leading recruiting tool, but I think many would agree the verdict is still out.

Richter teamed up with Yahoo! HotJobs (profile) creative director David Lam and created “Runway” which features Liz Claiborne’s chief creative officer and mentor from TV show Project Runway, Tim Gunn.

Lam approached several clients late last year about creating recruiting videos as part of a Yahoo! HotJobs pilot program, and Richter jumped at the chance. She also came up with the video’s main concept and the basic script. Richter said that the video’s production costs would typically average $20,000 to $25,000; she received a discount for being part of the pilot program.

Besides revealing the company’s creative side, Richter also wanted to show prospective applicants that not everyone who works in the fashion industry looks like Kate Moss and that a typical day at Liz doesn’t begin with a cry of “gird your loins” as it did when Miranda Priestly arrived at the office in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

The company has been opening new retail stores and creating real jobs for real people; many of its 10,000 jobs are in typical support functions like IT, accounting, and marketing.

“We wanted to show our brands and a representation of the wide variety of careers you can have here at Liz Claiborne,” says Richter.

The video features actual employees talking about their jobs and career paths at Liz, but the highlight is a 30-second clip of a mock fashion show where employees listen to a motivational speech by Gunn and then bound down the runway.

So far, the video is delivering the goods. It’s loaded on the Liz Claiborne website and advertised on Yahoo! HotJobs and StyleCareers. As of mid-July, Richter said the video had received about 6,000 to 7,000 views on the Liz Claiborne website and another 6,000 views on HotJobs. At a job fair held just last week, Richter said the longest applicant lines were at the Liz booth and Gucci. But, besides energizing applicants, the video has also motivated the company’s employees.

“Despite the difficult economic times, our company is poised for growth, so the video has really been a motivational tool that has energized our existing employees as well as applicants,” said Richter.

Just five years ago, less than 1:10 Fortune 200 companies had a dedicated role to manage the employment brand, yet today more than 1:4 Fortune 200 companies have dedicated headcount and budget to the practice.

Employment branding is the practice of managing your firm’s image or reputation as an excellent place to work. Because so many factors influence how an organization is perceived, employment branding is loosely defined.

Most of the individuals involved in employment branding use a “learn as you go” approach, actively trying a market basket of brand manipulation activities to see what works and what doesn’t. Quite often, initial employment branding efforts are weak and full of elements that need serious improvement.

To have an effective employment branding function, periodically conduct an assessment or audit of the three critical branding areas:

• Your branding program’s design elements.
• The information that you provide.
• The approaches used to establish each of your sub-employment brands.

Whether you want to audit your existing effort or get a new effort off on the right foot, here is a quick audit checklist you can use to judge where you are now and where you need to be.

Incidentally, if your goal is to build a powerhouse employment brand like Google’s, recognize upfront that each individual audit item is important, so don’t skip a single one.

Audit Part One: Assessing the Critical Program Design Elements

When you assess the design of your branding program, the following are critical elements that must be included if your effort is to be successful:

• Program plan. The program has a written plan with milestones, timetables and individual accountabilities.
• Program goals. The program spells out each of its specific measurable goals. These goals must be widely communicated and there must be a specific metric (with a measurable target) to assess whether each program goal is actually met.
• Focus on job acceptance criteria. It’s critical that there be a process for identifying the “job switch criteria” of the candidates you’re trying to attract. Successful programs have a process for matching your firm’s strengths with the requirements of potential applicants. The program should then focus image-building efforts on those targeted factors or brand pillars.
• Excitement. Branding is a sales and bragging effort, so identify and spread several specific WOW’s or features that will measurably excite potential candidates. Branding can’t be successful unless it excites potential candidates to take action (i.e., visit your website or apply for a job).
• Emphasis on “hot” topics. Assess whether your overall campaign sufficiently emphasizes all of the current hot topics including green/sustainability, innovation, emerging technology, global reach and job security.
• Minimize advertising. Recruitment advertising adds value but does not constitute employment branding. If you must “pay” to get your branding message out, it’s just not as credible. A focus on leveraging traditional recruitment advertising is the most common employment branding error. The best employment branding messages are spread virally.
• Clearly differentiated. If you mention programs or features in the information that you provide that everyone has, your firm cannot appear superior. As part of your audit, compare your branding programs, features, and messages with those of your talent competitors to make sure that your programs and features stand out as clearly superior in more than one way.
• Focus on stories. Great branding works because it emphasizes stories which can be easily spread by your employees and the media. Stories about what it’s like to work at your firm are the most effective tool for spreading your brand message. If your information doesn’t contain stories or if the stories are not compelling enough to be repeated, you have missed a great opportunity.
• Focus on referrals. Nothing is more credible or powerful than having your own employees tell stories and provide examples about how great it is to work at your firm. If your referral program has not been refurbished so that it results in over 40% of your hires, you have to grade your branding program as mediocre.
• Relying on collateral materials. In an electronic world, brochures and handouts send a message that you are antiquated. Because ads and collateral materials cannot contain video, blogs, or detailed information, you cannot justify their high expense or rapid obsolescence.
• Referral cards. Providing powerful referral cards (both hardcopy and electronic) to key employees is essential if you are to take advantage of their broad social and professional networks.
• Your website. Every potential applicant will visit your website as a mechanism for validating whether what they’ve heard about your company is really true. Your “careers” and “jobs” websites must provide opportunities to read detailed information, to review employee profiles, to read blogs, and to view videos.
• It is tested. Never assume that your materials and approaches are effective. Test information you provide on your target audience in order to assess the resulting image and the action that each message obtains. This involves surveys and focus groups among the targeted individuals that you are not currently able to attract. (Do not ask them whether they liked it, only whether it would lead them to make an application.)

Audit Part Two: The Information You Provide Has the Maximum Impact

The next phase of the audit is to assess whether the information that you provide effectively sends the correct message to your target candidates. Regardless of how you communicate with your target audience, your efforts should meet these criteria:

• A story. The information has at least one repeatable compelling story contained in it.
• No trite words. It doesn’t use a single trite word or phrase (i.e., teamwork, values, ethical, a challenging career, exciting opportunities). If these vague words are used, there must also be examples included so that the reader can easily differentiate what you offer from what everyone else offers.
• Quantified results. Using numbers to differentiate is one of the most powerful ways of improving program information (e.g., we offer 25 days of vacation the first year versus “we have paid vacation”).
• Degree of participation. Potential applicants often view HR programs with a degree of skepticism. Overcome some of that cynicism by showing the degree that the program or feature is utilized by your workforce (e.g., 96% of the workers participate in our flexible work schedule).
• Dollars and time spent. List the amount of money (or time) spent on it each year (e.g., employees devoted 2,005 hours of paid time to community-based programs).
• Direct comparisons. Already powerful stories with examples and numbers can be made even more powerful when they include comparison numbers. This might include comparisons like “we spent an average of $2,000, the highest in the industry, while the average in the industry was only $700.” Stating that you were the first in the industry to do something can also be a powerful brand builder.
• Compelling quotes. Almost any bit of information can be improved and made “more real” when a compelling quote from an employee or customer is added.
• Programs have names. HR and people management programs get more recognition and are more likely to be passed on if they have compelling names (e.g., periodic meetings versus “departmental CEO coffee talks”). Program names should be tested to ensure that they convey the right message.
• Involving ordinary people. Almost universally, applicants like to read information or hear stories that involve the success of “ordinary” people. Providing information and stories where the “little guy” becomes very successful within the corporation is a strong brand builder (even if your applicant isn’t an ordinary person). Assess whether these powerful programs are open to participation by hourly and even part-time workers.
• Testimonials from individuals. Where more detailed information can be provided (i.e., the corporate website) effective branding information includes testimonials from employees. These can be narrative but they’re more effective if they are available on video and in podcasts. Profiles of your employees who are compelling can also be effective.
• Real examples. Examples can highlight either program features or of a typical employee’s experience with the program. Without compelling examples, programs can appear dull and ordinary.
• It includes media coverage. Narrative information about people management programs becomes more credible when it includes quotes or an actual newspaper/magazine clipping from when the program was profiled in the media. When possible, provide access to the actual media stories for the visitor to review.
• Videos. Any successful branding effort must provide one or more compelling video clips. Nothing is more powerful than seeing and hearing what it’s like to work at your firm. Often, the most effective videos are prepared by your employees in an ad-hoc manner. These videos can be made available for viewing on your website or on popular sites like YouTube.
• Pictures. When writing articles or including information on your website, always include a compelling picture showing the involvement of an actual employee (not a “canned” diversity picture with actors).
• Imperfection. Nothing reduces the credibility or believability of information more than the fact that it appears to be perfect. When you assess the information that you provide, rate it lower if it’s overly glossy or if it provides a 100% perfect story. Instead, make a story appear “real” by including one or two things that are currently being improved.
• An opportunity to read in-depth. Link to detailed information on a particular topic (the additional information is usually provided through a link to a website or blog entry).
• Values. Nothing is drier and less compelling than listing a firm’s mission or values without providing details and examples to prove that these values are real. If you can’t differentiate your values and how you act on them from other firms, don’t list them.
• Technology. Almost every picture and “nugget” of information that you provide needs to emphasize the fact that your firm is an extensive user of technology. Don’t provide pictures or descriptions that show antiquated equipment or methods. Instead show in every bit of information that technology permeates the firm
• Trite slogans. After the use of trite words or phrases, the next most common brand killer is the use of trite slogans (e.g., “We care about our employees!” or “We focus on quality!”). If you must use these slogans, at least provide examples or illustrations to bring them to life. Avoid all slogans that can’t be demonstrated and differentiated.

Audit Part Three: Your Branding Effectively Covers Each of Your Employment Sub-Brands

Although every firm has an overall employment brand, few realize that a firm’s brand includes up to 12 employment sub-brands. Two examples of sub-brands are a firm’s image on the Internet and your firm’s image as a “green” environmentally conscious firm.

The very best employment branding programs focus on providing information that effectively builds their image in each of these areas. When conducting your audit, assess the effectiveness of your efforts on each of these sub-brands:

• Your Internet brand. This includes information on your own site and information that potential candidates can find on other sites, on blogs and in videos. Effective branding programs ensure that it’s easy to find the desired information about your firm.
• Your internal brand. Your internal brand reflects how well your employees are enabled to bring the organizations brand to life based on their experience with the organization. Internal brand strength can be measured through surveys and by assessing customer reactions to employee service levels.
• Visibility in the media. Effective branding programs proactively spread their message in highly credible business and trade publications as well as on TV and radio. Assess the amount of exposure that your firm receives in the desired outlets and to what extent that coverage is positive.
• Professional event brand. Assess whether your leaders have successfully increased your firm’s exposure and image by speaking at industry events.
• Your referral program brand. The image and the information that your employees present when they are talking to potential job referrals is your referral brand. Assess its effectiveness both by the messages and the stories that employees convey, as well as by the percentage of new hires who come from referrals.
• Your image post-orientation. How well your firm manages and improves your image during orientation/on-boarding is critical because so many individuals call new hires during their first few weeks to ask them “what is it like there.”
• Your brand among college students. How well-known and how positive is your image among the college students you’re targeting?
• Your “well-managed” brand. Many firms choose to bolster their brand image by offering excellent pay and employee benefit programs. An alternative approach that focuses on your firm’s excellent management practices (incidentally, the approach CEOs prefer) is more effective in attracting top performers, innovators, and game changers. This “well-managed brand” approach communicates that your firm has great managers and excellent management practices. Focus on surveying only top performers and innovators who care more about excellent management practices than the average worker.
• Your “negative” brand. Assess the visibility of negative messages that can be found about your firm. Counter or “bury” those negative messages so that they are difficult to find.
• Green image. A strong branding effort proactively builds the firm’s image and reputation in the important area of the environment. If most of the potential applicants to your firm view it as having a positive impact on the environment, you have done a good job. However, if they view your firm as a leader in this area, you should rate your effort as outstanding.
• Your community brand. Your image in the surrounding community as a result of your proactive efforts to “give back” to the community is your community brand. This brand can aid in recruiting and in minimizing local legal and business restrictions.
• Your geographic brand. Firms need to assess how well they have provided information that causes potential applicants to view the local area and the region in which a job is located in a positive light. Great branding identifies any potential negatives associated with your locations and provides information to counter them.
• Your industry brand. If the industry in which your firm operates has a neutral or negative image, build up the image of your industry as an exciting place to work (i.e., retail, fast food, nuclear power, oil industry). Ask applicants during interviews if they have seen or heard any of your firm’s “pro-industry” messages.

Final Thoughts

Whether you are just now designing an employment branding program or if you are auditing one that is already in operation, it’s critical that you understand which factors make a program effective.

By using this simple audit checklist, you can force your efforts to focus on the critical elements that lead to a successful employment brand. If you need additional help on branding you will find numerous articles that I have written on the subject on ERE or on my personal site at www.DrJohnSullivan.com.

Historically, the search engines haven’t shared numbers on how many specific keyword searches there were for targeted keywords, but recently Google has changed its external keyword research tool to show us the search numbers for the previous month and the average number of searches for exact keywords. This helps to shed light on exactly how much job- and career-related search activity is happening monthly on Google.

Anyone can access this free tool at Google by typing in this URL to view how many people are searching for jobs in your locations and/or hiring need areas:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Some interesting facts, which you can validate using the tool above:

TOP CAREER AREAS: (Monthly)
• Sales jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Customer services jobs - 1 million searches
• Administrative jobs - 823,000 searches
• Accounting jobs - 673,000 searches
• Human Resource jobs - 673,000 searches
• Nursing jobs - 673,000 searches
• Finance jobs - 368,000 searches
• Legal jobs - 301,000 searches

TOP LOCATIONS: (Monthly)
• Georgia jobs - 2.7 million searches
• Illinois jobs - 2.2 million searches
• Arizona jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Massachusetts jobs - 1.5 million searches
• Michigan jobs - 1.5 million searches
• New Jersey jobs - 1.5 million
• Jobs In Chicago - 823,000 searches
• Dallas Jobs - 673,000 searches
• San Diego jobs - 550,000

After you play with this Google keyword research tool, you’ll see how huge the opportunity is for employers who optimize their career site and job content, so that you can drive these Google users directly to your career site.

While most corporate career sites look very snazzy and are designed for employer branding, those efforts can in many cases hurt your chances at getting your career site optimized. By using flash animations, pop up windows, pull down selections, and frames, you could be making your site very cool for users to experience, but at the same time making it so that nobody will find your cool site to visit in the first place.

Try it yourself. Try to Google one of your own job titles and see if you can find your job online.

Unfortunately, search engine optimization is a difficult game, and it’s not helped by most of the ATS players out there, who never built their platforms for marketing purposes, only to manage the recruiting process.

Most employers’ job content is hidden behind a keyword search engine which is great for a candidate who knows what they’re looking for. Google does not, and therefore won’t execute the keyword search, thereby never seeing your job content.

Even if Google did find your job content online, in many cases the basics of optimization aren’t followed by most ATS systems, which means the job titles, locations, zip codes, and other important content components aren’t put into the key areas of each job (titles, headers, meta tags, filename, etc.), which would be necessary to achieve any level of search engine placement. There are dozens of other aspects to optimization that need to be executed in addition to these, but we’ll save those for another day.

Another problem with getting your career site found by Google (using job content only) is that jobs go on and off your career site on a daily basis, which makes it difficult for you to get a higher placement ranking with the search engines using job content which is very dynamic.

Employers would be better off developing “talent landing pages,” which are job profiles for their key hiring need areas that stay online constantly (whether you have open jobs in that category or not), so that Google can always find that page, and that the content within it holds your currently open jobs matching that job profile.

If you’re a smaller employer, then you might be able to do this with HTML pages (talk to your webmaster) that you create and put online for a few of your locations and job titles.

However, enterprise clients with hiring needs in multiple locations and categories will need to seek an alternative. First, try a solution that can interface with your ATS system and automatically pull the open jobs into these pages. Second, the solution will then route candidates back to your ATS system when they want to apply.

This provides candidates with the best possible experience and gets you highly placed in the search engine rankings on Google and other search engines. (By the way, this is a similar strategy to how job boards do their search engine marketing, but rarely do we see employers using the same tactics in their interactive marketing).

In summary, innovative employers (or those looking to go beyond using job boards to do online recruiting) will learn how to compete for these candidates at their first search for jobs on Google, and drive them directly to their career site using either search engine optimization, or search engine marketing to cut recruiting costs dramatically.

Now’s the time to get started. Fall is coming faster than you think, and you’ll need to get started today in order to get on Google’s first page of search results if you hope to be there by September or October.

The wonder is that with so much attention paid to the subject, there are so many uninspired videos. You can find them everywhere. A college recruitment video from Appalachian State University, described as the worst recruiting video ever, is so bad it’s become a legend.

And then there are the “jobs” videos that newspaper websites still manage to sell to unsuspecting hiring managers and recruitment associates.

So why is Mike Nale jumping into employer video branding with a half-hour TV show?

“This is not some boring video clip of some company,” insists Nale, founder and managing partner of Honolulu based The Brand Management Group (profile; site). “This is really unusual stuff.”

We haven’t seen any of the actual employer videos, though there’s a show sampler online.
But Nale’s vision is convincing. “We’re doing a segment on a skydiving school,” he tells us. “We’re going to show you what a work day is like jumping out of a plane over an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Another planned segment is on a seafood restaurant that is growing and needs 10 more people. “It’s a company profile, with real human interest,” Nale says. How’s that? “There’s always good people stories,” he says.

That 30 minute shows called “Help Wanted Hawaii” will have two or three magazine style employer pieces, a segment on employment and job trends, job hunting tips and career advice and possibly stories from career fairs or job hunter interviews and the like. Interspersed among the pieces will be the commercials, preferably employer branding videos.

Pulling off a show like this is not easy. We haven’t found anything on the mainland U.S. that fits Nale’s vision. Undaunted, Nale tells us his secret is producer Jeff DePonte. Owner of JDesign, also in Honolulu, DePonte has done work for Children’s Miracle Network, PBS-Hawaii and for local Hawaii stations and companies. If the “Help Wanted Hawaii” work is even half as good as DePonte’s demo video, the show might just last the planned 13 episodes.

The show is set to debut on Aug. 7th on a cable channel. It will also be posted online. Watch the blog for details.

In exchange for turning their car into a mobile billboard, 135 or so Jobing.com employees gas up at company expense and get hundreds more each month to maintain and clean their vehicle.

Since gas prices began their rocket-like trajectory in late April the U.S. media has beaten a path to Jobing’s Phoenix headquarters. The brilliantly colored employee cars with the name Jobing.com prominent on all sides have appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS and, by virtue of CNN’s news syndication, you’ve probably seen them on your local TV station, too. Then there’s the newspaper coverage, including The New York TImes, Wall Street Journal, Denver Post and scores of other newspapers.

“Interesting an advertisement got us all this attention,” says an understated Joe Cockrell. As director of public relations for Jobing.com, he’s received hundreds of emails and phone calls, not only from the media, but also from other companies who want to know more about how the program works. “We put the program description up online” he says to reduce the call volume. Several video clips from the news broadcasts have also been posted.

The company won’t discuss the cost of the program except to say that wrapping the car in the vinyl billboard runs between $3,000 and $4,000 and lasts about three years. Employees are paid a $500 monthly fee and the company covers all their gas whether for business or personal travel. Cockrell told us that 61 percent of the 220 eligible employees take advantage of the program, which requires them to first take a safe driving course and keep a clean driving record.

By our calculation, the program costs Jobing.com at least $67,500 a month, not counting the gas. Add that in and the program approaches $1.2 million annually. (Here’s how we figured it: The Department of Transportation says the average American household uses about 600 gallons a year per vehicle. At a national average today (July 1) of $4.10 per gallon that works out to an additional $205 per employee per month or a monthly total of $95,175.)

What’s the ROI on the program? “I’m trying to figure that out,” Cockrell told us when we spoke with him. “It’s very difficult to isolate one marketing vehicle from everything else we do.” For instance, Jobing also has its name on a sports arena in Arizona, buys billboards (the non-mobile kind) by the dozens and gets its name on highway signs by sponsoring roadside cleanup.

Still, Cockrell is reckoning the value of the TV and print exposure alone at $1.5 million at a minimum and probably closer to $2 million.

The auto wrapping program was launched in 2001when founder and CEO Aaron Matos was looking for an inexpensive way for the fledgling 10-person company to get noticed. Starting with just a few cars, Jobing expanded the program as it expanded beyond its Arizona roots. Today wrapped cars can be found in every metro area where the company has an office.

Besides the national media exposure, which was an unexpected bonus, the mobile billboards help generate traffic to the Jobing.com websites. Compared to the cost of buying TV time or other billboards (in Los Angeles a high impression billboard along a busy freeway can cost $10,000 or more a month), the car wrap program is relatively inexpensive.

One a personal note, Cockrell told us the car wrap program is responsible for his current job. He had moved to Phoenix and was looking for a job when he spotted a Jobing.com car. He went to the site, discovered Jobing was looking for a PR director and applied.

That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be rated an “A” on the aggressiveness scale.

The first indication came prior to the initial merger offer to Yahoo, when its central sourcing team directly emailed recruiting messages to Yahoo engineers, playing on their concerns about Yahoo’s future. Just last week, they ran a full-page color ad in the paper announcing in bold type…“Microsoft has search jobs in the valley”.

There is no secret who the ad was intended for, despite daily defections from Yahoo there is still some top-notch talent inside the company that the competition would love to poach. No subtlety here!

Develop Talent, Hire Talent, or Buy the Competition

In nearly every industry, talent is the primary driver of both a firm’s capability and its capacity to perform. For firms that are growing, either holistically or through industry consolidation/expansion, there are really only three options to ensure access to talent.

Some companies opt to build or develop talent; unfortunately, development is often a “slow” option that provides mediocre results in a fast-changing world.

A second option, growth through mergers and acquisitions, allows the firm to increase its capabilities relatively rapidly as a result of “buying” or merging with a major competitor. It is one of the most common and fundamentally sound business strategies available, and one in constant use around the world. However, M&A is expensive, and often leads to defections of the very key talent you have liked to have retained. Mergers and acquisitions can be hostile or tame, something we have witnessed with Microsoft’s attempt to acquire in recent months.

When M&A doesn’t work, companies have yet another option, one that is less complex, less time-consuming, and much less expensive. This option is to poach away most, if not all, of the talent that provides the competition with its capacity to exist, something Microsoft is obviously doing in a very public way.

The “Neutron Bomb” Recruiting Approach as an Alternative to Mergers

The “Plan B” poaching strategy that firms should consider a feasible alternative to mergers and acquisitions focuses on using strong recruiting approaches to directly “poach away” the target firm’s key employees. This effectively gives you access to all of the capability that produced their intellectual capital without the internal drama that led to the competitor’s chaotic state.

I call this recruiting-based alternative to mergers the “neutron bomb” strategy, because much like the military’s neutron bomb after detonation, “the buildings” are left intact but the people are gone. (Yes it’s the same neutron bomb metaphor that earned Jack Welch the former CEO of GE, his nickname “Neutron Jack.”)

Microsoft not so subtly revealed its new recruiting emphasis by running a full-page color ad last week in the San Jose Mercury News (the key newspaper of the Silicon Valley). While it’s generally true that employed engineers don’t read newspaper career sections when they’re looking for a job, the act of placing a full-page ad garners buzz on the Internet, blogs, and social networks.

In that ad, Microsoft made it clear that it was investing heavily in search technology (the strong-suit of competitor Yahoo) and that it wanted to grow employment in that area. It also noted that it currently has over 2,000 employees in the Silicon Valley, thus indicating to potential Yahoo employees that relocation wouldn’t be necessary.

Advantages of Recruiting Versus M&A

If you have enough courage and a strong recruiting function, there are many advantages associated with implementing a “neutron” recruiting strategy in lieu of buying a competitor:

• Opportunity to select the best. Recruiting allows you to “cherry pick” the target firm’s key innovators, game-changers, and top performers in just the critical knowledge areas where you need help. With M&A, unfortunately, you have to acquire every employee, including unnecessary administrative staff and a significant number of slackers. While you can get rid of them post-acquisition, it’s a messy process. Using professional football as an analogy, in lieu of buying the entire team complete with its facilities, you would instead focus on recruiting away the best coaches and top quarterbacks, running backs, pass rushers, and wide receivers. In the end, you would have “cherry picked” a small number of individuals but a significant portion of the team’s capability to win.
• Avoid merger pains. When you merge two large companies, you must also merge different corporate cultures, business processes, and management structures. This integration is a major effort that can distract your employee’s attention away from the customers and the product. In contrast, when you recruit away a firm’s employees as individuals or in small, intact teams (known as “lift outs”) these new hires don’t carry with them as high a level of hope or expectation that everything will remain the same. Instead, these individuals immediately realize that they are expected to change and adapt to the existing processes and culture.
• No complicated negotiations or approvals are required. Unfortunately, firms have to get the government’s approval of any large merger, but you don’t have to get anyone’s permission to recruit away a firm’s key employees (this is because employees are not owned and are free to leave at any time. Consequently, there are few legal issues if your recruiting effort focuses on recruiting the individual employees for their capability and not the firm’s proprietary technologies. In fact, your recruiting effort can even be general enough that you don’t have to mention a competitor firm by name. For example, in the case of the current Microsoft recruiting effort, Yahoo’s current search and advertising employees already know that the recent advertising “deal” with Google carries with it the possibility that their job and their impact will be lessened at Yahoo. Merely letting the world know through advertising and word-of-mouth approaches that Microsoft is doing significant hiring and investment in a particular functional area is sufficient on its own to attract at least the interest of most of the targeted employees.
• Recruiting processes are already in place. Recruiting new employees is an everyday occurrence, so there are processes and staff already in place to handle any upturn in volume. In direct contrast, M&A activities occur infrequently and as a result, they require the firm to put together a new M&A and transition team each time they make a major move. If you have a strong employment brand (as Microsoft does) the odds of reaching your recruiting goals under this strategy are extremely high.
• No need to lay off. Under the M&A approach, you acquire every employee. Unfortunately, you may get a “surplus” with some weak employees or unnecessary duplicates. If you use the “neutron” recruiting strategy, you won’t need to plan for and execute the massive restructuring and the almost inevitable layoffs that are commonly associated with M&A. As a side benefit, it allows you to avoid the upturn in job-seeking among your most valued employees that research shows happens as a result of even modest downsizing.
• Recruiting may result in lower turnover. When you recruit new employees, you don’t have to give them the complicated and uniform stock option and severance benefits that are generally associated with employees acquired as a result of a merger or acquisition. Because these new hires were hired as “individuals”, the hiring package doesn’t have to be uniform across the board, as it is with mergers. As a result, you are able to negotiate a tailored package with these “recruited” new hires, which is more likely to directly meet their individual wants and needs (thus limiting the risk of future turnover). In addition, because these individuals were “cherry picked,” they are much more likely to stay with your firm because they have been selected to closely “fit” your corporate culture and your business growth areas.
• Others will follow. Fortunately, it’s not necessary for your recruiting function to initially target a huge number of employees. The reason behind this is the fact that once you successfully recruit away a company’s key leaders and influencers in a particular functional area, it’s highly likely that many others will choose to follow. Some will come on their own volition, while others will come as a result of referrals from newly hired employees.
• Leave behind damaged remnants. If you are successful in recruiting away a significant number of the targeted key employees, you leave your former competitor in a confused and often weakened state. This gives your firm an opportunity to move ahead rapidly, while your competitor must take time to regroup. This might seem harsh to some in HR, but remember, the business world is highly competitive and if you frequently use the phrase “war for talent,” it’s only natural that you would use more “war like” approaches when recruiting.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, HR and talent management are seldom brought into a merger or acquisition situation until after the deal is already done. Even then, their primary role is just to smooth the transition into a single firm.

However, there is a role for talent management prior to the decision to even begin M&A activity. That role is to offer senior management the option of achieving almost the same results (gaining a large volume of quality, trained talent quickly) without the associated complexity and costs related to mergers and acquisitions.

In my experience, not very many Directors of Talent Management or Chief Talent Officers have had the courage to step forward and intervene before major merger plans are underway. However, because M&A activity is continually increasing, even in our troubled economy, now might be the time to make an exception and to propose the “neutron” recruiting option as Plan B.

Recruiting talent is a business function, and business activities get branded as hostile or aggressive all the time without the negative connotations that are often associated with aggressive or hostile recruiting. As global competition heats up and the balance of global economic power shifts away from the United States, recruiters are going to have to get over their personal objections and embrace business realities.

This past week I spent time with a major recruitment advertising agency, a large direct marketing organization, and the top-performing office of one of the largest temp-to-perm employment agencies in the country.

These meetings revealed some trends that might help you develop your future recruiting strategies.

Trend One: The Merging of Sourcing and Consumer Marketing

The buzz in consumer advertising is narrowcasting. This basically means segmenting your customer base into narrow subsets (i.e., professional single women between 25 and 30 who live in the city) and pushing your advertising message to them using a variety of techniques.

Some of these include search engine optimization, organic search, behavioral marketing, the use of talent hubs and microsites, and pay-per-click. The key here is to make sure your advertising can be easily found by the right audience.

The implications of this for sourcing are pretty dramatic. On one level, it means that if a candidate uses a search engine to look for a job rather than a job board, your posting will appear in the first few postings. To pull this off you’ll need to be an expert at developing keywords. These are used as a part of the meta tags built into a web page.

However, in the race to the top of the listing the best keywords win and the best ones are not necessarily the obvious. This whole process is called search engine optimization and there’s more to it than just keywords, but its importance cannot be understated for the next evolution of recruitment advertising.

From what I can tell, the leaders here are Shaker Advertising from an advertising perspective, and Jobs2Web, from the technology side.

Regardless of how you go about it, if you want to hire top people in the future, expect to become an expert using search engines. Once you become an expert at figuring out how to get your boring ads found, you’ll be ready to convert all of these into compelling career messages.

These two steps will dramatically improve your ad results.

Next, combine all similar job postings into one common talent hub or microsite that’s easier to find, a lot less expensive, and even better, it will generate a larger pool of better candidates than all of the individual ads combined. (Email me if you’d like the marketing logic behind this).

Trend Two: Referrals Will Become the Primary Sourcing Channel for All Positions

In a recent Execunet survey, 70% of over 6,000 executives and executive recruiters indicated that networking would be the key to either finding a job or finding candidates, compared to 16% through online advertising.

While this would be expected at the executive level, our own 2007 survey of 800 corporate recruiters filling staff and mid-level positions indicated that networking and employee referrals represented about 35% to 40% of their hires.

This is about five points higher than last year, so not only is networking important, but the trend is up. LinkedIn has helped accelerate this trend, in combination with Facebook, MySpace, and some of the niche social networking sites.

At the employment agency referred to earlier, referrals were also a core part of their recruiting efforts. While this group was primarily placing hourly personnel in general laborer or office admin positions on temporary assignments, it seemed like at least 50% of their recruits were from referrals. More important, the emphasis was on getting even more referrals.

It’s a pretty safe bet to conclude that in the future, referrals and networking will be the primary means companies and third-party recruiters will use to find candidates at all levels. For recruiters and sourcers, this represents a critical shift.

Name generation is rapidly becoming the easy part, with the real skill being effectively cold calling candidates, recruiting them, and getting referrals. Since ZoomInfo is not an opt-in database of names, expect this to become a stronger basic resource tool for those who know how to pick up the phone, recruit, and network.

Trend Three: Increasing Reliance on Metrics, Forecasting, and Workforce Planning

I’ve seen more articles, webinars, and talks about workforce planning in the last few months than I’ve seen collectively over the past few years. This alone indicates interest and demand.

As narrowcasting becomes more prevalent, it will be even more important to plan a channel strategy and track the performance of each ad. Since this is how Internet advertising is priced, recruiting departments will soon be getting a real education on the impact and use of proper forecasting, performance tracking, and Web analytics.

The trend toward the increasing use of metrics and forecasting was clearly evident in ERE’s 2008 Leadership Award submittals. This year companies had to include metrics to prove their performance improvements. In fact, most of the winners and many of the proposals described the implementation of advanced process measurement and monitoring systems. This is a critical shift in approach and an important trend in converting recruiting activity from art to a predictable business process.

Trend Four: Recruiters Becoming Partners with Their Clients and Consultants to Their Candidates

Our 2008 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey revealed two big problems. The first was pretty obvious: 76% of the 775 respondents said it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough top candidates.

The second problem was a bit unexpected: 59% of the respondents said their hiring manager clients were the real problem in recruiting top people. Some of the problems attributed to this nefarious group included lack of good assessment skills, over-reliance on skills and experiences to weed out people, lack of responsiveness, and an inability to recruit top performers.

Of course, these same managers feel that their recruiters don’t understand real job needs, they’re not presenting enough good people, and they’re not very good at assessing ability.

While this is a pretty big gap to bridge, our data suggests that this difference is narrowing. For example, I spoke with six recruiters at the temp agency and each one was top-notch. While each did things a bit differently, they had one thing in common: each was a true partner with all of the clients.

One told me her clients taught her how to weld and drive a forklift truck. Another told me about attending her client’s annual employee picnic. A third told me about visiting her client’s medical office just to find out what color scrubs were worn.

While being a partner means different things to different recruiters, one thing is certain, recruiters who are partners understand the job, the company, and the hiring manager’s real needs. They also send in fewer candidates per hire, have more influence in the decision, and get called to handle more search assignments.

Just based on the other recruiters I speak with every month, it appears that the idea of becoming a partner is becoming recognized as a critical aspect of becoming more productive.

As the demand for talent increases and the pool of traditional sourcing channels dry up, becoming a career consultant with your candidates becomes equally as important. Not only will you be a more effective recruiter and close more deals, you’ll also be rewarded with the best referrals.

Conclusion

While hiring top people is predicted to become even more challenging, those who alter their recruiting and sourcing practices based on these trends will be way ahead of the game. Start by using Web 2.0 and state-of-the-art advertising techniques to position your ads to be found, rewriting them emphasizing what’s in it for the candidate, not the skills required.

In parallel, work toward becoming a partner with your clients. This will give you the credibility you’ll need to network and get better referrals.

Then to get better faster and maintain a constant rate of improvement, prepare a rolling forecast of your hiring needs and monitor your performance weekly. This will give you the information you need to identify problems in real time and make the necessary changes as they occur.

The future is rapidly approaching. Taking these trends into account will help you get ready for it.

In the world of recruiting, there’s no substitute for a strong attraction. And, while current employees can court candidates during interviews, an inspiring job announcement makes great candidates say “yes” to the first date.

To get a passive candidate to apply, you need an inspiring job announcement: one that stirs emotion, piques curiosity, prompts wonder, and triggers surprise.

There are five principles for creating inspiring job announcements: arouse emotion, stress strengths, emphasize opportunity, be optimistic, and keep it short.

Arouse Emotion

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated science gets: Stories will always trump statistics. That’s because stories arouse emotion. We crave stories of virtue, triumph, connection, and compassion. Here are the lead statements from five job announcements. See if the images and emotions stir up in you.

• International Community Health Services: an Oasis in a Foreign Desert. For thousands of immigrants in Seattle, Washington, International Community Health Services is an oasis in a foreign desert. It is a place where a Vietnamese mother can talk to a nurse about her baby’s development, where an elderly Somali man can pick up a prescription with translated instructions, and where a Chinese immigrant can get acupuncture for back pain.
• Powerful Voices: A Place to Dream and Succeed. In every corner of America, there is will and wonder in young girls. A 12-year-old daughter asks why we go to war. A niece in the eighth grade dreams of becoming a pediatrician. A girl down the street wants to end domestic violence. Girls are dauntless in their intentions to change the world and are steadfast in their hopes to succeed. With powerful voices, they can.
• Seattle Jobs Initiative (SJI): a Solution to Poverty. For a low-wage immigrant worker, SJI offers a path to prosperity. For a single mother, SJI provides an avenue to advancement. For adults who have previously struggled in the workplace, school, and other things in life, SJI offers a chance to succeed. It is a solution to poverty, one family at a time.

Stress Strengths

Everyone wants to work for a winner. We like organizations that had a great year, change with the times, and are solid. Ferret out the strengths of your company and incorporate them into your announcements. Does your organization’s culture encourage deep discussions like those found in college courses? Are afternoon meetings as lively as a party? Is your company a stable ship that can navigate rough waters when the market sways? Here are some sample statements from job announcements that convey strength:

• Organizational Growth. Since its founding three decades ago, Puget Sound Neighborhood Health Centers has grown steadily in size and scope. The organization has created teen health centers in schools, acquired independent clinics, and built new ones where needed. Today, Puget Sound Neighborhood Health Centers is a vibrant consortium of 18 clinics with a total annual budget of $26 million.
• Track Record. For 15 years, People for Puget Sound has been the leading citizen organization working to protect our region’s greatest jewel.
• Caring Organizational Culture. Staff members are drawn to Cancer Lifeline because of their commitment to the mission; they stay because of the organization’s commitment to them. The organization’s executive director has served the agency for 22 years; its associate program director has been there for 20 years; and several others have stayed for more than a decade.
• Financial Stability. With its reserve fund of $21 million, the Comprehensive Health Education Foundation is the envy of the Northwest nonprofit sector. The organization generates all of its revenue from earned income, giving its staff financial security, flexibility over where to spend money, and protection from market sways and government cuts.

Emphasize Opportunity

No matter what the color of our collar, we all seek similar qualities in our work. We want to make a decent living, to create and achieve something, to earn respect, and to contribute. Most of us also want to learn from our work and to make friends. The qualities a job offers are its selling points. Before mentioning duties or qualifications, weave in your job’s selling points, such as:

• Lead Us into the Future. The executive director of Social Justice Fund is an excellent opportunity for a leader with an unyielding commitment to social justice and human rights. The organization has all of the necessary ingredients for growth and success: a timely mission, a 30-year track record, a large pool of individual donors, an excellent reputation, a committed staff, and an active board.
• Join a Great Team. The staff at Icicle Creek Music Center (”the Center”) do what they love and love what they do. They also care about each other: While each person has a particular role, the staff also works together to support the Center as a whole.
• Strong Salary and Benefits. The starting salary for the MissionWise director is $80,000-$90,000 plus excellent benefits.

Be Optimistic

Every organization has warts, but warts only attract toads. To attract great candidates, sound an optimistic tone. A dip in sales is an opportunity to innovate. A discovery of bad side effects can be a chance to learn and improve. An inaccurate public statement can fuel a new policy to get the facts right.

Keep it Short

While the trend in recruiting is to post full announcements with lengthy lists of qualifications and responsibilities, nothing can make a passive candidate click away faster than an announcement that drones on like an absent-minded professor. Make job announcements 2-3 pages. If you feel the need to include a complete list of duties or required skills and experience, consider a second pop-up box linked into the job announcement.

The press release from the company states that employers are looking to align their internal and external communications and branding strategies as a way to drive employee engagement and increase productivity. The firm’s name change, positioning shift, and structural changes are designed to meet changing client needs. JWT Inside will be led by Jerry Touslee, as its president over North America, and Peter Womersley, as managing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Differentiating your organization from others in the eye of the candidate is becoming our challenge as recruiters. It is increasingly difficult to recruit solely on the basis of salary or benefits or even on the merits of a particular job.

With everyone offering almost the same packages, tweaked and customized as they are, how can an organization gain a competitive advantage in recruiting? What tools or techniques can recruiters use that don?t simply rely on salaries and benefits?

One of the lessons of the past decade is that tangible things such as salary, the size of the office, or the amount of technology you will get as an employee are becoming less important than the experience and engagement they will find once they are at work. Candidates are more focused today on the purpose and nature of their work than they are on these other attributes. And this is perhaps even more obvious in Generation Y candidates.

Even outside of work and recruiting we can see where experience is more important than product. Starbucks, for example, doesn?t sell just coffee; it actually sells an “experience” built around a cup of coffee. A customer is attracted to Starbucks because it has created an environment designed for casual conversation, for quiet reading, or for meeting a friend. You can buy a muffin or a roll, a cup of cappuccino or espresso, or just plain old coffee. You can select a grande or a venti, not just a small or a large. And you gladly pay a premium for the coffee.

The same applies to Borders or Barnes & Noble that offer much more than books. They offer entertainment and recreation. They create an environment for students to do their homework, for authors to write their books and articles. They offer live music, oral readings, coffee and other foods, and a huge selection of magazines and newspapers (much more readily accessible than those in the public library, and still free!).

Nordstrom, the famed retailer, offers live music played on grand pianos and features wine and coffee bars for their shoppers. A single clerk, who crosses from department to department with the customer, offers advice, color and style suggestions, and personalizes the shopping trip. The price is premium, but so is the experience.

While every generation likes to have fun and be entertained, it is an expectation of Generation Y. Work should be fun, engaging, and meaningful. They want to work at places where people work hard but have a good time doing it. Recruiters need to find ways to make the recruiting experience more engaging and much more fun.

Make Recruiting Fun

For most of us, looking for a job and interviewing is confusing, stressful, and painfully slow. Good recruiters will transform their career sites into ones that showcase the fun aspects of the workplace. These sites could offer tours done in a fun and interesting way. They could improve the job information by having actual employees talk about what they do.

Even recruiting events can be entertaining for candidates. You can put together events that bring groups of candidates together and get them laughing and involved. Southwest Airlines uses humor well and knows how to entertain both passengers on their flights and their prospective employees. Disney is also a master at this. People remember humorous experiences and continue to have positive thoughts about the provider.

Make Recruiting Educational

By providing learning experiences, free seminars, onsite classes, or other events, you create a sense of connection and begin a tie-in to your organization. Candidates absorb information and gain insights into the culture and working environment of the firm simply by attending a class or other onsite activity. This can be an excellent way to show how your company is different than another one in a similar industry.

Make Recruiting Creative

Get candidates involved in doing something different and totally absorbing. Computer games are a form of escapist experience. Anyone who has played a computer game knows how easy it is to become completely absorbed with the unfolding drama. Recruiters can create an activity that involves candidates intensely in their organization or with people from the organization. Some companies use outdoor team-building activities to create an experience such as this, but one could also develop an interactive Internet-based tour of the company that requires candidates to make choices and get involved. Recruiters can gain a much better understanding of what motivates and interests candidates by tracking what choices they make. But, while they are involved in the experience, they are learning about your firm’s culture and people, almost without realizing it.

Make Recruiting Sensual

Appeal to the senses. This is the area that Borders and Starbucks have mastered. Books, coffee, music, friends, smells, and colors are blended into an aesthetic experience that we all find some level of enjoyment in. Recruiters can use the corporate environment as an important recruiting tool. If your firm has nice lawns, modern and spacious buildings, a nice cafeteria, a gym, or a day-care center, you can tailor a tour that appeals to the aesthetic side of a candidate and showcase the environment. Yahoo!, SAS, and many other organizations have created such environments and they are, in themselves, differentiators.

The bottom line is simple. It takes more than a good offer, a good salary, and a good job to attract candidates and get them to say yes. Successful recruiters will increasingly need to use the tools of good marketers and learn from the lessons of the business world. Creating experiences is an inexpensive way to differentiate your company and improve your recruiting success.

Most corporate recruiting efforts are painfully conservative. That fact might not seem like something that you should waste a lot of time worrying about, but what if taking a conservative approach contributes significantly to your constant shortage of quality talent?

Most managers and recruiters do not yet realize that a few firms have dramatically changed the game of recruiting and brought it up to a new level, a level that some people would call “outrageous.”

To put it bluntly, your recruiting efforts are probably behind the times if you’re not recruiting with avatars and using videos on YouTube.

Some might argue that these “outrageous” recruiting efforts will not initially produce a high-volume of hires. That is probably true; however, the goal is not to recruit volume but instead, to attract those innovators who can really have a positive impact on a business.

Innovators are quite naturally attracted by others who innovate, so one of the primary goals of outrageous recruiting is to demonstrate to these candidates that your firm is on the leading edge of innovative practices.

Outrageous Recruiting Becomes More Common

In case you haven’t heard, some the very best firms in recruiting like Google, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, Bain Consultants, and even the U.S. Army have broken the mold of traditional recruiting.

They have gone beyond traditional sources like job boards, newspaper ads, and career fairs to use “new media” like video games, YouTube videos, online contests, MySpace, TV shows, and virtual reality websites.

You can dismiss these new media recruiting approaches as insignificant, but that would be a mistake. In fact, there are several reasons why your firm needs to be involved in outrageous recruiting.

Instituting outrageous recruiting practices in new media sends a clear message to your internal hiring managers and your employees that your recruiting function leads the way in tactics and strategy.

It also sends a similar message to your prospective candidates, one that your recruiting (and obviously by extrapolation, also your firm) is continually on the “bleeding edge” of most business and technology practices.

In short, being the first to institute a dramatic new business or recruiting practice can have a positive impact on your external and internal employment brand.

Grab Their Attention on Second Life

The “new” recruiting approach that seems to shock conservative recruiters is finding talent on Second Life, the virtual-world website where individuals can live a separate (i.e., second) life with a personalized virtual character (known as an avatar).

Living vicariously within a virtual world and a virtual character might seem like some crazy kid’s notion, but in fact, Second Life is a world visited on a regular basis by hundreds of thousands of adults.

If you’re wondering how you can recruit in a world that doesn’t really exist, the answer is that it’s not as difficult as you might suspect. First, you buy land (using real money) and then set up your career fair or information site. Already, top firms like HP, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Hyro, T-Mobile, Bain, Sodexho, Verizon, as well as forward-looking recruiting agencies like Kelly, TMP, and Semper are planning or have already run virtual job fairs or have instituted efforts to recruit individuals (and their avatars) within Second Life.

Recruiting in Second Life provides firms with the opportunity to demonstrate that they are open to new approaches and ideas. Taking a risk and trying something new makes heavy Internet users aware of the fact that your firm has the understanding and the courage to use “new media” in recruiting.

Unique “first to try” approaches both in products and in recruiting generally garner you significant amounts of free press coverage. For example, Bain’s Second Life recruiting efforts got a major write up in the Wall Street Journal and was also featured on the NBC nightly news.

In addition, having the courage to try something outrageous will likely increase the number of times that your firm is mentioned positively in industry PowerPoint presentations and within “viral” emails and text messages that are actively passed between friends and colleagues.

A Moving Picture Might Be Worth 10,000 Words

Everyone has heard the phrase that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and if that’s true, then certainly a “moving picture” (a video) is probably equivalent to 10,000 words. What could be a better way to clearly show individuals what it’s like to work at your firm than to show them a compelling video on YouTube and on your own corporate careers website?

What makes these short videos so powerful in recruiting is that while viewing them, a potential applicant can actually witness what “real life” is like at your firm. Within the video, outsiders can actually meet and get to know your best employees, view the physical facilities, and feel the energy and passion within your teams.

The U.S. Army is a prime example on how to successfully use videos to spread a message. The Army has placed real-life action videos on YouTube that have demonstrated the excitement of serving in the Army like no brochure or even recruiter possibly could. Other organizations including Deloitte, Cisco, and Google have also used YouTube videos to spread their message (Google has its own video channel). Just as in Second Life, videos send a message to innovators that your firm gets it.

Video Games and Other Outrageous Media Approaches

The recruiting envelope has been stretched into other “new media” areas as well. Recruiting on the popular social network websites like MySpace and Facebook has recently become more acceptable by conservative recruiters.

In contrast, most organizations are still not ready for recruiting within video games. Almost everyone knows that video games are popular among all age groups, but they are particularly popular with young adults.

Since young adults are the target audience for the U.S. Army’s recruiting efforts, they have developed a free downloadable video “war game” (America’s Army) that contains within the nonstop video action a “virtual reality recruiting station” where you can sign up as an Army recruit. It might be hard to believe, but it works surprisingly well. Other smart recruiters have targeted the other age groups that use video games by recruiting within the numerous online communities of video gamers.

The renewed war for talent has forced firms to try approaches that previously would have been considered outrageous. Some of the boldest recruiting approaches that only a few have been willing to try include:

• A television show. Southwest Airlines has its own award-winning TV show known as Airline on A&E, which appears to be a drama but in actuality, is a recruiting show. Because the show follows the workday of Southwest Airlines airport personnel, they get the opportunity to expose to millions the excitement and the drama involved in working at Southwest (in addition to any revenue that the show generates). A handful of casinos and hotels have also used television dramas and cooking shows to increase their exposure for recruiting and branding. No discussion of TV recruiting would be complete without the mention of Donald Trump, who routinely got over a million applicants for a single internship opening on The Apprentice.
• Online contests. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, among others, have used online contests as a recruiting tool. Perhaps the most famous contest holder is Google, with its numerous “code jams” that are offered around the world. Contests are a superior approach because they not only attract individuals who like to compete, but because they allow you to anonymously assess the actual work of the contestants.
• Blogs. If your employees write these blogs, they can seem more credible than a recruiting brochure. Blogs can provide a non-employee with an insider’s perspective, can serve as a forum to ask and answer questions, and in general, make the firm seem more real. Microsoft, Google, and MGM Grand have used blogs as a part of their employment branding and recruiting efforts.
• Podcasts. If you own an iPod or an MP3 player, firms like BMW will provide you with an audio or video podcast that highlights the features of the firm.
• Wikipedia. Some firms have made a concerted effort to ensure that listings on Wikipedia.com are positive and have no negative recruiting connotations.
• Billboards. Many hospitals (especially in the L.A. area) have learned to use highway billboards to recruit nurses during their long commute times. Google, not to be outdone, gained a great deal of notoriety by posting its “mathematical challenge” on highway billboards with the goal of attracting a handful of math geniuses.
• Recruiting at concerts and on the beach. UPS is a veteran when it comes to outrageous recruiting. They raised the bar to new levels when they decided to recruit at Metallica concerts. IBM also took the lead by pioneering college recruiting “on the beach” during spring breaks.
• Movie theaters. Southwest Airlines recruits moviegoers by placing ads in between movies and large theater complexes.

Innovations in The Groups That Recruiting Targets

In addition to better uses of new and existing media, some companies have pushed the envelope in recruiting by focusing on previously under-targeted groups of individuals. Some of these approaches that many would consider “outrageous” include:

• Recruiting retirees. Eli Lilly, P&G, Microsoft, and Home Depot have all received some notoriety by focusing on recruiting retirees from other firms.
• Recruiting from the military. GE and Home Depot have had success focusing their recruiting on ex-military personnel.
• Recruiting your own customers. Google leads the way in targeting customers who use its services. The Google ad words program has allowed many other firms to recruit by placing recruitment ads next to certain key word searches (i.e., “jobs in nursing”).
• College referrals. College recruiting certainly isn’t new or for the most part, innovative but Intuit has “raised the bar” by implementing a student referral program in order to elicit student help in identifying and hiring top candidates from their campuses.
• Targeting boomerangs. McKinsey, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Radical Entertainment and Booz Allen have all had great success in first targeting and then convincing former key employees to return to the firm.

Final Thoughts

Do not expect large-scale results immediately after initiating outrageous recruiting efforts because, like all brand-new, leading-edge business practices, it takes time to produce high-volume results.

But one of the immediate impacts that you should expect is an increase in the self-confidence of your recruiters, because they now know that their recruiting function is one of the few that is pushing the envelope.

Expect to attract more innovators, media coverage, and word-of-mouth awareness from potential applicants, since outrageous behavior seems to draw people’s attention. That is what outrageous recruiting is all about: drawing attention to your recruiting effort so that those who appreciate innovation the most will take notice.

The findings discussed in this webinar are part of the first comprehensive study of recruitment advertising effectiveness to be conducted on a broad national scale. ERE Media and Classified Intelligence collaborated in developing the survey and analyzing the results.

We wanted to provide guidance to recruiters looking to get the best results from their advertising budgets and to advertising publishers, whether print or online, seeking to understand the changing recruitment marketplace. We studied online job sites, print media, employee referral programs, the budding social networks, and career fairs. We asked recruiters to rank each and, for online job sites, certain sub-sets on a scale of 1-to-5 for effectiveness. We compared the effectiveness ratings to dollars spent, hires made, and spending intention for the balance of 2007.

View the webinar here.

Many organizations struggle to get enough high-quality applicants. While corporate websites, job boards, and events generate lots of flow, most agree that the quality is lacking in a vast majority of applicants.

The culprit might be how organizations sell their opportunities. A quick scan of major job boards, print advertisements, and corporate career sites reveals that organizations rely on ordinary, bland recruiting materials and dull position descriptions to attract talent.

It is evident that little emphasis is placed on making the recruiting pitch truly exciting. The lack of effort is indicative of an often oversubscribed premise that the talent you are after already knows how great you are as an employer, so you don’t need to spark their interest in your openings.

It’s a premise that is rarely true, unless you happen to work for a small handful of rather elite companies. If you don’t, there is an alternative approach that accepts recruiting as a form of sales and dictates that recruiters become more adept at articulating differentiated “selling points” (i.e., a value proposition).

Compile a List of Your Selling Points

It seems like such an obvious step, but only a small percentage of recruiting leaders invest significant time in establishing points of differentiation with talent competitors and distributing them to those in the recruiting process to establish a shared mindset.

This list helps to ensure that on the off chance such talent does encounter your message via any channel in use, your opportunities will stand out from all of the others competing for their limited attention.

Consistent, compelling messages have a better chance of being recognized, so selling points must permeate everything that touches the recruiting function, including:

• Position descriptions
• Corporate background profiles
• Recruiting collateral
• Corporate website (all aspects, not just the career site)
• Press releases and media kits
• Recruiting process communications (including the all-important offer letter)

Consider other important steps, described below, to help leverage such selling points to attract high-quality applicants.

Develop a Comprehensive List of Possible Job Application Factors

Before you can successfully make a sales pitch that would attract the very best, identify what specific features the best potential applicants expect in a good job and in a great company.

I call these selling points “job application factors” because they are the factors that drive the very best candidates to take the time to actually suffer through applying for a position.

Methods for identifying such factors include holding focus groups with your own best employees, asking applicants during interviews, asking new hires, and compiling a list of other firms’ selling points. Remember to scan position descriptions from competing firms to document things such as tools used and the scope of competing positions.

Develop Your Selling Points

You might think that you’re done, but unfortunately, developing a pitch around selling points that your organization cannot live up to is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. With that in mind, the next step is to pare down your list of ideal factors into a list of selling points that your company can actually deliver on.

While you may perceive that your company can execute to a particular point, it is much better to test than assume. Assemble a test panel in specific job families to review the ranked list of factors, then assign a rating of how well your organization delivers on each point. Develop those selling points that rank high in terms of attractiveness and rate high in terms of execution.

Company-wide features might include:

• Being listed on “best place to work” or employer of choice lists
• A culture of innovation and risk-taking
• A culture that celebrates diversity
• Firm/industry stability and programs that enable job security
• Growth rates
• Environmental record
• Pro