This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work.

Note: I frequently call these agreements “secret” because that is a goal. But with the growth of social media, they are becoming a poorly kept secret.

Ways That These Agreements Can Hurt Your Firm

• A loss of trust among employees — because of the potential legal issues, almost every firm keeps these agreements secret. However, if your firm has corporate values that include honesty and transparency, when the fact that the company is keeping secrets from employees gets out, any built-up trust will be damaged or lost. Restricting an employee’s freedom without telling them can have many ugly repercussions.
• Poorer treatment of employees may lead to productivity/recruiting problems — if the goal of the pact is reached (dramatically reducing turnover), managers and HR professionals will not have to work as hard to keep the best. This may lead to degradation in the treatment of employees and the benefits offered to them. An unintended consequence of this poorer treatment may be a measurable decrease in employee productivity, engagement, and innovation. The resulting weakened and slower improving HR practices and benefits may also harm your employer brand image and whatever recruiting you do outside of the agreement.
• Limiting new ideas and best practices — “no-recruit” pacts restrict or prevent the hiring of new employees directly from your competitors. This can severely limit the infusion of new ideas and the best practices from your competitor’s employees. And if your firm is not  No. 1 in your industry, your chances of moving up may also be restricted.
• It may restrict rapid company growth — in order for a firm to grow rapidly, it may rapidly need a large amount of already trained talent to support new products or initiatives. Unfortunately, no-recruit agreements make it almost impossible to rapidly get large amounts of ready-to-go talent from the most logical sources: your competitors.
• You are forced to hire those who are less prepared — because most of the well-trained and experienced talent will be at large firms in your industry, the agreement may force your firm to hire employees from smaller firms, where the employees are likely to be less trained and prepared. Many firms are then forced to increase their percentage of college hires because most experienced talent is restricted.
• Fewer promotional opportunities may restrict leader development – if the goal of reduced turnover is reached, there will be fewer openings for your best employees to get promoted into. This stagnation will frustrate your best and brightest, and more importantly, it will slow their development. And because you can’t recruit fully developed leaders from your competitors, you may eventually face a leadership shortage. If you want to maintain an effective rate of employee and leadership development, you will have to devote extra resources to develop a powerful development function.
• Your bad employees will stay much longer — the agreement is designed to prevent the loss of your best employees but it will restrict your weak employees from leaving also. Instead of leaving, your weak employees will continue to generate lower productivity and frustrate your top performers. Unless you develop a “no-recruit-except-weak-performers” agreement, you may have inadvertently damaged your firm for years.
• Knowledge of your customers may also be reduced — one variation of these agreements narrows the recruiting restriction to a firm’s major industrial customers. Obviously regularly recruiting away a customer’s top employees won’t win you a popularity contest. Occasionally hiring a customer’s employees may strengthen bonds, communications, and it may help you better understand the customer’s needs.
• The realization among employees that they don’t come first — once the word gets out, employees will instantly realize that all the speeches about providing employees with freedom get neutralized, because in this case, clearly the company is consciously putting itself ahead of the needs of its employees.
• Employees feeling owned — preventing other firms from poaching “its” employees sends a clear message that the company feels that it “owns” its employees. No one likes feeling “owned” and diverse employees may have an even greater negative reaction.
• Damage to your external employer brand damage – once the word gets out to potential applicants and the public, the firm’s external brand image will tank. You may also permanently anger top applicants from restricted firms when they are rejected outright for no logical reason.
• Internal employer brand damage – once the word gets out among your own employees about this repugnant practice, your internal brand will be damaged, and that may negatively affect the way that your employees respond to your customers.
• Damage to employee referral programs — if you succeed in keeping the agreement secret, your employees will not know that they shouldn’t make referrals from competitor firms. Once high-quality employee referrals go nowhere, without explanation, employees will naturally slow down their referrals from all sources.
• The best recruiters won’t want to work for you – the very best recruiters know about these agreements and most of the best dislike the thought of recruiting with their “hands tied.” And with fewer top firms to target, you will likely need superior recruiters in order to bring in the best.
• Not being able to poach locally may increase relocation costs – another variation of these agreements restricts recruiting from major firms in the same community, even if they are in different industries. Obviously when “local poaching” is restricted, more often than not you will need to hire from outside the area. Requiring more candidates to relocate will make recruiting much more difficult and costly.
• Small firms may become more competitive in recruiting — employees may become frustrated when they find that they “can’t leave.” As result, they may jump at the first chance and go to a small or less desirable firm (that is not covered by an agreement). A firm that they normally would not have considered. And if they choose, they can later move directly to a formally restricted competitor of their former firm.
• It may negatively impact government contracts – should you be found to be breaking the law, it may impact your ability to get future government contracts.
• Enforcement can be time-consuming and expensive — some of the recruiters under the agreement may not “get the message” (which occurred in the Google-recruiting-from-Apple case). As a result, executives will be forced to spend the time and the expense of “lawyer letters” to fix the mistakes. And because the agreement itself is probably illegal, you likely can’t go to court to enforce it.
• It’s a contradiction — and finally, if you happen to be an advocate of free trade and open market capitalism, you will likely have difficulty explaining to your Republican friends the hypocrisy of your actions.

Reasons Why the Agreement May Not Even Work

• A cold-calling ban may be insufficient — some of the agreements only restrict “cold calling” or making the first contact (as opposed to an absolute no-hiring ban). And as a result, smart recruiters often find a way to ruse or convince employees at the target firm to make the first contact.
• Third-party recruiters can be used to go around it — most external third-party recruiters are not included in these corporate agreements, so competitors can still hire your employees; they just have to do it indirectly through a third-party. Some executive search firms have don’t-recruit agreements with customers, so finding a top firm to manage your go-around can be problematic.
• Employees will still find a way to work for your competitors, indirectly — rather than going directly to a competitor, your clever employees will find a way to get there indirectly. All they have to do is to make a short stop working at a consulting firm or they can simply take a long break and apply. Ex-employees are not normally covered by these agreements.
• Limited poaching will occur anyway — even though the agreement says no recruiting, in practice you can get away with hiring one to three people a year from a firm without getting a stop call or a “lawyer letter.” Recruiters love to stretch limits, and many managers will go along up until the point where someone complains.
• Even keeping the agreement secret is difficult – with the growth of social media, you can almost guarantee that your recruiters (especially contract recruiters) will informally spread the word about the restriction.
• Some competitor firms simply won’t go along – these agreements can only have their maximum impact if all of the major players in an industry or geographic region participate. With the recent U.S. Department of Justice and civil lawsuits and the publicity that surrounds them, fewer executives will even be willing to discuss these agreements. Already, most global firms simply refuse to participate.

Final Thoughts

I have written about this questionable practice on numerous occasions including my recent article called Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets. Although secret, this practice is quite common not just in high-tech but it is also not hard to find in healthcare, major accounting firms, and among consulting firms. There are arguably some potential benefits related to this practice. They include: it pleases your major customers; it may reduce salaries by restricting bidding on candidates; and you may have less turnover because fewer recruiters are targeting your very best. However, after extensive research on the potential problems, I have concluded that the ROI of these agreements is weak and it is getting lower by the day.

It’s a mistake you want to ask yourself if you’re making.

The story speaks to how often employers waste time, money, and creative horsepower when it comes to attracting and retaining talent because they put their attention in the wrong place.

So here’s the story … 

Years ago a friend of mine was telling me how much he loved his Audi. In the same “I love my Audi” story, he mentioned that he will never buy another one again … ever. Before I could ask how Statement A leads to Statement B, he told me that the one and only Audi dealer in the area was a nightmare to deal with. The car-buying experience felt sleazy and the service experience after the sale continued to be a horror show.

He then went on to tell me about another customer of he had met. That customer had brought his car to a dealership out of state for the very same reason my friend disliked this particular dealership.

I knew the name of the dealership, but never had an opinion of them prior to his story.

Fast forward two weeks.

I hear this dealership’s ad on the radio. It is incredibly creative and clever.

When it’s over, I think:

“Isn’t this classic. They spend all this money and creativity coming up with clever ways to get people through the door, only to drive them back out the door by the experience they deliver.”

Since I love analogies and tend to see them everywhere, I then found myself thinking:

“Isn’t this a perfect analogy for what employers do? They spend all kinds of time and money trying to get the best and brightest through their doors, only to drive them back out — or drive them crazy — by the frustrating, disrespectful, and spirit-crushing work experience they deliver.”

Wouldn’t it make sense to invest just as much time, money, and creative horsepower delivering the work experience you promise as you do making a compelling promise to job prospects?

Doesn’t it make sense to invest as much in making sure talent stays once they come through the door, rather than creating a revolving door experience?

Doesn’t it make sense to create a work experience that makes your employees not only happy to stay, but also want to tell their talented friends: “This is an awesome place to work. When there’s an opening, I’ll let you know”?

Think of how much money you could help your employer save in recruiting costs if you helped them create a work experience that turned your employees into a volunteer recruiting firm.

If all this makes sense to you, here’s what you can do about it.

Share this article with your leadership team and suggest that you, as a team, examine:

• Whether you truly deliver the work experience your recruiting campaign promises.
• Whether you really know what kind of work experience you deliver.
• Whether you truly understand the key components of an inspiring, commitment-generating work experience … and how to deliver them.
• Whether your managers know how to manage in ways that inspire loyalty, passion, and pride.
• How much you are investing in telling the world you are a great place to work, and how much you are investing in actually being a great place to work.
• If you are doing the things Todd described in the comment here that are the things that make a workplace a good workplace: appreciation, interesting work, the chance to make a difference, opportunities for new skills, work/life balance, recognition, flexibility, health and retirement benefits, nice co-workers, smart co-workers, good managers but not micromanagers, training, a good location, money, promotions, and raises.

Share this article with your employees as a conversation starter. Find out from them whether they would recommend you as an employer, and why … or why not. Don’t just do this as a survey. I have found over the years that interviews and focus groups provide much richer, more actionable information. I don’t recommend replacing surveys with them, but combining the two.

Invest in helping your managers learn:

• What key practices create an inspiring work experience where employees feel not only valued and respected, but they also have the resources, support, and training to do great work.
• What key human needs drive employee performance and engagement, and how to create a work experience that satisfies these human needs. Here are just a few: the need for meaning and purpose, the need to learn and grow, and the need to feel a sense of control over one’s experience.
• How to become more mindful of critical Managerial Moments of Truth that affect employee engagement and morale. Examples of such critical Managerial Moments of Truth include: 1) Onboarding a new employee, and whether it’s a “sink or swim” experience or new hires get the message: “We’re glad you’re here, here’s how we are going to help you succeed”; 2) Giving employees feedback and doing performance reviews; 3) Communicating to employees about major changes; 4) How you ask employees for input, and what you do with that input.
• The critical communication skills that make it comfortable for people with less power — i.e. their direct reports — to speak honestly and openly about difficult issues.
• The myriad of other skills and the managerial practices that bring out the best in employees.

If you are serious about not just getting talent “through the door,” but also keeping them and bringing out the best in them, forward this article to your management team and your direct reports, and get the process rolling.

“We’re charging through the time of transition,” says Kat Drum, who’s the manager, social network and employment branding, and a familiar face to ERE conference-goers who saw her speak to rave reviews while working for Starbucks.

RIM’s co-CEOs are stepping down – a move that caused Jim Cramer and Barron’s to say, essentially, “too little, too late.” It has been the subject of buyout rumors, and is one of the brands consumers don’t envision lasting beyond 2015. (Then again, they also see the U.S. Post Office going bye-bye, something that seems unlikely in just three years.)

Meanwhile, in the works for several months is a new joint consumer/employment brand campaign that’ll emphasize the excitement, challenges, and ability to overcome obstacles at Research In Motion, and the possibilities to do all that on a global scale.

The goal is to find people who have what Drum calls a “builder-type personality” rather than craving stability. “We get these dynamos who want to take a risk and join us because they like the excitement,” Drum says. “They say, ‘I love your brand and want it to succeed and I want to get in on the action.’”

Some recent company tweets have hinted at this theme, using the expression #BeBold as a hashtag on Twitter.

It’ll be unveiled internally first, and then externally on the careers site, Twitter feed, and elsewhere, and discussed in more detail on an April 11 ERE webinar. Drum says she hasn’t seen many branding campaigns where the consumer and employment brands are developed this jointly, as opposed to the employment brand being a subset of the larger product brand. The daring-risk-taking-bold-brave sort of theme will be a “cultural shift” embedded not just in recruiting but in human resources, such as in performance reviews.

Both Sides of the Field

In addition to the branding project, RIM has also been playing recruiting defense. “We’re constantly having to battle the negative media,” Drum says. Working with inside PR professionals, who in turn also work with outside PR pros at the firm Edelman, the recruiting team develops messages to respond to candidates who inquire about what they’re reading. “It’s a real-time, immediate response to negative press,” Drum says. “And reporters like negativity.”

The messages to candidates generally boil down to this: despite what you read, we’re not standing still. We have lost market share in some areas but have gained it in others. Our subscriber numbers are up to 75 million. We are progressing with QNX, and, Drum says, “the innovation isn’t stopping.” RIM’s new CEO plans to focus on marketing to make sure that what the company feels is the full story of RIM is getting out.

All the offense and defense is going on with a much-smaller recruiting staff at RIM, shrunk as part of company-wide layoffs last summer. The brand work has been taking place as req loads have increased and as it has become harder to recruit due to the perception of the company as one that’s struggling. “We’re doing more with less,” she says.

Drum notes that in recent months, RIM groups on LinkedIn, like the BlackBerry Vine, have thrived. It’s having success using job aggregators like SimplyHired and Indeed, as well as with Beyond.com. Glassdoor has been a good source of candidates over the last approximately five months, Drum says; RIM has done search engine optimization on Glassdoor to drive people to RIM’s career page there.

She notes that “RIM is Waterloo, Canada” and without it, “Ten thousand people would be without a job, the community would die.” This, she says, is unlikely to happen, and the company will pursue the type of candidates who won’t want it to.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue.

Think it’s not possible? Here is a quick example to demonstrate the possibilities.

It’s obvious that average salespeople produce revenue and good salespeople produce more. So in an attempt to hire better salespeople, this technology firm analyzed its current sales hiring process and reengineered it, so that it measurably identified and hired better salespeople.

If the new process hired salespeople that sold on average 10% more (than those hired under the previous recruiting process), you could (with the CFO’s blessing), publicly state that this HR action had improved sales revenue by X dollars (i.e. the actual amount would be the 10% improvement in the average salesperson’s yearly sales revenue, multiplied by the number of new salespeople who were hired under the improved process).

Still skeptical? Here is another quick example of how HR can increase revenue.

The recruiting function at this Midwest bank realized it was losing significant revenue every day that a loan officer position was vacant. Obviously, with no one in the position, you can’t make or close any revenue-generating loans. In order to reduce the number of days that loan officer positions were vacant, it called on recruiting to apply its speed-hiring techniques on these positions.

By speeding up the requisition process, placing the best recruiters on these positions and identifying and eliminating “deadtime” throughout the hiring process, it cut the number of vacancy days nearly in half. At $5,000 per eliminated vacancy day, over dozens of requisitions, it increased the bank’s revenue by millions. Everyone from the CFO on down agreed that HR had substantially increased revenue. If these two brief examples are not enough for you, the next section contains the top 15 HR actions that can lead to increased corporate revenue.

The Top 15 Talent Management Actions With the Highest Impact on Revenue

Even if you’re not ready to implement an HR-wide coordinated “revenue impact strategy,” realize that there are many independent actions that the functions within talent management can take in order to increase organizational revenue. If you’re looking for some “low-hanging fruit” actions to take, here are some to consider (those with the potential for producing the most revenue impact listed first).

1. Prioritize revenue-generating business units, jobs, and employees — the highest impact and the lowest cost action is prioritization. HR needs to work with executives, the CFO, and risk management to identify and then prioritize the specific business units that generate the most revenue. You should also identify the highest revenue-generating jobs and employees. Next, you must also identify revenue “impact” jobs, which are jobs that don’t directly generate revenue but the actions of the employees in the jobs directly “influence” the likelihood of subsequent revenue generation. You should also identify revenue “impact” functions (note that product development and customer service are often the highest revenue-impact functions). Finally, you should identify and prioritize jobs where a major error would significantly decrease revenues or increase costs. Obviously after setting your priorities, you need to develop processes that ensure that the most HR resources and the best HR personnel are allocated to those priorities.
2. Targeted recruiting from competitors — recruiting talent away from your direct competitors has a high ROI, because if you are successful, your revenues will go up and theirs will go down. Start by “mapping” the revenue-generating talent at your competitors. Next, recruit away the top sales manager or exceptional salespeople from your competitors. Once you land a “magnet” individual, others are likely to follow. Other high-impact targets for your recruiting from competitors might include innovators, game-changers, pioneers, and individuals with expertise in monetizing products and services.
3. Retain revenue producers — retention has a high ROI because most of the factors that cause top revenue generators to leave are not related to their pay. Interview the most successful revenue producers and those who significantly impact revenue. During the interview, identify the factors that currently frustrate them, as well at the factors that would make their job a dream job. Put together a personalized retention plan to minimize the negatives and to increase the positives.
4. Hire revenue producers — external hiring brings in individuals with a proven track record for generating revenue. External hires also bring with them revenue-generating ideas. Focus your employer branding and recruiting processes on revenue-generating jobs. Reengineer the process so that it leads the industry in its ability to identify, attract, and hire individuals with a superior revenue-generating track record. For example, a major mobile phone network provider found that by adding an online testing component to its hiring process , the resulting call center rep that were hired produced over 10% more revenue than the untested hires.
5. Training on how to increase revenue — revenue generation and the related skills that support it must become a key corporate competency. The T&D function must target its offerings so that they cover all aspects of revenue generation. The quality of the offerings must also be improved, so that individuals show at least a 10% improvement in revenue generation after returning to their jobs after completing the T&D programs. In addition to targeting revenue-generating employees, revenue impact learning modules need to be developed so that every employee (regardless of their position) can understand the concept and subsequently improve their support of revenue-generating employees and business units. In this light, Wal-Mart routinely makes it a part of pre-shift store meetings to make all employees aware of which specific products produce the highest margins and revenue. This awareness allows employees to focus their sales and customer service efforts.
6. Identify barriers — HR must proactively use surveys, interviews, and metrics to forecast upcoming revenue-generating problems and opportunities. HR must also have a process for rapidly identifying current problems and the barriers that restrict revenue generation.
7. Create a fast-reaction team — HR must put together a team of specialists that can respond rapidly to the identified revenue problems that occur anywhere in your organization. Team members should excel at discovering HR related “root causes” and have the skills and experience necessary to solve sudden revenue generation problems.
8. Leadership development and succession must focus on revenue-related competencies – revenue generators also need to be effectively led and managed. So as a result, the leadership function needs to make revenue generation a key competency and development area for leaders. The ability to increase the revenue impact of their team should also be added as a key criterion for promoting managers and leaders.
9. Proactive internal movement — employees and contingent workers need to be proactively placed into the “right jobs” where they can have the highest possible revenue impact. The initial placement of top revenue producers needs to be regularly re-assessed so that key individuals (and even teams) are redeployed to the needed business areas. Seasonal and business cycle rotations may also be required to ensure that there is no excessive idleness among revenue generators.
10. Identify those who support revenue producers — once a year, survey your top revenue producers and ask them which individuals or support positions have directly helped/contributed to their revenue production. Make sure that these impactful support personnel are rewarded and recognized.
11. Release poor performers quickly – the performance management process must be redesigned so that it focuses on rapidly identifying, fixing, and releasing employees who fail to meet their revenue or revenue impact goals. The recruiting function should also continuously be on the lookout for top-performing talent that can be “swapped” with these lower-performing current employees.
12. Implement revenue-impact metrics and rewards – work with the COO, the CFO, and performance management to develop a process and a set of metrics that accurately assess an individual’s revenue generation and revenue impact. Rewards and recognition programs must also be focused and reengineered to better encourage revenue generation.
13. Onboarding — even the onboarding process can impact revenue generation if a weak process means that new-hires get up to speed slowly. As a result, the onboarding process must be reengineered so that new-hires on the first day clearly understand the importance of revenue generation, no matter what job they have. They also need to be informed about how their revenue generation/impact will be measured and rewarded. And finally they need to be educated as to where they can go to get help in this area.
14. Contingent workers and vendors must be included — because a significant percentage of the “workforce” are not technically employees, HR must also work to ensure that contingent workers are hired and evaluated based on their ability to impact revenue. HR should work with purchasing to ensure that vendors, contractors, and consultants are also all capable of increasing revenues.
15. Generate a direct profit — the least ambiguous of any HR action is directly generating revenue from external activities. Firms like Disney, HealthEast, Southwest, and Wachovia have generated revenue as a result of offering their HR services externally in areas including training, temp services, building a culture, and executive recruiting.

The Benchmark Firm to Copy

In addition to the 15 examples that were provided above, you should also know that the HR function at Google is the world’s leader in operationalizing a business-impact strategic approach. HR leaders at Google consistently use metrics and mathematical algorithms to scientifically improve business performance from programs like hiring, retention, and leadership. HR leaders can tell you the revenue impact of people management offerings like 20% time, free food, workspace design, and collaboration practices. They can also easily show you which business units (i.e. Adwords) have the most impact on revenue.

Understanding the five key components of a “revenue focused” HR strategy.

If you decide to implement this revenue-focus strategy, be aware that there are five key components that make a “revenue-focused” HR strategy successful.

Collaboration with the CFO — the first component is collaboration with the CFO. HR leadership must work directly with the CFO’s office (who is the undisputed “king” of measuring revenue). Together they must develop a credible process for proving when an action has a revenue impact and what the value of that impact actually is. Next, HR can provide the CFO’s office with a list of its intended actions and then finance can help to sort out any on the list that simply wouldn’t be credible no matter what the data said (i.e. an example of an action that might be sorting out as not credible could be the premise that hiring and retaining better janitors would increase revenues).

Make it an HR goal — the second component of the strategy is goal setting by making “impacting revenue” a major HR and talent management goal. As a major HR goal, it would need to be part of every HR function’s execution plan. The importance of the goal would be reinforced by adding revenue impact to the HR reward and metric structure. Together these actions would help to get everyone in HR to focus on this goal.

Prioritization — the third component is prioritization. If you start with the assumption that there will be no additional budget at least initially for this strategy,focus and concentrate your current HR budget and your best HR people on the business units, the jobs, and the employees that have the most impact on increasing revenue. Instead of equal treatment or first-come first-serve, high-priority jobs and employees would be serviced first. Resources would also be channeled toward the HR programs and processes which proved to have the most success on increasing revenue (i.e. usually they are hiring, retention, training, metrics, and rewards).

A process for identifying problems and barriers — the fourth component of the strategy involves identifying barriers to prohibit revenue from increasing. By applying benchmarking, research, and analyzing metrics, HR can determine which “people management problems” or barriers are having the most impact on reducing revenues. (Examples of problems include extended position vacancies in revenue-generating jobs, high turnover among top salespeople, salespeople unwilling to attend sales training etc.). The same effort should be put into identifying “positive people management opportunities” that when taken advantage of, directly increase revenues.

Best-practice sharing – the final strategy component is best-practice identification and sharing. Under this component, HR uses research, benchmarking, and metrics to proactively identify and then rapidly spread the implementation of the most effective revenue improving “people management practices” to all managers throughout the organization.

Final Thoughts

If you are still skeptical about this strategy and approach, ask your CEO whether they would prefer that you hire great clerks versus great salespeople. Also ask them if they would prefer that HR excel at low hiring costs, hiring without fewer legal issues, or would they instead prefer you to hire innovators and individuals who can increase revenues by 10 to 20%?

Although the initial concept might seem daunting, a number of advanced HR departments have been using a piecemeal approach to increasing corporate revenue for years. If you’re HR department were to adopt “revenue impact” as a primary HR strategy, the net impact for even a medium-sized firm would literally be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you implemented the strategy, not only would you “have a seat at the table” but you would be listened to and respected because you successfully made the transformation from “overhead function” to a strategic contributor. Your work would be noted in the annual report, so even the shareholders would become aware of the major contribution that HR made.

And incidentally, if you like this strategy, you should also consider related HR strategies. Where instead of focusing on revenue, the strategy would focus on increasing quality, speed/agility, customer service or innovation throughout the organization as a result of HR actions.

And one final question … Did this article succeed in expanding your thinking?

His list of credits is a veritable compendium of the shows that turned the Discovery Channel from a repository of old-school science and nature documentaries and recycled European programming to the most widely distributed cable network in the U.S.

By any definition of the word, Beers is a success.

But it’s because of the time he was out of work with a family to support, yet took the risk to start his own production company, that Thom Beers’ is one of the first stories American Dream told on Armed Forces Radio Network. When the show begins its second season later this month, eQuest will be the sponsor.

eQuest? Yes, the job-posting distribution service, is sponsoring the first 26 weekly installments of the show’s new season. Part inspirational and part motivational, the show is intended to help the men and women in uniform look ahead to their own success when their service to the country is done.

If eQuest seems like an odd match, you’re right, and you have company. Founder and CEO John Malone had about the same reaction when Fascination Entertainment first proposed the partnership. The production company, though, did its homework. Having produced videos for eQuest in the past, Fascination knew that veteran outreach was a requirement for any company doing business with the government.

“They put together this show to inspire these guys,” said Malone, using the gender-neutral meaning of guys. “It’s all about showing success is obtainable and it’s going out to something like 180 countries and millions of people are listening  to the (Armed Forces Network).”

It didn’t take Malone long to sign-on as the show’s sponsor.

“I was really impressed, and we thought it would be a good way to reach military people and we said (internally) ‘Wouldn’t this also be fun to have as part of our package,’” says Malone, explaining that American Dream is “part of our OFCCP outreach.”

The Office of Contract Compliance Programs enforces federal contract requirements, specifically those parts relating to affirmative action and equal employment opportunity. On its website, the Department of Labor lists some ways federal contractors can meet the outreach requirements of the Jobs for Veterans Act. Sponsoring a program on military radio is above and beyond; obviously not something the government thought of.

“It’s kind of a different way of doing veteran outreach … not something I would have thought of,” Malone agrees. But when he met with the producers and listened to the first shows, “I walked out of there all pumped up.”

“Whether it translates into jobs or veterans getting hired, I don’t know. I hope so,” he says. “The main thing,” he adds, “is that it’s really about pumping them up; getting them excited about what they can do after the military.”

Four eQuest customers will get sponsorship mentions during the 25-minute broadcasts. The company is including their message without charge. But don’t get the idea these are commercials; they are much more like the sponsorship messages on NPR. It’s branding; not an invitation to apply, although there’s no reason a web address can’t be mentioned, as the Sutter Health message does. (The other three co-sponsors are American Airlines, American Water, and FINRA.)

Malone says since hearing about the program, other eQuest customers have said they want to participate. Interested employers can contact eQuest directly.

In the coming weeks American Dream will air interviews with John Tesh, David Oreck, and Mario Andretti among others who may not be as widely known, but whose stories are no less inspiring.

“It’s not about the money they made,” adds Malone. “It’s about following their dream. That’s the inspirational message.”

That’s precisely the message that Thom Beers delivers. “First and foremost,” he says in closing, “make sure it’s your dream … Then do everything possible to make it happen. Don’t give up… Don’t get discouraged, man. Just keep plugging away.”

Indeed: the chief brand officer at Women’s Healthcare Associates, LLC is Anita Jackson. The director of human resources is also Anita Jackson.

In the video below, about 7 minutes long, Jackson and I talk about her unusual dual role at this Oregon gynecology and obstetrics organization. She shares whether this model could work in a larger organization, and how this structure affects the candidate experience.

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are…

Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — potential applicants assume that the company puts its best foot forward when it describes a job. So when they compare your dull, legalistic description with your competitor’s more compelling description, they will simply apply elsewhere. The net result is that you lose candidates unnecessarily, harm your employer brand, and you will eventually frustrate your hiring managers.

Not taking advantage of employee referrals — the best-practice firms approach 50% referral hires (the percentage of all external hires who come from referrals). Failing to fully use referrals means that you will miss out on a large number of high-quality, prescreened, and presold candidates. Because employees are no longer doing some of the recruiting work, your recruiting workload will increase.

Not learning the business — obviously if you can’t speak “their language” and you don’t understand their problems, hiring managers will be less responsive to your requests. Your lack of knowledge will also make it more difficult to communicate with, to sell, and to build relationships with candidates.

Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — higher-level jobs require a different level of service, knowledge, and relationship-building. So using the same process that you use for lower-level jobs on more sophisticated, technical, or management jobs will result in fewer returned calls, a higher candidate dropout rate, and lower-quality hires.

Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are gone quickly, so a drawn-out process or slow decision-making will likely mean that candidates with multiple offers will be gone. Managers will also become frustrated if a slow recruiting process means losing the best.

Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews are traditionally weak predictors but poorly executed interviews dramatically increase the chances of making a major hiring error. Poorly designed interviews may also screen out innovators and turnoff top candidates, because they have not felt challenged.

Using active sourcing approaches for passive candidates — posting your jobs using active sourcing approaches like job boards, newspaper ads, and job fairs means that the 75% of the workforce that is not actively looking for a job will never see them.

Not prioritizing jobs — focusing on low-value jobs with little business or revenue impact will anger your managers and reduce their business results. It may eventually lead to lower recruiting budgets, after executives see that your hiring is not prioritized and in line with their business priorities.

Not identifying job acceptance criteria — if you don’t proactively ask for their job acceptance criteria, you can only guess about what it will take to get a top candidate to say “yes.” Although it is ranked as #10, not tailoring your recruiting marketing and candidate-selling approaches to the decision criteria of top candidates almost guarantees that you will lose these candidates. Because these individuals have choices, they will simply wait until an opportunity comes along that precisely fits their requirements and expectations.

Final Thoughts

Nearly 80% of CEOs select talent management as the business area that requires the most change. As a recruiter, if you are going to dramatically change, you have only two basic choices, 1) stop doing the dumb things that negatively impact your results or 2) start doing smarter and more effective things. The “stop doing dumb things” choice is probably the easier of the two because it doesn’t require you to learn anything new.

So if you are recruiter or recruiting manager with limited time and resources, we recommend that you use this “dumb things” list to begin the process of changing and improving your recruiting.

Anderson is a family-owned outfit, started in 1913 and handling tens of thousands of homes and businesses. It has just under 200 employees but wants to grow about 25% over the next few months, adding 25 “co-workers,” as it sometimes calls them, by the end of the year, and about 25 more early in 2012.

And not only is it hiring, but human resources is part of its marketing to prospective customers. They’re told that “Anderson retains technicians longer so customers get more consistent service.” And they are asked, “How many different technicians have handled your account during the past 24 months?”

Anderson is hiring in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Indiana. The business is cyclical, with fewer pests in the winter, ants arriving in the spring, a slightly slower summer, and ants and yellowjackets in the fall.

It’s playing up its careers as being interesting, pretty stable (see graphic at left) and always in demand, as well as environmentally friendly. That last part of the value proposition, O’Hara says, is a biggie both for customers and recruits. Rather than offering just a few “green” products, the whole company is based around trapping, not using rodenticides. Rodenticides suck up a lot of resources when they’re produced, he says, and they also can end up in dumpsters.

This approach means more labor, more expertise. It’s so different from what O’Hara says competitors do, that the company doesn’t recruit from competitors. “Trying to weed technicians off of a tank is hard,” he says. “Communicators, service, heart, attitude — that’s what we’re about. It’s not the traditional ‘see and spray.’”

Anderson is also touting its community involvement. Carrie Missele, a regional sales manager I talked to, is particularly fired up about a program where if the firm adds 25 people before this year’s out, it’ll donate $5,000 to the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

This isn’t a sexy industry — “A stigma we need to overcome,” O’Hara says. So the company is doing a number of things. For one, not finding enough success with career offices and career fairs at schools, it’s talking to professors about the company, about their students, who might want to be an intern, and so on.

It’s bringing in people for internships where they rotate through different parts of the company, and then do an open-ended project at the end where they present ideas for improving Anderson. Some interns can then come back a second summer, and help put on the intern program for first-year interns. O’Hara says he’s also going to be working with a (very successful) public charter school called “Urban Prep,” in Chicago. Students will spend a couple weeks shadowing Anderson employees, and then will receive a paid trip to a university. O’Hara believes that once the student actually sets foot on a university and knows it’s within their reach to receive an education and have a good career, they’ll be more likely to want to go to college.

O’Hara said he initially thought people might want to read things like facts about animals on Facebook, but that he wisened up. “Nobody wants to hear that,” he says. They want to know, “where does this fit in with my life?” So the Facebook page has videos about life at the company.

There’s more. They’re trying to hire more women (and three female technicians have started in the last five months, after not having one in many years; O’Hara attributes this partly to having female recruiters). They’re trying mentoring programs. They’re trying to get more employee referrals. Past interns are appearing at career fairs and sales parties, like a party held at a race track. “When you get one of your students there,” O’Hara says, “the response is much different.” It used to be tough to compete at fairs against a company like Anheuser-Busch, he says, but after all of the above the company has been trying, “we actually have a line now.”

Inside this modest, even nondescript brick building is the Conspiracy. I capitalize it because I’m playing along with the preposterous notion that it was selected because of grammatical significance to be part of the official name of the organization that inhabits suite 200 here on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue.

“Conspiracy,” explains the man whose name is also part of the title, “is a collective noun. It represents the whole.” At another point he tells me, “The intellectual power of the organization comes from the whole.”

I do not question his explanation. It has the ring of HR about it.

Maintaining his own name as part of the title of what once was called Starr Tincup signals continuity; a heritage name, he adds. I do not question this either. It has the ring of marketing wisdom about it.

Thus was Starr Tincup rechristened The Starr Conspiracy, says the man. His name is Starr, Bret Starr. A year ago he bought out his partner Bill Tincup, then promptly made partners of four of his long-time associates.

Documents that have come into my possession (and which I share with the world here) more fully detail the name change. The word “conspiracy,” says a document bearing the cryptic seal of the organization — a be-tentacled octopus with an all seeing eye – ”denotes a group of persons working in secret to influence perceptions and outcomes.”

The inclusion of “Starr” is as I was told. The document notes, “While Mr. Starr generated the creative spark that resulted in the founding of the agency, the current partners, consultants, account managers, copywriters, and designers surpass Mr. Starr in every functional area. However, by keeping “Starr” in the name, the brand benefits from historic brand equity.”

This then is The Starr Conspiracy. A marketing agency that offers no portfolio, mentions no clients, and prohibits the merest tweet of where its co-conspirators are traveling. And yet,  it has been engaged by hundreds of vendors to the human resource industry. The document says the Conspiracy has become a $20 million business.

What exactly is this business? Business-to-business marketing for HR vendors, many of them (but not all) software and tech firms. The Conspiracy does not do recruitment branding, employer branding, career fair posters, or any form of job advertising.

Except sometimes they will when a client needs help, says Starr talking to me by phone. (“We talk on the phone a lot,” is an admission I found in the document.)

If you have read this far and not yet seen The Starr Conspiracy’s website, I will pause while you do. Pay attention to the Airstream in the video. Nothing will happen. Click here.

Now is this an agency you would hire to market your performance management system, or a new comp and benefits module, or onboarding program or, or, or? No?  Good. The Conspiracy doesn’t want you.

“We are not for everybody. We don’t want everybody,” Starr declares. “If a marketing idea doesn’t make you nervous. If it doesn’t make your stomach queasy,” he adds, “it’s probably not a very good idea.”

Should I be hearing this? He has already confessed to not providing client references, apparently preferring that prospects vet the company on the strength of the ideas it offers them, rather than the work done for others.

Starr, though is relentless. “We are a good match for companies who understand they have to be noticed,” he says. Companies “shouldn’t try to appeal everyone,” he advises, “because in trying to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.”

Shortly after making that pronouncement, the phone call is momentarily disrupted. Starr mumbles something about the phone service, then declares he has a meeting he must attend. It is almost 4:30 on a Friday afternoon in Texas where he is. What kind of meeting would a Conspiracy need to be holding then?

I hang up my phone and check to see if the doors are all locked.

Our brand has taken an absolute battering over the last 18 months. -Jon Tait, of BP

That’s for sure. (You’ve seen the coffee video.) Tait’s the head of global attraction at BP, talking about the aftermath of the colossal oil spill that killed 11 people and spilled millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The company is launching its first “people-based” recruiting campaign; more on that in a minute.

Tait says that in the fall of 2010, BP researched what people thought of BP, and how that compared to what they thought of competitors. It used LinkedIn for the surveys; the company’s user conference in Las Vegas today is where Tait talked about this effort.

BP found out that a lot of people — about 80% — didn’t know BP was hiring. They didn’t know other Big Oil companies were hiring either, but they knew tech companies were adding headcount. BP learned that 60% of people it wanted to hire are passive candidates, a target market it hadn’t been targeting much.

The good news it got was that more than 50% of people still had an interest in working for BP, and rated the quality of its workforce high, and its technology at least on par with competitors’.

People’s biggest concerns were the company’s financial sturdiness; its safety record; and their own long-term career goals, and whether they fit in BP.

BP’s brand — the perception it’s going for — is about bringing brilliant minds together with technology at a massive scale to meet the world’s energy needs.

Its recruitment advertising has changed, consistent with that brand, but using employees to describe it in human terms. 

It used to say things about exploring Alaska and other messages that were really about the company in a more detached, less touchy-feely way. Its new ads feature employees talking about why they’re inspired by their work; how they feel when they go home (exhausted, but ready to be renewed and refreshed with new opportunities when they awaken); how the company is socially responsible; and the idea that it’s made up of tens of thousands of “amazing stories.”

In a nutshell, it’s now spreading this brand message through stories: stories, Tait says, not of BP but of Carter or Farah or others it has featured on its website and elsewhere.

As for social media: Tait jokes that the way companies are using social media is similar to the way teenagers feel about sex: “You think you should be doing it, but you don’t know how,” he says.

He says that the live CNN broadcast of the BP well being capped was a defining moment of BP’s social-media usage. BP called up CNN to say that the coverage wasn’t accurate, and that an important tweet is on the way. CNN read the tweet on the air, one that got BP’s message out correcting CNN’s report, and one that left CNN looking confused about the whole subject.

It has courted journalists, becoming much more proactive in talking to journalists about its drilling business. Tait feels that media coverage has generally improved.

Anyhow, the stories, Tait says, are just “one small step” in BP’s branding. They generated applause when he showcased them at LinkedIn’s expo.

“They say a crisis reveals your true character,” Tait says. “I totally saw that with my colleagues at BP.”

For now, let me just take one challenge organizations will have in increasing their internal hiring of independent contractors, consultants, and free agents: branding.

Recent studies show evidence that freelance talent is generally 40% to 50% more connected in their industry than their full-time peers. In other words, many of them are considered opinion and thought leaders with the potential to influence and affect positive or negative employer brand perceptions of your company.

Traditional employer brands emphasize the long-term view of working for the organization, as well as tangible and intangible assets of being part of a given corporate community. Organizations will need to increase efforts toward creating an employer brand that communicates effective messages to the contractor community. The marketing messages themselves are highly effective for the traditional workforce, but classic segmentation should be part of the process in order to ensure that different messages are communicated to the freelance community. Those messages should concentrate on the enhancements, new training, and new knowledge that the freelancer will receive if they choose to join your organization.

Companies can take advantage of their ability to use social media infrastructure such as Facebook, Twitter and many of the other platforms. Developing an employer brand and marketing message that are targeted toward the freelance community by effectively using social networks and social media can allow companies to develop a sustainable online image that can be attractive and sustainable.

Other methods of attracting the freelance community to your organization should incorporate the sponsorship of events where freelance professionals gather, meet, and exchange ideas. Freelance professionals value their own skills and their knowledge in their fields; therefore if the freelance professional feels that your organization is open and generally welcoming to their expertise they will promote your brand as the “client of choice” because they will feel that you value their profession, industry, and community.

Developing relationships with professional sources of freelance talent will also be essential. This can include generalist staffing and temporary services agencies, recruitment process outsourcing firms, and any entity that chooses to mediate between freelance talent and companies that wish to employ them.

Changes in the interviewing process must also take place. Recruiters must remember that professional freelance talent, in general, is highly engaged and will measure the potential of your company through the interview process. Attention must be paid to candidate experience measurement and metrics, and recruiters engaged in the hiring of freelance talent should ensure the continuance of a positive perception by freelancers of your organization.

“The line is now blurring between assessment and branding,” says Moses Bar-Yoseph, the national director, talent attraction, for KPMG in Canada.

The Canada division has 5,400 employees, 32 offices, and about 46 people working on recruiting and employment branding. About three years ago, Bar-Yoseph and others started to look at where recruiting was going: more social media, more LinkedIn, more tools, and just generally, he says, “change on the horizon.” Bar-Yoseph felt that recruiting was going to change, away from simple job listings to pipelines and passives and all the things you’ve been reading about in recent years. KPMG wanted to be more proactive in attracting passive candidates.

Meanwhile, it came to believe that the basic psychometric tests that candidates have come to know and in some cases not love were not the way he wanted to go. Bar-Yoseph didn’t want people to answer a question and think, “I like the color blue so I don’t fit. That wasn’t what we were after. We were after something there was an actual exchange of information so the passive candidate would go through this and look more at what the job would look like. The job posting was not enough.”

It (with help from consultant Charles Handler) looked at vendors and settled in 2010 on Shaker Consulting Group, a company we once profiled in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (ask me, at todd@ere.net, if you want me to send you that issue). KPMG and Shaker spent about a year building a simulation, including extensive work by Shaker in reviewing KPMG’s HR materials, shadowing employees, analyzing KPMG jobs, and more.

Bar-Yoseph said the assessment’s goal was to “approximate what it would look like” to work at the company, and to tell employees “what they need to know about us to make an informed decision … here’s what we value. Implicit in that was, do you value that to?”

The simulation went live in August 2011. It sets up real-life scenarios for candidates, and asks candidates how they’d handle the situations. The assessment asks questions such as whether they, the job candidate, would be more likely to delegate a task or do it themselves — a task such as dealing with an under-performing employee. Or, in other parts of the assessment, candidates are given 2 1/2 minutes to type in a response — not choose from a drop-down menu — to a question such as, “how would you improve morale on your team?”

The simulation, about an hour long, isn’t given to everyone. KPMG is having only those who make it through the initial screen take it — people who’ve been selected for a face-to-face interview. Hiring managers use it to know what areas to probe during the interview, what questions to ask candidates. Perhaps something like this: “you indicated in the assessment that you’d delegate x types of duties … can you tell me about an experience doing that, how you made it successful?”

There are also questions that are more bio-data-like, such as what publications people read. And, questions about what’s important to people, such as whether it’s more important for them to be an industry guru, or to train and mentor others.

A cross-section of current KPMG employees in Canada also took the simulation/assessment, so that candidates’ scores can be compared to top performers. It’s integrated into the Kenexa system that KPMG uses to manage the resumes that come in.

Bar-Yoseph said a few dozen candidates have taken it so far. Feedback from them is limited as of now, but, he says, feedback from current managers and employees is “glowing.” In the next couple of months, KPMG will roll out the test to campus hires, which, he says, will be an “exponentially larger” group of test-takers. I should watch my tongue: Bar-Yoseph emphasizes that in building this tool, “the last thing we wanted was for people to feel like this was a test.”

When I interviewed for my position at TMP almost 14 years ago, I really knew nothing about the company, nor did I have an obvious route to learn more. Had I been privy to the TMP work experience conversation, I might have injected some of those nuggets and questions into the interview conversation. Without those gems I was relegated to closing the interview with “I really believe I can make an impact at TPM.” Thankfully, I still got the job. We had a good conversation despite my verbal typo.

Yes, the conversation about the conversation about the conversation can be exhausting. But, there are definitely valid reasons for an employer to be aware of the conversation. While there may not be a finite right or wrong way to determine when, if, and how to engage and guide the conversation, there are some common sense ideas to be considered.

(For those of you who have lost count, I’ve used the word “conversation” 25 times already.)

First of all, think about the conversation from this perspective: anyone can quickly and easily find well-indexed opinions about the workplace of most employers via search engines, message boards, blogs, social media, employee testimonial sites, etc. That’s a given and we should all stipulate that.

Now think about this fact: Anyone who is considering joining your talent community, applying for a position, “liking” your company career page on Facebook, accepting your offer, or even just curious what it’s like to work for your company because they’re having a bad day at work or their friend works there, there’s a good chance that, if they haven’t already, they’re going to do a quick search engine query on “Working at INSERT YOUR COMPANY NAME.” Did you know that approximately 80% of all Internet sessions start on a search engine?

For many employers, much of the online conversation about their workplace that is returned in a search may not be positive. In some cases that may be warranted, but in more cases, it’s merely a subjective sliver of the real experience – let’s face it, some of these employee testimonial sites can lean toward becoming repositories of disgruntled employee opinions – we like company when we’re complaining. That’s not to take away from valid opinions but needs to be considered. I believe the adage about treating me well and I may or may not tell one person; but treat me in a way that I perceive to be unfair, and with the click of a mouse I may tell 500 in my social network, is definitely what’s behind this. But we cannot assume that jobseekers viewing this information know that to be the case so they may apply much more stock to what they’re reading than is perhaps warranted.

So what can employers do at a minimum when faced with a preponderance of negative feedback about their workplace on the Internet?

We need to ensure that your recruiters, hiring managers, and other candidate facing employees — which definitely is a lovely segue to a diatribe about how all your employees should be employer brand broadcasters — are aware of key trends in the conversation, at least to the extent of being able to anticipate what a candidate might see online and have thoughts about how they should respond if that topic arises or if they should proactively bring it up. Possibly that takes the form of a distributed monthly recap and/or reputation audit document.

If a relatively small number of people are citing the same negative item about you online as an employer, note it. If it’s a large number relative to the size of the conversation who are saying the same thing, listen and consider the right next steps –which may consist of engaging in the conversation and offering a different and true perspective; being aware and consciously choosing to do nothing right away but note, track, and make stakeholders aware of it; looking inward to validate or disprove the negative sentiment; building a communication action plan as appropriate; etc. And when and if you need to engage and guide the conversation, use the authentic voices of your employees and communities to offer their perspectives.

Two great places to share first-hand perspectives are your well optimized career website and career social presence. There’s a lot of valid discussion about the importance of optimizing your actual job postings so they appear in search engine results. We should also optimize career content to appear and rank well in search engines. So when a person types into Google “working at Acme,” the employer’s own career content appears in the results too, rather than just the Glassdoors and other similar sites.

In closing, I do need to point out one enormous drawback of the pervasive conversation … a faux verb that I thought we’d laid to rest has returned. Yes, I mean “conversate.” It’s re-entered the lexicon — perhaps it never left — and twice in the last month I’ve been privileged enough to hear references to the need for employers to conversate with their target audiences.

Best of luck in genuinely engaging and conversing with your target audiences. The key is to be thoughtful in your overall approach and resist the impulse to quickly react unless absolutely necessary.

OK, so Yukon would like you to know that there’s more to its territory than a six- to eight-month long winter.

In 2008, it began looking at a new strategy for recruiting, retention, branding, and marketing the new brand. It wanted to better attract youth, Yukon First Nation (aboriginal) candidates, people with disabilities, and others, and do a better job at staffing hard-to-fill jobs.

By the way, if you don’t know where Yukon is — it’s next to Alaska. It’s about the size of Texas, but with only 30-35,000 people (less windy than, say, more southern Canadian areas like Winnipeg, notes Renee Paquin, an HR director in Yukon’s territorial government). Yukon hires social workers, healthcare professionals, environmental professionals, library employees, and others; in all, about 5,000 employees and about 650 jobs posted annually. Some communities can only be reached by airplane.

Paquin says that to arrive at a new employment brand, the Western Canada recruiting ad agency Midlyn Day held focus groups with employees, Yukon residents, and with residents from outside of Yukon. It also conducted telephone interviews with leaders in the organization, senior managers, and HR directors.

The Yukon HR team also looked at existing information it had, such as its annual employee engagement survey, exit surveys, and surveys of people who were hired from outside of the territory.

The result was a “comes with a territory” tagline – but, as ERE junkies know, a recruiting tagline is not a recruiting brand. The brand, the value proposition, the desired reputation, is really, in this case, about what comes with the territory: career opportunities and mobility, the lifestyle and environment, work/life balance, and the ability to make a difference in the world.

Along with the new brand came new materials, which were rolled out this spring and are still being created for various jobs. There are posters. Redone job listings. A new website, again with help from Day Advertising.

“The brand resonated,” says Paquin. “People are really behind it.”

Metrics and results and ROI are still in the works, as the marketing strategy is still being implemented. The posters that targeted First Nation job candidates resulted in a Creative Excellence Award, as did other branding materials created for the campaign.

Recruiters who now use Facebook exclusively or mostly to push out jobs will become even more marginalized by the increasing emphasis the social site is placing on engagement. Those who actively invest in courting their Facebook “fans,” offering content of value, and real conversations, will reap even greater rewards than they do now, earning their brand a place on user’s forthcoming Timelines, and the ability to broaden and measure their reach as visitors “Share” content with their own FB friends.

One of the consequence of these and the other changes Facebook is rolling out, is that it will be harder than ever for employers to compete for attention. Even before last week’s f8 conference, when the company’s most profound changes in years were announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, routine updates such as a “like” or a me-too comment, and job postings, were being moved to a ticker-style activity window on the profile page. Even more is likely to appear there as Facebook’s standards of what’s worthy of being a top post, and thus rising to the top of a person’s wall, become more stringent. (A good summary of the announced changes is available here.)

In fact, the new Graph Rank will govern positioning of content in both the Timeline and ticker. Facebook didn’t share any details of the algorithms Graph Rank will use in deciding worthiness, but engagement will undoubtedly play a prominent role.

MediaPost, in an article today on the implications for marketers of the sweeping changes, says, “One initial takeaway is that while the new features could create more opportunity for users to interact with brands and products, an increased volume and velocity of updates on Facebook could also make it harder to break through the clutter to reach consumers.”

Until now, the most significant Facebook metric for employment marketers was the number of Fans. Soon, the number of times an item was “shared” and the number of times a connection was made to a Facebook timeline will be even more important measures.

That someone now “Likes” your post is another current measure of interest. With the changes though, you’ll be able to offer them a more active engagement, so they can tell their friends they are “reading” your post, or “applying” for a job. Employers can create their own action-oriented apps to supplement Facebook’s three default Lifestyle apps: “reading,” “watching,” and  “listening to.”

Analyzing the potential these changes will have for marketers, 3601, a top-ranked digital marketing agency, said:

The features that Facebook announced …  reinforce the notion that engagement matters more than ever. Brands must continue to create and share relevant content, experiences, and applications on a regular basis. A core objective for marketers remains becoming a part of consumers’ personal stories in a shareable way.

The meaning of these changes will take time to be fully sussed out. And user reaction to the changes already implemented — the news feed and ticker, most prominently — which have been mostly negative, may result in some adjustments.

The broad strokes, however, are clear. Facebook is saying that engagement is what counts. Those of you, therefore, who have a Facebook page that is rarely updated, or which consists of job listings and nothing else, you’re wasting your time. That’s not a social media program now, and once Timeline and the other changes are pushed out to all 800 million users, you may discover that not even those few people who are your “Fans” remain.

For everyone else, now is the time to take another look at the content you post and the breadth of your online conversations. While it looks like it’s going to be a matter of trial and error to learn how Facebook’s Graph Rank works, the opportunities to be a part of the activity stream and to consider what Lifestyle apps make sense need to become a part of your social media strategy.

It’s easy to say, of course, that the content you post needs to be useful, valuable, and interesting in order to engage your fans and others. What specifically that content should be, however, is another matter. As you think through the implications of the forthcoming Facebook changes, take a look at past content that promoted comments and reposting. Your visitors and friends and fans, by their Likes and discussion, have already pointed at what they find valuable.

The marketing agency, 360i, in its report, talked about the marketing challenges posed by the changes, which it said “should generate a tremendous amount of additional content on Facebook.” “Brands,” the agency said, “will have to be even more strategic, creative, and relevant to their fans to stand out.”

"Why join the Navy, if you can be a pirate?"

Want to impress your CEO? Few CEOs wouldn’t mind having the innovation track record of Apple, so there is probably no quicker way to become an “instant hero” then by learning how Apple’s talent management practices have contributed to its success and applying those practices relevant to your organization. In this installment of the case study, we’ll look at internal branding, employer branding, and recruiting.

Internal Brand Encourages Fighting the Status Quo

Steve Jobs and the management team at Apple have worked tirelessly to build a unique internal brand image at Apple that positions employees (at least mentally) as revolutionaries and rebels. Many years ago the organization influenced this internal brand by challenging employees to think how much more exciting it would be to be a pirate, rather than someone who followed the formal protocol of the regular Navy. It even flew a pirate flag over its corporate headquarters. The tradition of being revolutionaries is upheld even today with many supportive slogans including “Part career, part revolution.”

Apple is well known for using T-shirts, parties, and celebrations to build cohesion and to reinforce the internal brand as a ragtag group of revolutionaries. By getting employees to view their role as attacking the status quo, it helps to spur continuous and disruptive innovation. It has been successful in maintaining that internal brand image despite the fact that the top-down approach and intense secrecy run counter to its hatred of bureaucracy and all things “too corporate.” The external image further supports the internal brand.

You Can Have a Strong External Employer Brand Without an Employer Branding Program

Many among us dream of working at Apple, but unlike Google and Facebook, it’s pretty difficult to find out what it’s actually like to work there. A quick search on the Internet reveals that apart from a few alumni, most who have roamed the halls are pretty tight-lipped about their experience. While that silence is probably largely driven by Apple’s widespread use and vigilantly enforced non-disclosure agreements, even the corporation itself is relatively mum. You won’t find a great deal of employment advertising or find the Apple name on any one of a dozen or more best-company-to-work-for lists covering the technology sector, even though competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Intel are regularly listed.

Despite the silence, most would agree that Apple has a great “employer brand image”; Universum ranks Apple No. 10 among global engineering companies. The lesson to be learned is simple: use management practices that support your desired brand and elaborate brand management work will be unnecessary. Get your potential applicants to admire your firm for who and what the firm does by being the admirable firm.

Your Product Brand Should Serve Double-duty as Your Employer Brand

Instead of spending millions on building an employer brand, Apple lets its product brand do all the talking. Apple works hard on building and maintaining its product brand, which is ranked as the #1 global brand according to BrandZ ranking. Although product brand messages are intended primarily for customers, the messaging which emphasizes innovation and thinking differently also hasa major impact on potential applicants and employees. The logic is that if your organization lives up to its product promises, then it is natural to expect that the company’s jobs would also live up to the firm’s brand promise. In their minds, potential applicants make the connection between great products and a great place to work. In addition, because Apple’s products are talked about by everyone, there is a lot of brand association power lauded on those who work at Apple.

This public awareness and admiration can, coupled with a strong employee referral program, make generating a high volume of quality applicants easy. That same attention and curiosity will also enhance a firm’s retention rates because your employees will realize that the public sees them as collectively changing the world. Having employees believe that they are likely doing “the best work of their lives” is a powerful situation that most companies can’t easily mimic.

Being a Most-admired Firm May Be Enough

Apple does receive some notoriety in the press as the world’s “most admired firm.” In fact, Apple has been No. 1 for four years running on the list. That is an amazing feat. Apple dominates this list by being ranked first in eight out of the nine possible ranking factors. Those eight categories include factors that impress potential applicants, including people management, quality of management team, innovativeness, and social responsibility. The most admired list is based on the perceptions of business people and executives, something that Apple excels at managing. Having your firm admired garners enormous publicity in addition to increasing employee pride, engagement, and retention. The lesson to be learned by other firms is that if you don’t offer great benefits (which Apple doesn’t) you can get the same or even larger impact if you manage the perceptions of executives at other firms.

We want our people to be on the leading edge, so that everyone wants them… and then we must treat them right so they will stay, no matter what offers come along! –Apple Senior Manager

Aggressively Recruit the Best From Other Firms

The pirate-raiding mentality at Apple certainly carries over into recruiting. Apple has a long history of recruiting away top talent from other firms. In fact, the development of its iPod probably wouldn’t have occurred if it wasn’t for importing external talent from firms that didn’t appreciate the value of this new technology. Steve Jobs himself has been known to get directly involved in recruiting top talent. Apple has a top-grading type philosophy in that it targets top performers. Jay Elliot, its former VP of HR, cites one of Apple’s core principles as: ”Always… hire the best  ’A’ people. As soon as you hire a B, they start bringing in Bs and Cs.”

Apple’s recruiting approach is evolving because it has recently imported a team of recruiting leaders from Electronic Arts, but historically, despite the aggressive philosophy, its recruiting methods were pedestrian. It uses job boards and has an employee referral program that has paid up to $5,000, but its candidate experience is far from perfect. Glassdoor users rate Apple interviews 3.0/5.0 with regard to difficulty. Its college recruiting effort isn’t exceptional, with the exception of using recent college hires to help recruit the new crop. The key lesson for other firms to learn is that you can generate huge volumes of high-quality applicants if your firm is highly admired and if potential employees believe that they will be working on leading-edge products that everyone will be talking about.

In the retail group, there are two notable recruiting practices. The first has been the naming of the “Genius Bar,” where technical support is provided. Many applicants and employees in the retail area seem to be willing to put up with the relative drudgery of retail work simply for the opportunity to someday work their way up to becoming certified as a “genius.” The second is the use of employee referral cards that are well-designed and powerful. They reinforce the companywide focus that originated with Steve Jobs on recruiting the best from other firms. Recruiters and employees who witness great customer service at other retail and customer service outlets hand the card to those few individuals who provide impressive service. The front of the referral cards say “You’re amazing. We should talk.”

The back praises the individual and their work with a near perfect narrative … “Your customer service just now was exceptional. I work for the Apple store and you’re exactly the kind of person we’d like to talk to. If you’re happy where you are, I’d never ask you to leave. But if you’re thinking about a change, give me a call. This could be the start of something great.”

Next week, Part 4: Apple’s approach to training and development, management, leadership, and other difficult-to-categorize talent management lessons to learn from.

If your responsible for your company’s campus recruiting efforts, Natasha Singer’s recent article for the New York Times is a must-read. The story highlights ways companies are using student Brand Ambassadors to promote products and services, and generate loyalty via social media, in-store events, and on-campus buzz.

Traditional marketing efforts like print advertising and TV spots are yielding fewer and fewer tangible results, but did you know that this fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses as Brand Ambassadors?

By illustration, Singer’s article cites efforts from three American Eagle student marketers who solicited 50 volunteers to take part in a move-in event at the University of North Carolina. Wearing A.E. Move-In Crew T-shirts, they helped with lifting boxes, handing out swag, and creating a welcoming branded experience for new arrivals, as just one of AE’s 50-campus events.

Target opened up its wallets for a freshman welcome dinner, and its doors for a private late-night shopping experience, complete with DJs and dancing through the aisles.

Mr. Youth, a youth marketing agency, published its list of brands who were best at communicating with freshmen. They included Nike (design your own shoes), Xbox (engage, connect and compete with your friends), and of course Apple (‘nuf said.)

So advice to the campus recruiting teams: Plan together and plan ahead.

1. Check in with your marketing department and find out if they are launching any guerilla marketing events on the college campuses. If yes, get in on it. If no, this is where you can shine. Help them plan something and then work together (isn’t that a great concept) to promote a seamless brand experience from consumer through employee. Give them the list of your target schools (you have that right?) and start there.
2. Work to infuse an employer value proposition that is aligned with the consumer value proposition into all your messages, and don’t sound like anyone else.
3. Make sure you’re careers site has been recently refreshed, is up-to-date and mobile friendly (QR tags are optional), and your social media sites are integrated with your career/jobs information.

Remember: the brands that swim together, win together.

Let’s forget for a moment the hundreds of applicants who apply for a particular position, with a small percentage of them qualified. The candidate experience is not going to be positive for the unqualified applicants, and that’s okay. If they had taken seriously the minimum qualifications listed on the job posting, they would have realized they didn’t have a chance.

And let’s even forget those applicants who are qualified, but don’t have a strong enough background to be considered for an interview.

What we are talking about, however, is the candidate experience for those individuals who get invited to the company for an onsite interview. That’s where we have a problem. And it’s a big one.

As HR and recruiting professionals, we’re the face of the company for potential employees. We want to, and typically do, make a strong impression on leading job candidates. We politely and respectfully do screening interviews. We carefully match the hiring manager’s criteria with candidate skills. We provide recommendations on strongest applicants. We work closely with finalists to coordinate days and times for them to meet and interview everyone necessary within the company. We juggle internal calendars. We make follow-up calls. We prepare and distribute interview schedules. For some candidates we make travel arrangements and hotel accommodations. And we provide a welcoming smile and positive attitude when the candidate walks in the door.

And then we forget about them.

What? Forget about them? Well, not intentionally. But many times we do. And that leaves a much stronger and lasting negative impression on the candidate than all the other positive efforts we have made up until this point.

Think about your experience with job finalists who have been invited to onsite interviews. How many of them have you left hanging after the interview was over? How many have sent follow-up e-mails or letters thanking you for the opportunity to interview, and reiterating their qualifications? How many have called to follow up on the job status, never to hear another word from you.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many, many good recruiters, both internal and external. There are a few HR departments that put an emphasis on the candidate experience. Some do follow up with final candidates, even when the news is not positive. They share whatever information they can, from telling a candidate they were not selected for the position to telling candidates the position has been put on hold, or an internal candidate was selected. Sometimes they relay that the hiring manager has been delayed in making a final decision and that they simply wanted to keep the job finalists in the loop. That’s great communication.

But a great percentage of others leave the candidates in the dark. Never another word.

Is that fair to the candidate after all the effort he or she put into the interview process? Is that right to ignore a job finalist whom you have respectfully treated up to this point? Is this the way you want to treat someone who you feel may be a great future employee of your company, but perhaps just wasn’t the ideal fit for this position? If you were that candidate, wouldn’t you want to know at least a little bit of additional information? Particularly after the many hours you’ve invested in attaining that position?

Candidates understand that only one person can get the job. And they can readily accept when they are told that someone else was selected for the position. But not to say a word? That’s just not right. It takes a small amount of time on your behalf to do that final communication, but it can leave a lasting impact on the candidate. And a critical final impression of you personally, as well as the company brand.

Why wouldn’t you do that final communication?

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!