Aw, come on. Of course you’ve looked yourself up on the Internet. Almost half of all Internet users did in 2007. The latest survey puts the number at 59 percent.

And if you really, really haven’t then you may want to retake recruiting 101.

Just as companies no longer are masters of their own brand, neither are you. There are sites to rate teachers, cops, doctors, even parts of your anatomy. Then there are the pictures and comments well-meaning friends have posted about you.

Google yourself and you may find those bleery-eyed conference party photos of you rank higher than than does the whitepaper you authored. Or, you may discover you rank lower than the death notices of others with like names.

To help remedy that there’s PlaceYourName.com. It’s a personal marketing service that promises to help users “manage and control what is seen about them when their names are searched online.”

For $50 and a few minutes of your time you get a press release (which you write, they edit) sent to an online newsservice and PlaceYourName submits your name and some bio info and your photo to what it says are four “high ranking websites, blogs, and news portals, viewable in search engine results.”

For $100, you get double the distribution plus a vanity website of your own.

There’s nothing PlaceYourName will do that you can’t do yourself. But the truth is most people don’t. Sarah Welstead, a Toronto recruiting marketing professional, a few months ago wrote about the importance of building a personal brand. Yesterday, ERE offered a webinar on this topic: “Creating a Personal Brand: Increasing Your Online Presence.” Presented by Toby Nathan of RecruitaStar is the nuts and bolts of how you build a personal brand and it’s archived here.

There’s also a valuable personal branding blog started by Dan Schawbel, a guru of personal branding.

While a service like PlaceYourName.com can get you started — and you may want to consider it and other branding tools like Personavita or VisualCV if you lack the discipline — in order to sustain the effort, you need endurance, and something to offer.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

In today’s age, the fable is a metaphor for those in HR who are unwilling to state an obvious truth to a higher up out of fear of appearing stupid, sacrilegious, or politically “incorrect.” They would sooner let a company’s reputation stick out buck naked than tell the truth about the company culture and reputation. This is co-dependency with a superior who wants Yes-men, not accountable partners.

I arrived at this observation because I am always struck by the stark difference between what companies think their employees think about them and what they tell me when I interview them. I also am always shocked about what those employees will say on Twitter, Vault, and any other number of “pink slip” sites about these top-rated employers. I wonder if anyone in competitive intelligence, PR, marketing, or HR ever reads about the fallout of bad managers making bad decisions, including furloughs, reduced hours, wearing double hats, etc. When did having a bad reputation not count?

I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me at Wal-Mart. I haven’t recruited for Wal-Mart. Last week I watched a show on the Discovery Channel about Wal-Mart’s Super Store operations. They have onboarding sessions and songs that everyone sings that promote team spirit at Wal-Mart. They showed the droves of people who drove for miles to work there. Right after I watched the show, my iPod had to be replaced. Since I was too lazy to go to the Apple store, and I wanted it right now, I went to Wal-Mart. While I was standing at the counter trying to get this chick to hand me the iPod, she turns her back to me and starts complaining about her hours being reduced to another guy who is complaining about his benefits. I finally interrupted them and asked her to please hand me the iPod and take my money. I got home, got down to my iTunes work, and opened up my gmail account, and there was an email about boycotting Wal-Mart on account of some hideous thing that it did to bust a union. In the course of one week, I had some serious employment brand material in my consciousness.

What is interesting about the TV show, the store experience, the e-mail, and the press about Wal-Mart is that there is a level of chatter about its brand that is beyond their control. Wal-Mart feels it is well on the way to rehabilitating its image through a new logo and green Super Stores; yet, that doesn’t match my personal experience in that week. What can it do about Twitter, e-mail chains, at the store, in the news, and across the Thanksgiving dinner table, especially if one incident adds fuel to the fire?

I chose Wal-Mart because well, that happened to me last week, and that is a fairly large target. I won’t be the first one to raise this reputation issue about them. Frankly, it probably doesn’t matter what people think about its “employee” brand because they employ groups of people who have limited choices and who presumably grow in faster and larger numbers than let’s say, semiconductor design engineers with PhDs. What is interesting is when all of those things collide and affect more vulnerable brands.

The war for top talent is going to get fought and influenced by Twitter, Vault, users groups, and former employees. And in a country like the U.S. where services and design are the only real place where job growth is, people know each other. Maybe some companies should consider cutting down spend on money for logos and Superbowl ads, and treat people better.

Despite many successes, it’s time to admit that a major employer branding principle is no longer true: that corporations can own or control their employer brand image.

The premise was that corporations could proactively put together a plan to win awards as excellent places to work, secure mention in news pieces and editorials, participate in case studies, and be talked about at industry events. Because corporations were coordinating nearly all of the information that made them visible, it was possible to heavily influence how they were perceived.

It was a practice that made firms like Google, Starbucks, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and HP famous as great places to work. However, that was then and this is now.

While it is still possible to heavily influence perception with well-managed efforts, significant growth in social media, peer-to-peer content publishing, and online rating services have shifted a majority of the power away from the corporate employer brand manager to the masses. The shift in power renders all but the most strategic and well-executed efforts virtually ineffective.

To those who actively engage and publish their story, their perception is reality, even if the experiences that led them to their perception are not common. Their points of view are often emotionally charged, personal, and therefore, significantly more trusted as fact by those you need to influence than corporate, generic dribble.

Odds are, the people most influencing your employer brand are people you have never met.

Other People Now Own Your Employer Brand Image

Control provides comfort to senior talent management executives, and for years, they have been comfortable. No matter how much the employee experience differed from the overly positive perspective they sold to candidates and organizational stakeholders, they could get away with pushing out their message.

While many product brand marketers learned long ago that if the experience with the product didn’t match the brand positioning, consumers would revolt, few in HR were paying attention. Many HR leaders may ignore or discount the facts, but the truth is that a fundamental shift has occurred, and like it or not, the years of putting forward a brand identity not tied to reality are over. Some organizations have been successful in silencing organizational critics through threat of legal action, but the majority of attempts backfire, ultimately making the criticisms even more visible.

The New Owners of Employer Brands

The new owners are a complicated mix of individuals who use a variety of communication channels to influence your brand without your knowledge, consent, or guidance. The array of contributors grows more complex daily, and the most prominent groups of brand influencers include:

• Bloggers – blogs have been around for quite some time, and while it used to hold true that only 1:100 people active online were contributing original content, a vast array of new online services has significantly reduced that ratio. Today, thousands of independent-minded individuals are posting comments about their day at work, their boss from hell, the idiot that just got hired, the stupidity of HR actions, the lunacy of senior leadership, and all those little liability secrets corporate security would like to keep buried. They communicate without fear and without purpose. Psychological studies have shown that we are nearly three times more likely to consume negative information than positive information (there is a reason the nightly news focuses on the negative), which means that we are significantly more likely to share the bad stories versus the good ones. We are also prone to exaggeration and sensationalizing, but rarely does that fact get considered when folks are reading peer-produced commentary about life at XYZ Corp.
• Social media users – Social media isn’t a regional thing, it isn’t an economic thing, and it isn’t a political thing. It is, however, a technology concept that is enabling a fundamental shift in how people learn and communicate. From sites like Facebook and MySpace in the United States to QZone in China or Hyves in the Netherlands, millions of people are sharing the details of their daily lives with friends, family, coworkers, and virtual strangers. In minutes, users can spread facts, rumors, pictures, or innuendos to thousands and thousands of individuals around the world. Negative videos like “Comcast sucks” that would have in the past been seen by only a handful of close friends are now seen by millions. Social media users can exert phenomenal pressure by using the grapevine to highlight stories many organizations would rather people not hear about.
• People active on Twitter – Twitter deserves special attention among the social media outlets because it is so instantaneous. Just as political events in Iran were instantly Tweeted about, so are the negative experiences of your employees, and even your customers. Individuals being laid off can now provide a “blow-by-blow” account of the badly handled termination process and share their pain instantly with thousands.
• Texters on mobile phones – these individuals utilize this omnipresent 24/7 channel to both receive and send news about your firm, its employees, and your practices.
• Commercial websites – there are numerous “what your employees are saying” sites like Vault, the forums at Indeed, or glassdoor.com, that specialize in sharing messages about what it’s like to work at a firm with individuals considering employment. While most make some attempt to validate that the comment contributors have worked or currently work for the organizations in questions, not all do. Prominent firms like Coca Cola, Best Buy, and Starbucks have been targeted by unfriendly “anti-firm” websites that exist merely to spread a combination of real, half-truths, and untruths about the firms.
• Industry and profession-specific forums – current employees, former employees, investors, and individuals who have merely read about your firm can post questions about what it’s like to work at your firm (or answer them) on numerous and quite active professional association website forums or independent listservers.
• Internet groups – Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow individuals with similar interests to form groups that can help to connect individuals who share common interests and likes/dislikes about your firm.
• Internet show hosts – there are numerous Internet voice and video casts (some associated with traditional media outlets and others that are just independent). These shows frequently include interviews with individuals who, without your knowledge or permission, say both good and bad things about what it’s like to work at your firm. Videoblogger and avid social network user Philip DeFranco demonstrated the power of the approach to take on even the most powerful litigation-bound employer, Wal-Mart, in response to fine print in Wal-Mart’s self-funded insurance plan that allows the employer to cease damage awards received by plan participants.
• Social bookmarking service users – individuals who tag a story with a “Digg” or related online bookmark can proactively increase the visibility of any negative story, whether you like it or not.
• Search engine managers – these individuals differ in that they probably don’t have a particular bias toward or against business or any particular firm; however, the design of search algorithms influence what type of messages about your firm that others can readily see.

Individuals who are likely to be the most active in shaping your employer brand on these communications channels include:

• Current employees – hundreds or even thousands of your employees who sometimes innocently and sometimes purposely post Tweets or wall postings provide insight into what it’s like to work at your firm. Even something as innocuous as a LinkedIn profile might lead some to make assumptions about your firm as an employer.
• Former employees – you may have thought they liked you, but what they say after they leave is more likely the reality. From disgruntled alumni to employees recently laid off, the information collective is alive with former employees recounting their experience.
• Vendors – those current and former vendors who have had both a positive and negative business relationship with your firm can now easily spread their perceptions and experiences over the Internet to anyone that will listen.
• Anti-business types – individuals who are looking for opportunities to blame corporations for a variety of economic and environmental problems are quite active on the Internet. Some are actually quite effective in not just spreading Internet messages but also in creating mass letter-writing campaigns and even actual face-to-face meetings or protests.

Peer-Produced Content Is More Credible

If you were to fact-check most blogs, Tweets, or YouTube videos, most would be considered fallacious. Yet survey after survey shows that most individuals in general (and net-generation individuals in particular) believe peer-produced content over traditional news or print media content.

You can bemoan this fact all you want, but statements on your corporate website, in your employment ads, or in press releases will almost always be viewed as less credible than a comment from a blogger who is passing along an innuendo that might have no basis in fact.

Messages from Others Are Extremely Hard to Counter

As Internet users become more prolific, the ability of corporations to monitor and respond to every channel is significantly diminished. If several hundred people outside the organization are producing content, like it or not, there is little your small team can do to match that scale (short of building a brand army of employees inside the organization to push positive commentary).

Responding to negative commentary online isn’t a good idea, as your response makes the original content both more visible and more charged.

Final Thoughts

Given the bleak picture and the almost daily erosion of control over your brand image, you might consider just giving up, but I urge you not to make that mistake.

While you no longer control your employer brand, you can become more aware of your actual brand — especially the negative comments being posted about your firm. Learn to use tools like search engine alerts, blog search sites, and Twitter archive searches. Use search engine optimization techniques to ensure the content you want to be most visible becomes most visible, and work to hide negative comments.

Smart brand managers can use employees who are active on the Internet to increase the number of positive brand messengers. Develop plans to influence key opinion leaders by making more authentic and candid (read: less perfect) stories and examples available to them. I’ll cover the approaches you can use to proactively influence your brand in coming articles.

If you have corporate experience operating an employment branding function, I solicit your additions on this loss of brand control topic. Also, if you have questions you would like answered on corporate employer branding, you are encouraged to post them in response to this article.

Entice Labs

Earlier this year, John Sumser described the company as a “game changer.” In June, Susan Burns, president of Talent Synchronicity, said the company’s TalentSeekr product is “a sleek and effective approach to targeted employment brand positioning.”

Now, TechCrunch has said of the company, “it still beats hiring a headhunter.” OK, so that’s not as scintillating an endorsement as either Sumser’s or Burns’, but then TechCrunch is a site for geeks, not recruiters. But you gotta figure that a product that wows both techies and recruiters is worth taking a look at.

So let’s start with the elevator description: TalentSeekr is a recruitment advertising program that creates interactive ads out of standard job postings, targets them by the criteria you specify, places them on sites in its ad network, then monitors the results, adding exposures here, reducing them there and deleting ads entirely from sites that provide too few or too poor results.

The ads can be of all types, including video, Flash, banners, and text ads, for example. Formats and placements are tested and refined in real time. Recruiters can monitor the performance of individual ad types and placements and make changes. But the automated adjustments are the real selling point. As candidates click in and are qualified, TalentSeekr learns what performs best, and provides more of the same. The longer the campaign, the better the performance and the lower the cost of each applicant.

This heuristic capability sets TalentSeekr apart from mere monitoring systems that provide lots of information but don’t act on it. With the potential of having an ad appear on hundreds, thousands, and even more websites, being able to make changes on the fly can save money on PPC postings and improve the quality of the candidates overall.

The other, and equally important capability, is the potential for capturing passive job seekers. Ads can be placed on all sorts of sites and places. Adidas managed to snare a candidate who saw an ad when checking their  Gmail.

Targeting can be contextual, behavioral, geographic, or by social media type or all of these. There’s a video on the TechCrunch site that says Entice Labs can target as broadly as a nation or as narrowly as an individual building.

On her Talent Synchronicity Burns describes the process:

“EnticeLabs begins by collecting information from the recruiter about a job or a job category to develop a highly relevant positioning strategy. They’ll work with you to understand key markets (talent and geography) and create text, image, picture, video, or flash ads that will appeal to passive and active seekers.

Then, TalentSeekr automatically generates an engagement page that serves as a “storyboard” type concept to enhance the prospect’s experience with your company’s brand. Through the engagement page, TalentSeekr weaves together video, photos, referral capability, and links to your career site, job posting, community interface, or any other digital real estate to which you want to drive traffic that results in a valuable employment experience.”

In the interest of complete transparency I should point out that Burns and Sumser are members of the Entice Labs Expert Panel. But having seen some of what TalentSeekr can do, the descriptions are apt, if understated.

The heuristic nature of the system sets it apart from other advertising networks, most recently SnapTalent, which closed up shop in August.

TalentSeekr, as its VP of strategy and alliances, Joshua Westover, says, makes the most sense for continuous recruiting. Small companies with only the occasional need to advertise positions or those that care little for branding are not Entice Labs’ best prospects.

But, as Stephen Fogarty of adidas explains in a video Burns did with him and Westover, TalentSeekr can help fill even challenging positions, the kind that adidas used to turn over to headhunters. In her blog posting, Fogarty reports that in a test campaign to fill a difficult job, TalentSeekr produced several qualified candidates in two weeks.

Writes Burns, “The prospect adidas hired had seen the ad on their Gmail page and was so taken by the experience and highly relevant content they were blown away.”

Amazingly, that’s what Fellows and Associates has done. And just to make sure you get it, the firm issued a press release over the weekend discussing the video.

“The aim was to find an idea that was provocative in order to elicit a response and maximise the video’s potential for spreading virally whilst maintaining a balance of responsible advertising” says Fellows and Associates Managing Director, Pete Fellows.

I don’t know about the provocative part, but the viral part seems to have fallen flat. According to You Tube stats, the “Goose Attack At Wedding” video has not yet broken 1,000 views after 7 days online. Compare that to the branding video for Caterer.com that I wrote about in July. It got almost 38,000 views on its first day.

The press release notes that “Fellows and Associates are the first UK recruitment firm in the Intellectual Property sector to experiment with viral video advertising.” But issuing a formal press release isn’t quite what viral marketing is all about, even if it has gotten some online mileage.

On the other hand, when you’re launching a new business into a competitive market, any publicity is good publicity. We wrote about it, didn’t we?

Adidas will be going live at the end of August with a corporate careers site it’s convinced will be an “industry disruptor.”

It took a year and a half for adidas to put its new site together, with help from Carat (which is now Freestyle Interactive). Steve Fogarty, adidas North America Recruiting Captain, was the project leader. Other major stakeholders included adidas Group Global Head of Recruiting Steve Bonomo; Reebok Recruiting Manager Tara Gallone; and TaylorMade Recruiting Manager Kate Hinshaw.

Fogarty, who with Bonomo is speaking at ERE’s conference coming up in Florida, is underwhelmed by what he sees in corporate careers sites. (He does like, however, the U.S. Army’s recruiting work — “they put genuises behind it, Fogarty says” –  helped by a huge budget and support from McCann Erickson. He’s also fond of Microsoft’s Hey Genius campaign, and what Cirque does with its high-profile entertainment jobs.)

Anyhow, Fogarty found that most companies either brand themselves well, but make it hard to find what you want on their career sites, or they do the flip side of that: offer a truckload of information but the brand is lost.

In a recent issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, as part of an in-depth article on branding, Fogarty said that the best-marketed products don’t let the customer forget the brand:

Absolut Vodka is one of the best examples of this. The Absolut bottle has a distinct shape. Every single ad over emphasizes this shape by creatively integrating the ad into the shape of the bottle. When you walk into a liquor store, whether you are looking for Vodka or not, your eyes always go to the Absolut shelf …

Let your creativity run wild. How can you develop advertising and marketing campaigns that burn your brand positioning into the minds of your candidates?

On top of that, the sites, he finds, are rarely genuine: usually, they’re loaded up not with actual employees speaking candidly, but with stock photos, carefully calculated to check off the right diversity boxes.

The adidas recruiting department got the company’s marketing department to let it borrow, so to speak, some of the star athletes who are adidas sponsors. “Our employment brand,” adidas recruiters told adidas marketers, “is as important as our consumer brand. You give us an athlete and we’re going to shape what they do. We’re going to script what they do.” In other words, canned, generic messages from athletes that didn’t relate to employment wouldn’t be pigeonholed into a recruiting site.

Adidas doesn’t want candidates to think of athletes as the demigods they’re often portrayed as in the media. At this company, a superstar is someone you might actually meet through your job. Says Fogarty: “We take athletes off their pedestal so they become more like you and I.”

A trio of these adidas sponsors will be featured prominently for candidates who land on the new site. There’s Candace Parker, of the Los Angeles Sparks’ WNBA team, Ben Watson, from the New England Patriots, who is associated with Reebok, and golfer Natalie Gulbis, pitching the TaylorMade brand. Current employees, talking about their jobs, are also featured prominently.

Right now (with the old site), adidas has one group website representing all brands. Fogarty says, of the new site, that “Instead of saying the group supersedes the brand, the group is symbiotic and made up of the brands.” So if you want to work for TaylorMade, you’re immersed in a golf-careers site. The parent company adidas group, Fogarty says, “should be thought of as the collection of brands.”

Fogarty believes the site will work because it won’t fall into the trap so many career sites do. Companies have been playing up their “best company to work for” and “employees are our greatest asset” catchphrases that aren’t really differentiators. They clutter up their career sites with confusing navigation, boring corporate-speak, the stock photos we mentioned earlier, and unnecessary multimedia.

Focus group participants, in fact, told adidas they didn’t want tons of cluttered information thrown out them right away when they land on the site. So the site, Fogarty says, will “serve up information as it becomes relevant. Only when it’s narrowed down to the thing you are most interested in will it give you the majority of information on that particular area. Most candidates don’t care about 50 bells and whistles. They want it to be easy. I really don’t give a &*()& how my refrigerator works. I just want my food to be cold. The technology shouldn’t be apparent on the site. It just should work.”

“Companies run together for me,” Fogarty says. “Even the best of the best out there aren’t doing it well. Google does great at marketing tactics. I’ll give them all the credit in the world for that,” he says, referring to such things as clever recruiting billboards. But Google, Fogarty says, largely failed to use its real differentiators, such as employees’ ability to spend 20% of their time on experimental projects.

Adidas’ version of the famous Google 20% rule — in other words, adidas’ employee value proposition — is a focus on sports and in particular on athletes, as people you can get to know and not merely worship, and how that is part of the adidas employment experience. If a job candidate leaves the site feeling like they could, if hired, someday get to shoot a hoop or two with Candace Parker, adidas will have succeeded.

We’ve said before that companies often redo their career sites, and leave the job descriptions boring. Fogarty wants to avoid that. It has created what it calls a “brand book” for recruiting leaders in every country. It’s basically a presentation showing, among other brand examples, samples of what the company wants to see in a job description. “We will hold the recruiters accountable for writing good job descriptions,” Fogarty says. “Right now that accountability is a little loose,” he says, with so much work being done on getting the new site up, among other things. “It’s a huge focus for us,” Fogarty says of job descriptions. But, he says, a good job description doesn’t make up for a bad job. “Is the job itself crappy?” he asks. “I’d rather have the job right than a perfect job description.”

Indeed, Fogarty wrote in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership:

Our hope is that a top candidate who may have browsed the site and then left without action in the past is compelled and inspired now to apply. No matter how great your brand positioning is, your candidates won’t come back if your jobs suck. This is where you need to work up front to ensure your organization’s jobs are scoped correctly and you are writing compelling job descriptions.

Adidas is still working on the site and the way it coordinates with its back-end applicant tracking system from Jobpartners. Originally scheduled to go live in the Spring of 2009, it should be ready later this month.

Not any more. Gore will be telling scientists, engineers, and other prospective employees its story by launching a new global branding campaign from Arizona to China with a modest little theme: Join Gore & Change Your Life.

Barbara Pizzala is one of Gore’s global leaders in recruiting. Well, sort of: Gore does without official titles, direct reports, or indirect reports. She’s one of two co-champions of the project; the other represents the company’s corporate communications team. Pizzala says work started on the campaign about three years ago in Europe. It was put on hold, and then work began anew about a year ago. The ad agency TBWA, in Hamburg, has been involved.

The hub is a website, which spells out such things as the company’s fundamental beliefs and what it’s like to work there (if you need more structure, try the Gap).

As with most other corporate career sites, if you make it all the way through the Taleo system to the job descriptions, you may find them a little boring (something I said a year ago about Cellular South.) Says Pizzala: “Job descriptions will have a more brand-reflective look to them. This is something we are still working on. Each and every posting will be more brand-reflective than today.”

A second website, modified for European locations and using German and British English, will launch in Europe in about four weeks. A third site, in Chinese and English, will launch in Asia about four weeks after that.

Pizzala says Gore will drive site traffic using 1) big boards like Monster and CareerBuilder, and to a lesser extent, niche boards for the medical device field; 2) a minimal amount of print newspaper ads in Arizona, Delaware, and Maryland (and significantly more print ads in Europe); 3) campus recruiting and career fairs (it has bought new booths); and 4) social media, which hasn’t really begun yet.

Gore has brought on Jobs2Web to help with social media. “They’re educating us, Todd,” Pizzala says. “This is new for us.”

Senior Leaders Got It

Gore has never had a global employment brand.

“It is a first ever,” Pizzala says. “Historically, Gore does not go out and boast much about who we are. It’s a part of our culture — humbleness, humility. We expect our products will speak for themselves.”

But, senior leaders knew that had to change. They realized that the company wasn’t visible enough in some of its markets — in the Asian medical-device field, for example.

“If there’s one thing that really worried us,” Pizzala says, “It’s whether we were going to be able to hire enough of the right people. It was a pretty widely held belief among our senior leaders that talent would be one of our biggest constraints for growth.”

Gore has had little to no decline in its medical-division hiring, Pizzala says. While it has used the slow economy to develop and move people internally, there are some things you can’t train overnight — like when you’re trying to hire a scientist with experiencing dealing with the FDA. So, she says, “We’re finally telling our story.”

Branding junkies can learn more about the topic by checking out your April 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership; seeing Steve Fogarty’s presentation coming up September 10th; or by doing a search.

The astute Shannon Seery Gude of the company Bernard Hodes says that employers aren’t always looking in the right place for answers to that question. They’re looking at Google Alerts, perhaps. Maybe Glassdoor. But, she says, they often neglect the Indeed Forums. “Look for your company and see what’s going on in the forums.”

She suggests searching for “working for IBM” – filling in your company name for IBM.

(I also tested out the use of quotes, by putting “working for Google” in quotes to sharply limit my results. And I couldn’t resist trying a search for Hodes.)

“What we will often find is the No. 1-returned search result in Google comes from the Indeed forums,” she says. That means job-seekers are ending up on Indeed, so recruiters should, too.

The Spoke and the Wheel

“Smart Experimentation” is the motto at DaVita, whose recruiting department was recently honored by peers. The Colorado company hires nurses, social workers, dieticians, technicians, and others for its dialysis operations.

A social media research team, including three DaVita recruiters and Shaker, reviewed the Web 2.0 landscape to decide where to initially focus the company’s efforts, in addition to its corporate careers site. One topic of conversation, for example: Should MySpace be on our target list?

In February, they presented their findings to Tony Blake. As a result of the study, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube topped DaVita’s short list of social-media favorites. All 50+ recruiters have LinkedIn accounts, and an internal Spring audit showed 80% had Facebook pages.

DaVita had a Facebook careers group, but is migrating toward a better fan page, with the help of Shaker. It also uses Facebook for an internal blog, where recruiters post best practices, such as increasing followers on Twitter. Interest in that blog has been modest so far.

Although Blake and others have jumped on the Twitter wagon, it will be in Q3 when Twitter will follow Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube as the object of DaVita’s attention. What’s now DaVitaJobs will probably change to a variety of sub-divided jobs — DaVitaNursingJobs, or something like that. A number of other tactics are in the works for the rest of the year. It’ll try JobsinPods and will probably have another go at TweetMyJobs. When it posted one job there, 19 people looked into it. DaVita liked the results, but cut back when the company started charging.

This Fall, Davita will also work on a new social media plan, based on what it has learned from its “smart experiment.” Among the metrics it’ll use to judge its success: LinkedIn page views; user ratings for answers provided by DaVita recruiters on LinkedIn; Twitter followers and other recruiter-network growth; source of hire, which it’ll measure monthly; growth of Facebook fans; wall posts; and Google analytic information showing movement from social media sites to DaVita’s careers page.

Says Watson: “Our goal with the social networks and career site is to function like a spoke-and-wheel where all social sites are the spokes feeding into the center of the wheel which is our career site.”

Spreading the Word by Video

This quarter, the DaVita recruiting team will turn its attention to YouTube. Watson wants employment-branding videos made that are “really raw, the true nature of what it’s like to work there.” Perhaps, he says, the company will hold a competition where employees make their own videos showing what it’s like to work in facilities, or nursing, or other jobs.

KPMG has been at this a while. For a year and a half, interns and new hires have been putting up videos on YouTube about what it’s like to work at the company. This will be the third summer that interns can participate in a best-video contest. KPMG uses its career site to spread the best videos, and takes advantage of “campus ambassadors” who tell other students about the videos and about their internships at the company.

That’s just the tip of the social-media iceberg for KPMG, which brings in about 2,100 full-time college hires and about 1,700 interns annually.

Beyond video, other KPMG tactics include virtual career fairs, as well as one intern’s blog about the company on Jobsinthemoney.com.

Kathleen Schaum, director of the company’s campus strategy, has been at the company 20 years, the last half in HR. She says several tools developed by the company are aimed at helping candidates answer the question: “If I went to KPMG, would I be stuck in one little job my whole career?

Its employer brand (or employee value proposition; choose your jargon) is three-pronged. Candidates are told they can have three things at the company: fun; leadership opportunities; and a global career.

Recruiters can tap into an alumni network for boomerang hires. Employees and candidates each have sites to map out their career trajectories. For employees, once they map out where they want to go and have a sense of which KPMG-ers may already be doing similar work, they can use a separate mentoring tool which allows them to connect with those employees for advice.

“Didn’t Pay a Dime”

When it comes to social media, LinkedIn is a winner for Christina Ousley, a senior HR generalist in California for CO-OP Financial Services.

She recruits sales, HR, accounting, and other jobs for the company, which is involved in the electronic funds transfer business. Last year, she helped bring in about 100 people to the 250-person company. Recently, to backfill a PR manager job, she emailed targeted people who were part of her LinkedIn network. They emailed it and re-emailed it and sent it to marketing and PR groups. The result is a new employee, and, she says, “I didn’t pay a dime.”

She has also used LinkedIn to get a hold of recruiters at credit unions where she reads about layoffs. In one case, she contacted such recruiters, and ended up conducting a little outplacement session at the company. She had three really qualified people for an open job. Did she hire one? “Almost,” she says. “It would have been a great success story.”

Jeff Todd, also in California, is using LinkedIn at Berkeley. The state is so broke that it’s talking about shutting down parks, freeing prisoners, and selling off landmarks. School funds are being cut and some University of California-Berkeley employees who handle IT, publications, and fundraising, and other areas, will lose their jobs. Todd is teaching them to build LinkedIn profiles and join LinkedIn groups, as well as learn their way around Facebook.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, he’s posting articles about the school from his Twitter page, and using HootSuite to measure success. With HootSuite, he can set up a special URL to see what’s generating traffic and what’s not; politics (such as a post in which he said “UC Berkeley lab conducts stem cell research, free for the first time from restrictions lifted by Obama”) and entertainment seem to sell. The goal: to build a relationship that’ll be necessary when things turn around. “When things get hot,” he says, “the people who are going to talk to you are those you paid attention to when times were slow.” His wife would probably agree, as she recently hired someone at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who had been forwarded her job-opening post on Twitter.

“In the Future, They’ll Be There”

Brianna Foulds, who has been Tweeting using her married name BrieNadal, is the senior manager of recruiting at California Pizza Kitchen. She works on the hiring of restaurant managers in the Western U.S., oversees the corporate recruiting, and is involved in internal promotion and succession-planning initiatives.

While the chain would prefer an expanding economy, one thing that’s helping it hold up well is its thank-you card program, where repeat customers have the manager open up a card entitling them to a gift.

Anyhow, Foulds is experimenting with social media like so many others. “We’re really just trying to get on the big ones,” she says. “We’ve decided it’s best to be on a couple sites and really own them, rather than a lot and not really be effective.”

The restaurant doesn’t have a formal plan in place, but the marketing department is building a Facebook fan page (which Foulds’ department will then help keep up). It’s going to be one Facebook site for fans, whether you like your job being a hostess, or you like the Thai pasta. Meanwhile, the PR department is Tweeting about the thank-you cards mentioned earlier, as well as other topics, under the handle http://www.twitter.com/calpizzakitchen.

For office jobs like HR, “LinkedIn is a fantastic place,” Foulds says. The company isn’t finding as many restaurant manager candidates on social media as it’d hope, but “in the future, they’ll be there,” Foulds says.

John Nykolaiszyn, one of four senior corporate recruiters for Burger King Corp, is also dabbling in social-media for restaurant-industry jobs. “We want to be ahead of the competition,” he says. “We’re quietly using Twitter. We’re using LinkedIn. We’re exploring search engine optimization and search engine marketing to promote our brand.” That brand has four parts to it; “Bold, Accountable, Empowered, and Fun.”

Right now, the modest steps are getting good buzz. A June 9 list of top Twittering recruiters (say that 10 times fast) included BK, as well as the line: “This list is almost as interesting for who’s NOT on it at this point. We have Burger King, but not McDonald’s.”

“People Are Terrified”

Matt Alder is the director of product strategy for Barkers, the largest recruitment communications agency in the UK. He’s helping clients manage their employer brands online, which involves, he says, two things. The first is getting the message out about their companies, whether through videos, Twitter, or something else. The second is monitoring what people are saying about them.

Privacy, he says, is a bigger issue across the Pond than in the U.S. As mentioned before, it’s easy to be uneasy about what you find on social media sites.

“People have a real potential problem with people looking up on Facebook and things like that. Facebook is still considered quite private. The press over here jump on every single invasion of privacy that social media throws up.”

Advertising on Facebook, he says, is fine. But researching candidates: not as much. “There are fewer employer Facebook fan pages in the UK at the moment. LinkedIn and Twitter seem to be something companies are comfortable with. But who can see what they’re doing on Facebook — people are terrified about that in the UK. Facebook has had massive, massive growth year over year and people are very keen to share … but with family and friends.”

Christina Ousely, from CO-OP Financial Services, is using Facebook “for personal use, but I haven’t really tapped into it (for recruiting). I’m hesitant to add people to my page, because it has pictures of my daughter, stuff like that.”

These are challenges at Berkeley, too, according to Jeff Todd, the fellow mentioned earlier who’s helping with outplacement and testing out Twitter there. The university is still trying to figure out who should be looking up what on social media sites: Should it be HR? Search committees? Someone else? Todd says there are innumerable issues that arise when viewing a Facebook profile and finding out a person’s religion, politics, and appearance. The problem, he says, isn’t just about rejecting someone because of what you learned about them – something that hopefully won’t happen much. It’s that once you take a look at their profile, there could be the perception that you rejected them for that reason.

Foulds, from CPK, occasionally posts a job on her personal Facebook page, or otherwise receives an careers inquiry there. But, she tells candidates: “I try and keep Facebook a little more personal, for friends and family. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.”

“Loaded Up on Tweets”

Managing all this social media is also a challenge.

Christina Ousley has a close relationship with CO-OP’s marketing department, and is talking to the marketers about the best way to send out jobs via Twitter in the future. For now, if she wants to Tweet jobs out, she’ll do it by hand, not RSS.

She’s still using Monster, for entry-level positions in particular. Ousley’s “trying to find the manpower” for Twitter and other social media.

Mainly, she’s using Twitter to find good articles about best practices, and network with corporate recruiters who are also using it. But, she says, “As the only recruiter, it’s hard for me to sit there and Tweet all day (something she says often goes on with independent recruiters). I’m not a beginner with Twitter. I think I know more than a lot of people out there. But it’s time-consuming. I am glad I work really fast. I’m glad I can multitask. My cell phone is loaded up on tweets. Some people just Tweet all the time.”

Similarly, CPK’s Brianna Foulds (who also likes the restaurant community Fohboh as well as the Talent Revolution site) is using Twitter to learn about best practices in recruiting. “The thing I found that is absolutely wonderful about Twitter,” she says, “is the networking with others, sharing best practices and information. There’s a huge presence of professionals. I try to go in a couple of times a day and read Tweets, and try some re-Tweeting of my own. It’s adding on to my normal, typically busy day. Some days I just don’t find the time.”

But unlike every one of those tens of thousands, the newly minted MBA from Boston College took the unconventional step of running a job-wanted ad on Facebook.

“You know that old saying,” he wrote us explaining why, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich? I think the same thing goes for marketing: ‘If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.’”

So that’s just what this marketer did. His target is Microsoft; the work is entertainment, and; the results? Well, no job yet, but a boatload of contacts, lots of buzz, and offers of help from people like Glenn Gutmacher of Arbita and JobMachine. “Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful,” Barker says.

Before we get into our Q & A, you should know that Barker himself is a bit unconventional and certainly no amateur. His undergraduate degree is in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA in entertainment production from UCLA before working in Hollywood for 12 years as an independent screenwriter and media developer whose deals made it into Variety on occasion.

And a note of caution: Be nice to Eric should you meet him. His LinkedIn profile mentions that he’s a mixed martial arts/Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner who has trained with champions.

ERE: How long have you been looking? Are you currently employed? What’s your specialty or type of job?

Eric: I just graduated MBA school (May 18), believe it or not. My background is in media and entertainment — it’s all I’ve ever done. From writing screenplays for Disney and Fox to transitioning Spiderman creator Stan Lee’s superheroes to the web to marketing the Wii for Nintendo, helping companies bring people great entertainment has been my thing. Now that I’ve completed my MBA, my focus is product marketing/product development for companies involved in the media and entertainment space.

ERE: What made you decide to buy an ad?
Eric: I thought it would be unconventional and innovative. I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin’s work. The old model of marketing is changing. It’s trickier to reach people and to reach people effectively. I took this to heart not just in my marketing work, but in how I market myself. You know that old saying, “If your stock broker knows so much, how come he isn’t rich?” I think the same thing goes for marketing: “If that marketer is so good, he’d better be able to market himself.”

ERE: Why did you pick Facebook for the ad?
Eric: Facebook was the perfect place for me to put my ad. It gets enormous traffic, it’s inexpensive, allows you to precisely target your advertising, and provides you with solid metrics with which to track your efforts. Plus I think people enjoy going there, spend a lot of time there, and are in a good mood while they’re on the site. And most importantly: nobody else was doing what I was doing. That was key.

ERE: What is it costing you?
Eric: No more than $10 a day. Usually under five. I can control my bid price and set a cap on my daily spend. Starbucks puts a bigger dent in my wallet than promoting myself online does.

ERE: What kind of response have you gotten?
Eric: Considering this was just a little experiment in unconventional job hunting that cost about a half hour of my time and less than $50, it’s been insanely successful. My ad got tens of thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks and more than 20 people contacted me with offers of assistance. More than that, the quality of the interactions is very high — people were impressed with the concept.

ERE: Had any solid bites? Interviews?
Eric: No interviews just yet but plenty of solid interaction, lots of buzz, and most importantly, I’m making good contacts.

ERE: Do you have a sense as to whether this approach might work for others? Why do you think so or think not, as the case may be?
Eric: I think this could definitely work for others. The market could quickly get saturated, of course, but given proper targeting this is a good way to reach the right people cheaply and passively — to work on job-hunting even when you’re sleeping. But past the method itself, you need to have something to offer. In the end, it’s all about the value proposition. But if you’ve legitimately got something that the company needs, this can be a great way to reach the right people with minimal effort and expense.

ERE: What other approaches have you tried to finding a job?
Eric: You want me to reveal ALL my tricks?

ERE: Is this something you would or will do again?
Eric: Now that this method is getting exposure, a lot of people may start doing it and it won’t be quite as innovative. I’ll just find another unconventional way to reach employers — but if my personal marketing keeps going this well, hopefully, I won’t need to. :)

That’s the takeaway from the Employer Brand Institute’s Global Research Study of more than 2,000 companies.

Engaging the CEO and senior management in the benefits of employer branding also ranks highly. Surprisingly, conducting internal and external market research ranked the lowest in importance, suggesting companies are rushing into employer branding without a clear direction of where they are heading.

The results of the global study should be a concern for CEOs where money invested in employer branding initiatives may be misdirected and/or misaligned with the business strategy. Most companies are in the early stages of developing an employer brand strategy that builds competitive advantage (globally only 16% have a clearly defined strategy), so the survey results provide some important guidance for leaders to ensure their investments are focused on priority areas.

Figure 1: How important are the following to you in achieving your employer branding objectives? (rank in order from 1 to 7 (1=least important, 7 equals most important)

The survey also found while 31% have a strategy, it can be developed further. Importantly, 37% of companies have already begun work on developing their employer brand strategy. A small percentage of respondents (13%) said their company does not have an employer branding strategy (see Figure 2). These companies may be in the early stages of developing a business case for investment or the department responsible for managing the employer brand may be having difficulty engaging the CEO and senior managers to allocate resources toward the strategy.

Figure 2: Has your company developed a clear employer branding strategy?

Getting it Right the First Time

We suggest six key areas to focus on to ensure you develop an employer brand strategy that will assist you achieve your program objectives.

Determine how employer branding is viewed inside your company
You should define what employer branding means to your company.

Your employer brand is “the image of your organization as a ‘great place to work’ in the mind of current employees and key stakeholders in the external market (active and passive candidates, clients, customers, and other key stakeholders).” Employer branding is therefore concerned with the attraction, engagement, and retention initiatives targeted at enhancing your company’s employer brand.

If you take too narrow a focus on employer branding, it is likely to end up as a departmental project that’s not aligned with the overall business strategy. For example, if you believe employer branding is only about recruitment, it is likely your organization will have already closed up shop on employer branding as a result of the economic downturn while competitors who understand the concept are continuing to invest resources as part of a long-term employer branding strategy to attract and retain talent.

Define employer brand objectives and project scope
Defining your objectives up front will save you time and money in the long run and keep your program on time and on budget. Companies have different lifecycle stages and therefore will have different objectives at various stages. Your objectives may be related to the whole employer brand program or a specific employer brand project (e.g. establishing an alumni program or employee referral program). Your objectives may include integrating the cultures of two companies during a merger, decreasing staff turnover rates, increasing volume of hires for a summer recruiting campaign, improving candidate quality, or reviewing and updating your career website to appeal to graduates.

The relationship between HR, marketing, and communications
Ownership of the employer brand strategy is often a gray area that should be clearly defined so all key stakeholders achieve consensus and are united in the objectives. To obtain both budget and buy-in, human resources often has to drive employer branding through internal education and awareness building.

While some level of oversight or standards adherence is natural and may vary depending on the organization, the employer brand is a long-term, strategic talent management endeavor. The strategy and messaging are designed to attract/engage/retain talent, which clearly sets up a strong case for collaboration between human resources, marketing, and communications (e.g. marketing/communications can offer some compelling strategic support such as website analytics and target-market segmentation).

In instances where there is a lack of collaboration, power struggles ensue, projects can be delayed, and creativity/strategy minimized to the detriment of the outcome.

Discovering your employer brand
The key to developing your employer brand strategy is to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the organizational culture, work experience, key talent drivers (engagement factors), external perceptions, leadership vision, and management practices. Operating from this position of intelligence supports the construct of a message platform that is authentic, compelling, differentiated, and that will be internally embraced, appropriately received in the external market and consistently delivered upon by the organization.

This can be supported through quantitative research (e.g. survey mechanisms) and qualitative research (e.g. focus groups, leadership interviews, roundtable meetings). It’s also an ideal phase to do some competitive intelligence gathering and benchmark against available insights. In this era of increasing transparency, the organization’s external reputation can be considered through both external focus groups and/or some level of online reputation audit to determine ‘what is being said’ about the organization via web channels (blogs, social networks, and corporate rating sites such as JobVent).

CEO and senior management engagement
It pays to have conversations about your employer brand with the CEO and senior managers in the early stages of developing your strategy. The Employer Brand Institute’s global survey found engaging with these key stakeholders is very important in achieving employer branding objectives (see figure 1) and could be conducted using a roundtable forum on employer branding. Areas for discussion could include:

1. How will a stronger employer brand support our business strategy — M&A’s, growth, consolidation?
2. What kind of culture do we have? How consistent is it across geographical and divisional boundaries?
3. What behaviors are felt to be most characteristic of the organization? What are the moments of truth when your organization is at its best (and worse?)
4. What is the most useful way of segmenting the employee population in terms of their cultural characteristics and distinctive needs?
5. How consistent are the messages we are communicating internally and externally about our organization as a place to work? How do we inform our vendors?
6. What are the most effective channels of employee communication, both top-down and bottom-up?
7. Which positions are most critical to our success and what are we currently doing/need to do to attract, engage, and retain them?

Communications planning
There is a plethora of offline and online media channels available to communicate your employer value proposition to your target audience, including web, print, social networks, events, PR, alumni events, etc. The rate of growth of these channels can be mind-boggling and while their use may not fit the stereotype of a conservative company that has been around for 100 years, it pays to test these sites for benefits or risk losing ground to your competitors. Who would have thought three years ago a micro-blogging platform where only 140 characters can be used in communicating a message would be used successfully by companies such as Zappos (the CEO has over 590,000 followers!) to communicate with their target audience. Taking a strategic approach toward your employer brand will ensure your team is able to assess these innovations as they appear while maintaining focus on the longer-term objectives.

The key is to test and trial these channels and arrive at a communications strategy that provides maximum impact and efficiency for minimum investment. There is no point building a presence on Facebook if you don’t allocate the resources to respond to messages from the community that has joined your fan base!

Companies like Standard Chartered Bank and Phillips ensure a consistent brand is communicated globally through recruitment communications with changes for local nuances such as language. This not only ensures clarity in brand positioning; it saves on design costs and increases campaign speed to market.

Have a solid understanding of cultural diversity in communicating your brand to your target audience. Just because the messages were tried, tested, and validate by your U.S. workforce doesn’t mean you’ll get the same level of buy-in when suggesting to regional offices they use the same set of communication collateral. Your own workforce can be helpful in determining what works best in their region and the assistance from a local vendor may also add value.

Some final thoughts

In the absence of a clearly defined strategy your employer brand strategy is likely to fall flat. Taking a strategic approach to your employer brand program is likely to result in CEO/senior management engagement and allocation of the resources required to effectively build competitive advantage like companies such as Google, PwC, and McKinsey & Co have consistently achieved over time and that regularly rank highly as ‘best places to work.’

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

(Click here to read part one.)

Category V: Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young

In a conservative industry and in a segment of recruiting that offers little innovation, Ernst & Young has led the way for several years in a row. It has been ranked #1 on the BusinessWeek “Best Places to Launch a Career” list and has an astonishing 90% conversion rate for interns.

Some best practices include:

• Executive involvement. It convinced over 1,500 client-serving partners to take time away from their busy schedules to service selected schools, just as it services clients. Even Board members visit a select number of assigned schools each year. Each business unit has specific goals and is held accountable for successful college recruiting.
• A pipeline approach. It provides leadership development programs for freshmen and sophomore students, both to increase the supply talent later on and enable early identification of potential candidates.
• Resources. Ernst & Young maintained a staff of 75 dedicated college recruiters, and holds an annual 1,800 person, 4-day leadership conference to develop its interns.
• Competition. Sponsors “Your World, Your Vision,” a student competition where students design an initiative that benefits their local community. Winning schools were awarded funding to make their initiative a reality.
• Technology. Uses nearly every technology approach to recruiting and employer branding, including the use of a dedicated Facebook page to service students and to build its brand.

Notable college recruiting features at other companies:

• Qualcomm. Funds labs and faculty research projects on targeted campuses. Also has an on-campus ambassador program.
• Genentech. Uses a Customer Relationship Management system to capture information on targeted candidates early in their campus career in order to enable relationship-building throughout their college lifecycle.
• Microsoft. Uses a five-year quality-of-hire study to make the business case and to prove the positive ROI of college recruiting. This research justified maintaining budget allocation levels, regardless of the state of the economy.
• Aricent. Focuses efforts on specific student streams (versus on entire campuses). In addition, hiring managers and the employment brand manager conduct postmortems in order to troubleshoot failures.
• MillerCoors. Uses real-world management projects sponsored by individual managers as the primary focus for its summer internship programs (i.e., project-based consulting).

Category VI: The Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo

As we all know, Yahoo has been undergoing turmoil in recent years, so it’s particularly amazing that despite the turmoil, coupled with the economic downturn, its HR team put together an amazing Web 2.0 rebuilding effort. The result of this transformation? A career site that went from being ranked as one of the worst sites (on the prestigious CareerXroads ranking) to one of the best sites, all in a short period. The redesign tripled the amount of content consumed by its visitors, which led to increased conversion rates.

The website has some notable features, including:

• Technology everywhere. Not all career websites at technology firms use the wide range of technologies available from the Yahoo site. It offers numerous interesting videos, including “a day in Yahoo life” and “the spirit of Yahoo.” It also provides access to what your employees are saying on Twitter, a company blog, and employee profiles. It also enables visitors to other websites like Twitter and Facebook to post Yahoo’s jobs that might be of interest to their network.
• Awards. Visiting this site makes the viewer immediately aware that Yahoo is an award-winning company. The site highlights Yahoo’s outstanding record of appearing on Fortune’s Best Place to Work List.
• Integrating products. Many career websites seem to operate independently of the firm they represent. Yahoo has made a concerted effort to integrate its wide range of products into the career site and vice versa. This includes providing numerous pictures highlighting the Yahoo experience on its photo and video sharing website, Flickr, and the opportunity to join “Yahoo! Groups” related to recruiting. Other integrated features include maps, my Yahoo personalization, and Del.icio.us. (social bookmarking).
• A combined approach. In addition to its use of the Web, Yahoo also uses other effective recruiting media, including radio and billboards, to push traffic to the new site.

Notable features on other corporate careers websites:

• Microsoft. An award-winner in several other categories, it developed several websites that enable the company to microbrand to smaller, more defined candidate populations. Sites include view, the genius lounge, and youatmicrosoft.com.
• DaVita. Provides a narrated video tour of a DaVita facility.
• IBM. Has extensive ecofriendly messaging, extremely interactive use of multimedia, and very simple navigation. The site is one of the few that can realistically be classified as “global.” It contains “day in the life” videos, Digg, live chat, business-unit specific information, and flash video.

In the remaining two categories, the winners are next-practice innovators; someday, everyone will seek to emulate these practices.

Category VII: Most Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft

Each year, technology becomes a more impactful part of recruiting. No one seems to realize that fact more than the talent management team at Microsoft. Its website, and the numerous innovative things they’re doing with technology, can only be classified as amazing (especially the talent community work pioneered by Marvin Smith).

To the uninitiated, the power of these tools might take some time to appreciate, but I assure you, they are on the leading edge, even ahead of famous competitors like Google:

• Micro-segmentation of talent communities. This represents the future of recruiting, and no one else even comes close to what Microsoft is currently doing, no less what it is planning. Micro-segmentation is a powerful concept borrowed from advertising and marketing. Micro-segmentation means that instead of treating every potential customer or candidate exactly the same, you tailor messaging and the candidate experience to meet the unique needs of a more defined market segment. Firms currently make elementary attempts to segment in college recruiting, but this new approach breaks candidates into smaller segments known as “talent communities.” Microsoft defines talent communities as “targeted, qualified, active & passive prospects that Microsoft… staffing can develop into a self-sustaining source of engaged talent that will be harvested for years to come.” The information needed to make a job decision for an electrical engineer would be different from a software engineer; both would differ significantly from the needs and interests of a sales professional. Delivering messaging unique to the population you are going after and tailoring the experience they get is microbranding. While some companies may segment by function or region, Microsoft’s new approach enables segmentation on steroids, producing hundreds of segments that could be as narrowly defined as a job family or as wide as a certain diversity classification in a certain demographic region. The talent communities are enabled by software that includes CRM, content management, talent profiling, and job-matching components. The concept and its execution were so compelling that the initial pilot program for a Microsoft hardware engineering unit was paid for by hiring managers.
• Knowledge sharing. The Microsoft talent community approach is broader than just filling jobs. It includes finding ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they don’t take your job. It moves away from the more traditional transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting with networking and knowledge sharing components. The design is based on the Chinese principle of Guanxi, which is a connectivity or relationship-building concept. Over time, it is assumed that the talent communities will become working professionals “virtual 3rd place” to hang out. Over time, they will become self-maintaining. Despite this multi-purpose, employment opportunities are always only one click away thanks to widgets running on both their LinkedIn and Facebook pages.
• Real messages. One of the most common errors in recruiting is “perfect messaging.” Most websites and employer branding messages are so “flawless” and generic that they are simply dismissed by candidates as propaganda. Microsoft is one of the leaders in providing “real messages,” or messages that agree that everything isn’t perfect and counter why that is a bad thing. Such messaging is considered significantly more credible.
• Shareability. Most of the website content blocks are shareable, meaning that visitors can share content they find of value with a broader audience through the use of popular social networking tools like Facebook and Digg.
• Compelling website. The award-winning View concept www.viewmyworld.com is not one website, but rather a network of sites that enable unique messaging to micro-candidate segments. The average visit on the website is 26 minutes, an astonishing amount of time. Its messages and videos are some of the most exciting and compelling online. They make it easy to “feel the passion” and the excitement of those working at Microsoft. Diverse candidates can also explore their likely experience via www.YouAtMicrosoft.com.
• Many options. All sites leverage the latest in social networking, RSS feeds, Multi-media (video) and employee blogs (Microsoft was one of the first innovators in recruiting blogs). Even Microsoft’s talent communities will include both virtual and live events.
• Connected. The sites contain links to non-Microsoft-owned pages that talk about Microsoft. (Microsoft censors this content, so it is perceived as being much more credible.)
• Quality-of-hire metrics. Microsoft is beginning to use quality-of-hire metrics to assess the effectiveness of its recruiting programs.

Notable features at other companies using technology:

• Dun & Bradstreet. Uses workflow modeling software to identify delays in recruiting cycle/process.
• Firstsource Solutions. Uses short message service (SMS) to support candidates throughout the hiring process.
• Fluor. Uses live webcasts featuring executives to attract talent. They also offer in another feature that is becoming more common, live chat sessions with recruiters.
• Foster’s Group. Made its process paperless. Candidates get offer electronically via a secured website. Candidates are informed of their status following each stage of the process via SMS text messaging.

Category VIII. Recruiting Department of the Year — DaVita

This final category covers overall excellence by the recruiting department. After judging its application, I can only classify it as a “WOW.” Not only were DaVita’s actions amazing, when you consider that it is a leading kidney dialysis provider and part of the ultraconservative healthcare industry, you can’t help but be blown away. The DaVita story is one that truly demonstrates what focusing on talent can do for an organization.

Just nine years ago, DaVita was on the verge of bankruptcy. At that time, its CEO focused on refining the talent in the organization, not just at the leadership level but throughout the enterprise. Despite tough times and hardship, it took aggressive actions that characterize a true “war for talent,” and turned the organization into a wildly successful enterprise. The work of Tony Blake and his team can only be classified as spectacular.

Highlights of DaVita’s accomplishments:

• Business case. The biggest difference between well-supported and underfunded recruiting functions is the ability to quantify in dollars the business impact of talent management. For example, DaVita demonstrated that by cutting vacancy time down from 63 to 45 days, it could save the organization over $5 million in contract labor and overtime costs. It also reduced costs by cutting external recruiting fees by 41%, saving another $3 million. It’s hard not to be a hero when you can demonstrate that you saved the firm over $8 million. Last year alone it filled over 3,200 nursing positions.
• Boldness. Few recruiters can be accurately classified as competitive and bold, but the DaVita team is an exception. The team labels its competitor-recruiting approach as a “targeted strike.” Last year, it executed a targeted strike on a competitor that resulted in 113 experienced clinical hires, $2.8M savings in training costs, and took 7% of its competitor’s workforce. Whether you agree with the approach or not, you have to give them credit for aggressiveness, and accept that its patients will always have access to the best care because little will stand in the way of acquiring top talent.
• Position prioritization. Another difference between great and good recruiting functions is having a formal process for identifying which jobs should get a disproportionate amount of recruiting resources. It realizes that not all jobs have an equal business impact, so it doesn’t recruit the same way with the same amount and quality of recruiting resources.
• Recruiter development. Of the 40 teammates in clinical recruiting roles, eight of them were promoted last year — demonstrating that it is constantly increasing bench strength and growing its our own recruiting talent. In addition, it keeps its requisition loads low. Field recruiters only carry about 25 openings at a time, on average, down from 60 in 2006.
• Vacancy rate. Its excellent recruiting strategy and approach has resulted in an amazingly low 3.8% vacancy rate among the nursing staff.
• Secret shoppers. It is one of only two firms that I have found with the courage to use secret shoppers to go through its recruiting process in order to find errors. The team secret shops its own process twice a year, evaluating the process at competitors at the same time.
• Satisfaction. Few have the courage to measure it, but DaVita measures hiring manager and new-hire satisfaction every quarter. Departmental satisfaction ratings by managers improved from the bottom five to the Top 25 (among 70 departments) within two years.
• Employer referrals. It operates an excellent employee referral program, which demonstrated that referrals have a 200% lower turnover rate than other new hires. It also donates a portion of the referral bonus to a local charity, which increases the number of motivators available to encourage employees to make referrals.
• Awards. DaVita won a Taleo innovation award for its automated survey process.
• Military recruiting. A dedicated military recruiter hired 27 diverse, retired leaders from the armed forces to assume director and manager positions within DaVita.
• Recruiter assessment. The formal process for assessing recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as dismal. In direct contrast, DaVita takes an aggressive approach in assessing and improving its recruiters. It uses a monthly scorecard that actually force-ranks recruiters, a one-in-a-million approach.
• A pipeline approach. It uses a continuous recruiting pipeline approach called “relentless recruiting.” It’s much superior to the “reactive” approach used by most firms.
• Boomerangs. DaVita targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their careers.

Notable features at other companies:

• GE Healthcare. Uses Six Sigma methodology to “model” its recruiting processes and identify breaking points; leveraged technology to automate sourcing (i.e., stored boolean strings); and conducts weekly process audits.
• Microsoft. In addition to the other things highlighted already, it is developing a sophisticated workforce-planning model.
• Seagate Technology. The company significantly shortened onboarding from three days to 2.5 hours. In addition, the team now measures quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted in this article have clearly pushed the envelope in recruiting and talent management. Despite tough economic times, they have focused on the “big 6″ elements of strategic recruiting (technology-centered, a dollar-focused business case, an emphasis on referrals, prioritized recruiting, a focus on employer branding, and a continuous pipeline approach).

If you’re still focusing on transactions and cutting costs, you are way behind the curve. It is highly unlikely you will be adequately prepared to “explode out of the box” when the current economic downturn subsides.

As embarrassed as I was to hear that then, my accusers were right! I had dropped the ball and not gotten back to them. What I had not realized (even though I had experienced the same thing during my own period of being laid off), was that during recessionary times, everything we do as recruiters gets magnified.

As a result, to me, times of difficulty do put us under a microscope in which perceptions are skewed. However, so too do they present great opportunities to build even better relationships with candidates and third party search providers, to sharpen our skills and give ourselves greater tools as recruiters, and to further enable us to be unique professionals who stand out from the pack.

But to begin, let’s be clear: It’s an ugly world out there. Your company may have gone through layoffs and decimated its recruiting department. And now you’re the one that’s left — and you still have to fill requisitions and hire people.

On top of all that, for many roles you need to fill (such as in sales, operations, and general management), it can be harder to attract “in-place” people during difficult times than in good times.

Thus for starters, challenging economic times require a greater focus on candidate management. With so many people looking for work and resumes coming in at a much faster rate, there are simply more candidates to manage. Thus it’s easier for recruiters who are usually very good at this to drop the ball (and for those who usually don’t do so well to begin with, it’s doubly worse). And, as mentioned above, since as a rule people magnify their experience during difficult times, any slip-up will be judged much more harshly during a downturn than when things are good.

But the converse is also true (which is why this is a great opportunity for relationship building): Those with whom you followed up and treated well will never forget how you stood out from the rest of the pack of potential employers who never called them back.

And remember, since the way you act reflects your employer brand, how people are treated during this time makes or breaks your employer brand!

Thus for all candidates who have submitted a resume for a role, an email should immediately be sent as a common courtesy. This can be automated through an applicant tracking system.

However, for those who have come in for an interview but did not get an offer, they should be followed up with personally. Sending an email in this instance is not only bad form; it’s cowardly. Emails are a one-way form of communication that provide no interaction, can be passed onto others and, importantly, don’t allow you to develop a broader relationship with candidates overall.

For these candidates, prioritize which candidates to contact first and then set aside time to make the calls. Block out time at the end of the day, at 5:00. Since it’s later in the day, you may have to leave a message. But if you do so, don’t leave the reason you’re calling on their voice mail (it’s the same as sending an email). Rather leave a message saying simply to call you back. Then once you do get them on the phone, be straightforward and genuine (although I’ll comment in a later column on what to say during that call).

To review, here are some reminders for candidate follow-through:

1. Prioritize which candidates to call first
2. Set aside time to make the calls
3. Don’t send a letter or email
4. If you have to leave a message, don’t say why you’re calling
5. Once you talk to them, be straightforward and genuine
6. Network with them for the future
7. Don’t worry about the legal issues of turning them down in on the phone

Recruiting during this time also forces you to hone and sharpen your skills. For instance, with active candidates, economic downturns require more investigation skills and a greater focus on candidate evaluation. Simply because someone is laid off doesn’t mean they are a bad candidate. However, it does require greater investigation to insure that there aren’t performance issues.

And, as mentioned, “passive” candidates can be harder to recruit than in good times. Actively recruiting someone in a sitting position from a competitor is harder because there has to be a compelling reason for them to take your call. In addition to likely being overwhelmed (since they’re the people doing all the work), passive candidates will be a lot more risk-averse. Thus they will have less patience for your inquiry and will need to know a lot of information up front (this doesn’t just apply to senior executives, but to lower-level employees as well).

For instance, a passive candidate will likely want to know on the first call the risks, rewards, and the reasons they should consider making a move. They will definitely have a “show-me-the-money” attitude. This requires that you talk to your hiring managers ahead of time about a range of issues, including compensation, severance, relocation, change in control and layoffs, and have many “tools” in your toolbox, before making the call. And when you make the call, be legitimately open and empathetic with candidates, and to hear their concerns.

Candidate relocation, in particular, is a hard issue to deal with during this time, but again with every challenge comes the opportunity to think out of the box and have more tools at your disposal for the future.

Companies need to be prepared to pay more than they normally would for relocation. A candidate will typically not want to take a financial hit on their house and will need to “made whole.” Some companies will guarantee a buyout of a house at its appraised value (and some will even offer more than the appraised value). Another option is a company can provide rental assistance for a candidate’s current home (helping them find a renter), while the candidate looks for a buyer, and if they can’t sell it in six months the company will buy it. And there are many variations for how to deal with this issue. The key here is to be open-minded and come up with creative solutions. Work with internal or external relocation experts to come up with options and then educate senior leadership on this issue.

Lastly, these challenging times enable you to deepen and improve your relationships with third-party recruiting partners. Let’s face it: we can’t do everything ourselves. There’s no reason you can’t leverage your relationships with outside recruiters for help in ways you hadn’t before considered. And because they’re hurting too, many outside recruiters will likely be more flexible in partnering with you.

For instance, many search firms will be more open to unbundling their services and perhaps discounting as well. But the key is to reach out to them and figure out a way to work together. And, as with candidates, outside recruiters too will remember which companies reached out to them to try to find a way to work together during these challenging times, and which never returned their call.

Thus these challenging times are, in fact, opportunities for you to build your skills and relationships as a recruiter, which will enable you to continue to stand out from the pack, add value to your organization, and have greater tools at your disposal for when the tide turns and the good times once again roll!

The New York City school system, a 2009 ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards finalist, is doing something about it. The department of education, which has to hire 4,000-7,000 teachers every year, or about 7% of its workforce, wasn’t happy with the quality of the teachers it was recruiting. It redid its brand to try to attract passive candidates who are high achieving, intellectually curious, and highly motivated.

It came up with an “I Teach NYC, Because it Teaches Me” motto to use on its website and elsewhere. The “elsewhere” includes a Twitter profile, a wiki for teachers and applicants, and a Facebook fan page launched June 2008. That Facebook page exceeded 3,000 page views per week during the peak time at the end of August 2008.

With the Ad Council, it also made videos — like the one I embedded below that made me wish my math and music classes in school were a lot more fun.

After about months of the branding initiative, it’s a tad too early to judge the quality of hire being generated. What we do know is that about half of the school system’s Facebook fans are over 25. These are folks who have work experience, and are exactly who the system’s trying to attract.

Claire Prager of the Cheesecake Factory describes the making of this $30,000, four-minute video developed and produced in two months last year as “pretty painless” — which is not how I’d describe trying to finish off its entire dinner-size Thai Chicken Pasta.

Job seekers are viewing the video at a rate of about 40,000 per year. Their eyes are peeled for an average of 3:48 minutes. (The average for similar videos is 2:33.)

Prager, senior manager, talent selection, was responsible for the overall execution of the video, a task she says MadDash’s good work made easier. The video, aimed particularly at the passive job seeker, was posted on Monster, CareerBuilder, AHRE.org, and HCareers. The Cheesecake Factory shows it again during new-hire orientation (which, we report with jealousy, involves a meal at the Cheesecake Factory), as well as at college career fairs and other job fairs, and on the company’s careers site.

The Cheesecake Factory selected an Area Director, Senior Vice President of Kitchen Operations, Executive Kitchen Manager, and General Manager to play key roles in telling the story. While developing the video, it selected the following elements to include:

1. Who is The Cheesecake Factory?
2. Quality
3. Our People and Our Culture
4. Technology and Innovation.

The uber-consistent restaurant chain also owns the Grand Lux Cafe and now RockSugar.

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.

By now, everyone’s most likely heard of the impending Employee Freedom of Choice Act that will make unionization significantly easier.

As a recruiting professional, have you contemplated what role recruiting can play in maintaining a “union-free” environment at your organization?

Think about it! What better way to ensure that an organization will remain union-free than changing the recruiting, branding, and hiring process so that your organization is more likely to attract new hires who naturally (without any direct influence from management) wouldn’t want to join a union?

Hiring For Tendencies Is a Common Practice

It is common to design recruiting and hiring processes to select individuals with certain mindsets or behavioral tendencies.

Southwest Airlines, for example, has been written up in numerous books and articles for how they successfully attract and hire individuals who naturally behave and act in a certain way. In the case of Southwest, its hiring process targets candidates who naturally put the needs of the individual customer before their own.

Southwest is not alone. A range of organizations, from the FBI to Disney and Google, have all designed recruiting processes that identify and hire individuals prone to certain behaviors and actions. So why not adapt that recruiting concept to focus on individuals who prefer an independent work environment?

The Time to Act Is Now

Now is the opportune time to act before union-related publicity increases to the point where the spotlight is continually on any union-avoidance activities and while most recruiting functions are facing a reduced hiring load.

Rarely do recruiting leaders have as much time as they have now to strategize and to reengineer their processes.

The goal is to redesign your recruiting and hiring processes in order to improve the chances of attracting and hiring individuals who, when given a choice, have a higher probability of selecting independence over “big brother” group action (i.e., unionization).

Don’t Have A Cow

Upfront, you need to realize that it’s ok for management to resist unionization. Most firms rely primarily on the “traditional approach” which focuses heavily on anti-union propaganda campaigns among existing workers.

However, there’s no reason why that approach can’t be supplemented by an effective recruiting campaign that proactively acts “on the front end” before workers are even hired.

Now, I’m not suggesting even for a minute that you go out and purposely hire only “union hating” new employees, because that actually would be illegal.

What I am suggesting is that recruiting can make a major contribution in maintaining your workforce’s flexibility and competitiveness by revising your firm’s employment processes so that they now include elements that “naturally” attract more independent-thinking workers.

Incidentally, I started my working career as a card-carrying union member and now as a professor, am currently represented by a union, so don’t automatically assume that I don’t understand the value unions can provide.

However, I would remind you that as an HR employee, if your executives choose to go down the “maintain a non-union environment road,” it’s your responsibility to make sure that recruiting makes a substantial contribution to that effort.

Start With Market Research

After getting management’s approval for the overall concept and strategy, identify the types of personalities, demographic groups, and regional locations where you’re likely to find a large percentage of “independent thinkers.”

Work with psychologists, sociologists, and market researchers in order to identify the types of individuals and the “traits” that are common among independent thinkers. After you better understand what it takes to excite and attract them, refocus your recruiting process and materials.

Refocus Your Employment Brand

The next step is to shift your “employment brand message” so that it better highlights the elements of working at your firm that would get the attention of your target candidates. That could include emphasizing the fact that your firm excels in flexibility and allowing your employees to make independent decisions.

In reverse, remember that an over emphasis on security, seniority, and great benefits in your branding campaign might actually attract individuals that prefer a unionized environment, where those features are often heralded.

But branding your organization with characteristics you cannot possibly deliver and have no intention of attempting to deliver will do more harm than good.

If you want to remain union-free and the employer attributes most likely to attract and retain a workforce committed to that status are not attributes that characterize your organization, you may just need to change!

Recruitment Advertising

Work with your recruitment advertising agency and vendors to see if they can help you in repositioning your recruiting collateral so that it focuses on attracting the type of individuals that you are now targeting.

The content of your ads, positioning of your ads, and your position descriptions as well might also have to be modified so that they better attract a more desirable target audience. A little research can help you find out whether you are more likely to find a higher percentage of your target candidates in specific demographic groups, age groups, geographic regions, etc.

Screening Processes

Tread lightly in this area, because you don’t ever want to directly confront the issue of whether applicants are pro-union. All you can reasonably expect to accomplish in the assessment area is to “screen in” a larger percentage of individuals who have characteristics and traits that make them both great workers and a preference for remaining independent.

There are, of course, numerous vendors that specialize in hiring for “fit,” so work with them to see if they have valid and legal ways to target your “assessment” toward traits that are shared both by excellent workers and by individuals with independent leanings.

One of the biggest complaints unionized labor voices about being in a union is that negotiated work standards and seniority-based pay systems are not fair. Focusing your assessment efforts to identify individuals who have historically been frustrated with organizations that define equitable as equal could be a good start. Of course, only if your organization doesn’t do that as well.

Other Employment-Related Approaches

Here are additional actions to consider:

• Increase the percentage of your workforce classified as contingent workers. Not only are contractors easier to release, working with them for a period of time makes it easier to assess whether they “fit” your independent-minded profile before you act to convert them.
• Re-design your employee referral program so that it educates your workforce about the types of behaviors and personalities that you’re now targeting.
• Begin targeting your recruiting at specific firms that are known for attracting and retaining employees that have a long history of independence.
• Work with consulting and law firms that specialize in maintaining a “union-free environment” to better understand best practices and what other approaches may be acceptable under the law.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re facing unionization efforts or not, focus your recruiting efforts on these independent-minded workers because the traits they possess might by themselves be valuable to the business. Their willingness to try new things and to innovate is likely to be higher than many recruits.

If you’re going to act, now’s the time, before labor laws and policies change to make it more difficult to use recruiting as another “union-free environment” maintenance tool. If you are looking for an opportunity to act strategically and outside the box, this is it.

This is not up for discussion. We sometimes dance around the premise, but recruiting is essentially the selling of a company on a candidate and a candidate on a company. Those who choose not to engage in selling can pretend to be noble, but they’re doing a disservice to their clients and employers. It’s engraved on stone tablets for every third-party recruiter who makes it longer than three months, and even the most sales-averse HR generalist has to admit that at one time or another, they’ve tried to talk a manager into meeting with a candidate based on their internal interview. It’s the nature of our business.

Where we sometimes butt heads is in the implementation of a sales mentality versus that of a process-oriented human resources approach. I have good news: The sales mentality is remarkably effective for finding high-quality candidates or hiring large numbers of people quickly. Unfortunately, no company needs that kind of structure forever, and the friction caused by a sales mentality in hiring can lead to management, administrative, and even legal obstacles. The human resources approach of a kindler, gentler HR works when you don’t have urgency, and when you have an enlightened HR/executive management relationship, but process-oriented hiring turns off the top creatives and results in the hiring of a stable, but less aggressive workforce. That’s no way to run a company in uncertain times.

These are uncertain times, but also exciting ones. Jobseekers, through social media, now have access to information on their would-be employers that is truly revolutionary. In addition to being connected through social networks to hiring managers and other employees, candidates can gather information on individual recruiters, staffing firms, referral programs, and even interview questions. They can do so while they are sitting in an interview room waiting for that manager to arrive. The imbalance of information has been a strength of companies, who can set wages, benefits, and generally control the employment process. Today’s job-seeker has access — and is learning the skill — necessary to balance that information. The result is smarter, better-prepared candidates with wider options as to where they work and what’s acceptable in the employment process (such as whether someone will put up with multiple interviews and long assessments).

This trend may not yet have affected your open requirements, but the strategies employed by the very top candidates are spreading to other high-quality candidates. I know this because I, and others like me are helping train them. Every time I write about a tool on a blog or a social network, candidates have every bit as much incentive to read as do recruiters. And from my website stats, those kinds of readers are growing in droves.

A declining economy, high unemployment, and an increasing need for knowledge workers is running up against demographics, increased specialization, and social media. Recessions are supposed to be times when companies get lean and mean. They cut benefits, reduce or eliminate raises, and often use layoffs to restructure the business. All of that is happening, but the ease of finding candidates hasn’t changed. Companies sometimes get hundreds of resumes per open position, and with the implementation of ATS and database search technology, one would assume that companies could afford to sit idly by and let job-seekers come to them. Companies adopting that attitude are already hurting, and have been for years.

The Answer: Become A Marketer

You don’t have to buy non-prescription lenses and large amounts of hair gel, but will have to adjust to a world where employment branding is not a buzzword, but something that defines what kind of candidates come knocking on your electronic door. Those companies that brag of hundreds, or even thousands of resumes per position aren’t happy with their results. Candidates looking for work blast off resumes hoping for a lucky hit, which ultimately clogs up the recruiting system, especially when you’re in an industry required to log what you’ve received and why you accepted or rejected the resume.

Recruitment marketing used to mean writing job ads and placing them in newspapers. Today, it covers a wide range of disciplines that includes creative, copywriting, SEO, web analytics, pay per click, video, blogging, and social media marketing. The new goal is getting in front of the right people at the right time, and that’s a marketing function. To be successful, it requires that every touchpoint (another marketing term) within your company be aware of how you hire and the best way to apply. Providing accurate information to channel candidates into the correct funnel is the most efficient use of your recruiting time, freeing your employees up to interview and match, rather than sort and sift.

Let’s be honest. Even with massive databases and an influx of resumes, most recruiters still spend over half their time on the job boards searching for new resumes. The reason is simple. Resumes are old the second they hit your database, while resumes posted on job boards (particularly if you search by “last posted”) show an interest in getting hired right now. The advantage of a marketing mentality, especially one of pull-marketing, is a value to all activities taken. Searches for a position today can be magnified by social media to create a long-term search engine value and online profile for your company. Unlike job boards and company websites where information appears and disappears, online marketing creates relationships that continue to bring value after a search is completed. It’s not easy, and much of this work is in its infancy, but companies that embrace online marketing through the prism of social media are finding that recruiting gets easier, and more efficient.

It’s no panacea. Marketing requires a lot of retraining and a sympathetic management who puts a priority on hiring. Marketing requires a commitment to long-term employees and long-term strategies, but the benefits of an enhanced company profile are easy to measure using onboarding surveys. Rather than simply asking where the candidate heard about the position, questions should focus on what worked to influence the candidate during the employment process. Where did they get information? What information was helpful? Who was helpful? Companies who embrace a thorough strategy of recruitment marketing will find it easier and easier to hire the best employees. Those who focus on short-term sales or long-term process-oriented hiring will find it easier to hire those who are left.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory works on a few easy little projects such as saving the environment, reducing oil dependence, and preventing terrorism. Recruiting for the last one — preventing terrorism and nuclear non-proliferation — is the work of Rob Dromgoole.

“A modern-day moon shot,” he says of this lofty work. Eight different recruiters at the lab recruit for about 615 hires annually (about half of them interns/students), among a workforce of about 4,200. Turnover is around 6-8%, tenure about 11 years.

Many employees have doctorates, and many masters’ degrees. About half of the hires come via referrals. The rest are from direct sourcing, Monster, CareerBuilder, Facebook, LinkedIn, and from colleges.

Some of the lab’s favorite schools, particularly for candidates with graduate degrees: University of Washington, Oregon State, Michigan, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, and one we mentioned before: University of California-Davis.

The selling point of a job at the lab, which is one of 10 Energy Department Office of Science national labs, is, according to Dromgoole, the chance to do world-changing work.

“Having an impact and a chance to protect the country from a terrorist attack … investigating ways to get off the oil addiction … that’s the modern day moon shot,” he says.

Dromgoole notes that the United States is the “Saudi Arabia of coal, one of the world leaders in coal deposits.” But since coal is dirty, the lab is looking for ways to make it cleaner by, for example, storing emissions underground. The lab also works on such diverse projects as increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, as well as research on fuel cells. So job candidates (in addition to being promised they won’t fall into a black hole) are told they’ll have a chance to pick from a variety of interesting work. “Intel and Microsoft are telling them what products they are working on,” he says. “Here they have a lot of flexibility in terms of what they want to do. They’re not working for a company shareholder. They’re working for a country shareholder.”

Attracting people to a somewhat remote place near the Oregon-Washington border is a challenge. Having said that, it has been voted one of the top locations for scientists and engineers. And you can get a house for under $200,000 — and pay no state income tax.

The real-estate bust has made it hard to attract people from, say, San Diego and Los Angeles, Dromgoole says. When their $750,000 houses are now worth $550,000, they’re in no mood to sell them.

Another recruiting challenge is pay. While lab employees get a good retirement and health plan, “base salaries aren’t as high — competitive, but not the highest, like Google,” he says. “I can’t compete against Google. Though if it’s about the money, they’re not going to be a fit here anyway.”

The lab hires 84 foreign nationals annually. Not all of the organization’s jobs require a clearance, so it can bring in top talent from Bejing and elsewhere when it needs. Still, Dromgoole is concerned that the United States is tightening immigration as other countries — including, but not limited to Canada and European nations — expand it. On top of that, he says, only 6-7% of American college students want to go into science and engineering.

As you might imagine, Dromgoole is a fan of Raghav Singh’s immigration articles. He’s with Gerry Crispin on candidate treatment. And he agrees with Jeremy Eskenazi’s view that this recession is different. Different because recruiting the scientists the lab needs, he says, is still quite a challenge in a slower economy. And that’s not likely to change for a while. “These type of issues are beyond Democrat and Republican. If we don’t need to depend on oil from Iran and the Middle East and Venezuela, Americans are going to be more secure.”