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When you are battling for talent in a highly competitive environment, you are likely to encounter more than your share of failures. In fact, because underperformance in recruiting is so common, I am constantly surprised when corporate recruiting leaders have no formal process for identifying specifically why their current recruiting efforts don’t produce their desired level of results. The formal method for identifying the factors that cause a process to fail is known as “failure analysis.” But unfortunately, even though it is used throughout business, failure analysis is seldom applied to the recruiting process.

I was recently reminded of the need for failure analysis while researching the extensive recruiting problems of oil and gas firms in the booming area around Alberta, Canada. I’ll be presenting my recruiting solutions at the Talent Hub Conference, Metropolitan Centre in Calgary, on Wednesday, September 19, 2012. But if you’re not involved in the petroleum industry, don’t worry because the same failure identification and prospect research processes can and should be used in any industry.  If you’re unfamiliar with the term “prospect research” it is a form of market research which involves the use of surveys and interviews to identify what worked and what didn’t work during the recruiting process and precisely what factors attract and turn off top prospects.

Prospect Market Research Is Required keep reading…

Think you don’t need an employer branding strategy? Read on about a few numbers.

88% keep reading…

In the corporate world, HR leaders are frequently considered some of the most conservative and risk-averse. Running HR in a conservative manner might have served your company well in the 1990s, but unfortunately it may be inappropriate and even damaging today. This fast-changing and highly competitive business world has caused senior executives to now expect innovation not just in their product lines but also in all of their business processes.

As a result, it’s time for HR leaders to realize that in a battle to attract and retain top talent and innovators, your firm has to act differently with superior talent management approaches if your firm is to develop and maintain a competitive advantage in the talent marketplace. In fact, from an employer branding perspective, your firm needs to do a few unique things in HR if it is to stand out as a great place to work.

As a professor, I am fortunate to have the time to track and give corporate presentations on the array of leading and “bleeding-edge” programs that a handful of firms have had the courage to implement. Almost by definition, bold HR programs are new, controversial, and full of risk, so don’t be surprised when you don’t agree with many of the listed approaches. I suggest that you compare them to your own programs in that functional area in order to see if perhaps your firm is being too conservative and is falling behind the leading edge.

The Top 10 Bold and Outrageous HR and Talent Management Practices keep reading…

Informatica, multiple honoree of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Award, has launched a new careers site whose design isn’t full of bells and whistles, but whose verbiage touts Informatica’s “big data, big difference, big purpose.” It’s part of an ongoing relaunch, with more changes to come.

The company, fighting hard to bring in hundreds of people, got help from an agency not well known in the recruiting field — Emotive Brand, which had about 10 people working with Informatica from start to finish.

What Emotive delivered over the past year was more than a site, but a larger strategy as to how to recruit. Its research showed that Informatica had a strong company brand, but not a strong employer brand. Put differently: you may not have heard of this company. Perhaps more important, “I don’t think people really knew why Informatica mattered,” says Emotive Partner Tracy Lloyd.

Screen shot of the top of Informatica's previous careers main page

Cindy Cloud, talent attraction consultant at Informatica, says the site has been designed to be “teed up” for a mobile version. In other words, it was built in such a way that it’ll be easy to convert to a mobile site, and has a bit of an iPad look to it. “Minimalist on content,” she says, “big on job searches. You don’t have to read through blah blah blah, culture this, culture that — this just accentuates our brand discourse, our language, instead of the usual.”

Monster and its client Marussia — a British auto-racing team — are running a turbo-charged recruiting campaign for car-racing-related jobs, one that’s relying heavily on social media and video, and in particular a contest, a bit reminiscent of Sunglass Hut’s, that has entrants essentially doing a bunch of employment marketing for Marussia on Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube.

This all began in the latter half of 2011. Marussia was a newer team (once called Virgin Racing) on the Formula 1 circuit that has hired 13 people this year and has 21 open jobs now.

Its HR team was practically a one-woman band, using Excel spreadsheets. That one woman was Katie Allen. Allen had been using agencies, as well as magazine ads, to attract people. The candidate experience was suffering a bit. Unbeknownst to her, her marketing department had been talking to Monster about a marketing partnership. Monster was, truthfully, a company that gave her slight hesitation. In her mind it was associated with, she says, a “high volume of candidates, with limited results.”

As conversations with Monster began, she began to change her thinking.

Marussia and Monster were, and are, looking for some fresh ideas for finding people, something to reduce headhunter spending in such a competitive industry with jobs like one involving buying metallic components. Marussia wanted Monster to help it appear “cool” and to have jobs that were so; in turn, Monster was happy to have a way to raise its cool factor — more on that latter point in a minute.

Marussia lacked the funding of some other teams, and was in less of a position to compete on what David Henry calls the “merry go ’round” of Formula 1 talent. It’d be harder to poach people from other teams. keep reading…

The Summer Olympics start soon and most will be focused on the athletic achievements, but the Olympics can provide many valuable lessons for recruiters. Recruiting leaders often say that they’re looking for “outside-the-box” approaches and it’s hard to argue against the fact that the Olympic recruiting approach differs significantly from the corporate recruiting model.

London 2012

What better example to emulate is there than a system that motivates and convinces thousands of individuals to make extraordinary sacrifices and to develop themselves beyond the capabilities of the athletes who preceded them? This Olympic people-management model routinely brings out world-record-breaking human performances.

So, while you’re watching the events, think about the powerful way that Olympic teams recruit and how their strategy and methods differ from the traditional and more conservative corporate approach.

Top Recruiting Lessons That Should be Learned From the Olympics keep reading…

You’d think after a Vanity Fair article talking about “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at Microsoft that has created a “lost decade,” there wouldn’t be much left to beat up on at the tech giant.

But you would be wrong. Add Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s Chief People Officer to the pantheon of autocratic Microsoft leaders like CEO Steve Ballmer, famously described as having the appearance of a Stalinist secret police operative by no less an insider than co-founder Paul Allen.

Brummel, now, has been even less flatteringly described — if that were possible — as the “most universally hated executive” at the company.

“Murmuring in the halls was that if the writer hadn’t been gunning so hard for [Ballmer] he’d had noticed the seething hatred of Lisa Brummel, perhaps the most universally hated exec in the place,” writes NetworkWorld blogger Andy Patrizio, quoting a source.

Ouch. keep reading…

A footwear company, known by consumers as FootSmart and officially as Benchmark Brands, is growing quickly, hoping to double in about four years, hiring recruiters, and adding an HR-recruiting-learning department which essentially has not existed prior. It even believes it’d be growing significantly faster if it had the right people in place, a refrain heard before in companies around the world.

FootSmart, based in Atlanta and with a distribution center in Memphis, has 300 employees. It caters to people who are getting up there in age (ha – like 45), or who have various feet and leg problems like blisters, bunions, plantar fasciities, back or knee pain, and so on. The combination of both comfort and health are what it sees as its advantage as a footwear company.

Thana Sakas is in charge of what the company calls its “Talent Asset Management” initiative. Before this, she was at Lee Hecht Harrison, a big outplacement outfit, and Accenture. Elizabeth Peterson, who has recruited for corporations and agencies, has joined Benchmark Brands as the director of talent acquisition. Lynette Harris, who has an HR background, is the new director of talent development.

Sakas started about seven months ago. Then, with about 280 employees, there was pretty much no HR department to speak of. The CEO realized he needed to hire strong recruiting and learning people, with benefits for the most part being outsourced.

Peterson has hired a full-time contract recruiter and a recruiting coordinator, a sourcer, and an additional part-time sourcer. “It’s just a moving target for us,” says Sakas, referring to her company’s growth. Prior to a recent workforce planning project, for example, the company thought it needed 18 people in the corporate office; it added 22 open spots after that planning was done.

Many of these open jobs are e-commerce jobs like Internet marketing and web development slots, for example. Some haven’t been posted yet. It uses Berglass + Associates for some top executive roles.

The value proposition — employer brand — Benchmark wants to achieve is a lot about growth, profitability, and cash flow. In other words, many retailers aren’t doing well, Sakas says, but this company is. keep reading…

This week on ERE.net, there is a unified focus by a wide range of authors on the use of LinkedIn. To me, this focus is justified because LinkedIn has the potential of becoming the #1 corporate recruiting portal.

I’m the first to admit that LinkedIn still has many flaws, but even with them, the power of the portal in the recruiting field is unmistakable. If you are a corporate recruiter and you are looking for a database or source that includes a large percentage of passive prospects, LinkedIn is simply alone at the top. It is superior for many additional reasons, including that its profiles are accurate and consistent, it allows your employees to find quality potential referrals, and it enables a firm to conduct phenomenal talent management research. In this article, I will highlight what I have found to be the top strengths of LinkedIn.

The Top 20 Reasons to Use LinkedIn keep reading…

There is no more valuable recruit than a “Purple Squirrel.” In fact, a single Purple Squirrel recruit may be more impactful than all of your other hires combined during a single year. If you’re not familiar with the term, a Purple Squirrel is the moniker that denotes an extremely rare and talented recruiting target. Purple Squirrels are valuable because they are extreme innovators. Once hired, they can change your firm’s capabilities, direction, and marketplace success almost instantly.

The benchmark Purple Squirrel was Tony Fadell, who conceived of the concept of the MP3 player while he was at Philips. But Apple recruited him away, allowing them to dominate and make billions in a product area (the iPod) where they had little expertise before recruiting him. This single Purple Squirrel acquisition made Apple billions and set the expectation for future market dominating innovations at Apple!

The most stunning thing, however, about Purple Squirrel recruiting is the fact that there is literally a zero chance that these valuable game-changers and pioneers can be recruited using the existing recruiting process at 99.5% of the world’s major corporations. For example, everyone would agree that Steve Jobs, even in his youth, was a Purple Squirrel, but the fact is that he was rejected by the recruiting process at HP, despite all his talent, simply because he had no college degree.

These purple squirrels are true pioneers with the capability of not only coming up with original ideas but also in successfully implementing them. Purple Squirrels are generally not senior executives, but instead, they are often mid-level employees in product development, technology, mathematics, social media, or the monetization of products and services. Each of these areas are essential for market domination.

Why You Should Develop a Process for Recruiting Purple Squirrels keep reading…

In the informative webinar presented by Amelia Merrill of Risk Management Solutions, we’ll be taking a close look at the tools and strategies you’ll need to entice and engage top talent. Amelia will be discussing the importance of designing an attractive and functional career site that helps you stand out from the competition. In addition, we’ll be covering ways to engage your candidate base once they have applied, including staying in touch through video, live and virtual events, social media, and chat.

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

Recruiting is important at any firm, but it is super critical at startup firms. This is because when you have thousands of employees, you can still get by after hiring a few turkeys. At a startup, however, you are so lean that every hire must count and a single bad hire can cause incredible damage.

To further complicate the matter, large firms have a product and employer brand that can attract applicants. Startups have no name recognition, no recruiters, and only an informal recruiting process. The recruiting is made even more difficult because startups are often targeting engineers and IT staff, which are the second- and third-most difficult-to-fill jobs.

Don’t despair. It is possible to recruit great people to a startup if you are aggressive and you know the right tools to use. The following is a list of recruiting approaches and tools that are tailored to the limited resources and the special needs of startup firms.  keep reading…

When people think of Mars, most often they think of chocolate — and we do make some of the best-loved chocolate in the world! But we’re much more.

It began with Frank Mars and his wife, Ethel. Together they started making candy in their kitchen in Tacoma, Washington, in 1911. Little did they know that a century later, Mars Inc., the company they formed, would be a global giant in chocolate, pet care, food, drinks, gum, confections, and health sciences, producing some of the world’s favorite brands, including M&M’S®, Snickers®, Milky Way®, Orbit®, Skittles®, Uncle Ben’s, and Pedigree®. We own the world’s largest privately-owned veterinary practice. We’ve got more than 65,000 associates, and a reach that extends across five continents into 180 countries.

We’re extremely proud that even after 100 years of global success and hundreds of household names created, we’re still a private, family-owned business. And that’s a deliberate choice. Because by not having external shareholders to satisfy, and taking our own profits and investing them back into the business, we get to have a long-term view on investment.

So being successful, and yes, profitable, to us is not about paying out dividends. It’s about maintaining our freedom to do what’s right, on our own terms. This independence means our associates can work with far fewer restrictions, and at the same time carry more responsibility. They’re free to take educated risks, defy convention and, most important of all, act quickly and decisively.

It’s quite a success story, and one that became the foundation of our employer brand campaign that best be summed up this way: Storytelling.

In Florida, in September, I’m going to take you on this journey through the rich history of Mars; the principle-based approach to business; the portfolio of iconic brands; and the employer branding campaign that quickly led to international recognition.

The storytelling campaign launched with Mars’ re-branding of its food businesses to take on the Mars name. We set out to build a more visible corporate brand, as the Mars name was not associated with its brands and had little recognition as an employer.

I’ll tell you about the challenges due to the diversity of our businesses and the strong consumer brands. I’ll describe the deep reflection that went on about the principles and the culture that are the “Essence of Mars.” And I’ll tell you about the compelling “One Mars” storytelling campaign — and the results.

See you in Florida.

About a year ago, I wrote about Facebook overtaking and eventually replacing LinkedIn. Since both social networks have been in the news recently, I thought now would be a good time to look back on that prediction — and how the social media recruiting landscape has changed since then.

image from pammarketingnut.com

In the past few weeks, LinkedIn has announced a doubling of revenue, acquired SlideShare, and crossed the 100-million-user mark. Facebook, meanwhile, had its much-anticipated IPO, which fell far short of optimistic expectations.

When I wrote the blog post back in August, Google+ wasn’t a factor, and no one had heard of Pinterest. But now both sites are being used by big names, from Michael Kors to BWM to Fresh & Easy, for recruiting and employer branding. This means that LinkedIn is facing competition — but not necessarily from Facebook. keep reading…

What do you expect from a website feature whose URL is mynitro.com/nobullshit?

What’s after the slash is what Nitro tries to give you in its new careers site feature, a little game built by Nitro’s developers. The San Francisco company, in the paperless office/document management business, wants to show that it is creative, fun, Australian-influenced, and un-corporate. So it asks candidates if they want to take the “wombat pack” career track or the “corporate drone” career track, as well as a few other quick questions to that effect.

On the site, it says it’s looking for engineers and product managers (and even a recruiter) who are “rock stars” and who “get *%$@ done.” Except it doesn’t use those characters.

Like most every other careers pages, it unfortunately loses a bit of the cool factor once you click on the job descriptions. Anyhow, check it out here.

When most recruiters learn about a potential new media channel like Pinterest or Instagram, their initial reaction is often to discount them as a low-volume source. Many recruiters shortsightedly fail to see their value, no matter how many desirable prospects “hang out” on them, simply because the new source is not designed primarily to be a recruiting site. But don’t let those recruiters with a shortsighted “fill the requisitions mentality” steer you away from a strategic opportunity to build your firm’s image as an innovator by being the first to use new approaches.

Including innovative practices and sources in your recruiting is essential because innovators look for signs of innovation in the recruiting process as an indicator that innovation permeates the firm. And if your firm is one of the first users of these hot sites, you further reinforce your employer brand image as a first mover and innovative firm. If you are going to be a strategic recruiting function, you need to look beyond the short-term goal of filling reqs. 

Build Your Image as an Innovative Firm keep reading…

According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.

This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.

In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.

And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. keep reading…

Marriott is giving away $100 each day for 10 days to a different job seeker, a Facebook freebie meant to generate a little attention to the company’s community and make more people aware it has open jobs.

The hotel chain received the 2012 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employment branding category. It also has experimented with Facebook contests and games in the past, as mentioned in this post by Matt Jeffery.

Marriott’s Jessica Lee and I talk about the shoe program, below. She describes what drove the creation of the giveaway; how the company will measure results; what it means by a “spirit of community” it wants to create; and the balancing act between investing in a Facebook career page vs. a corporate careers site. keep reading…

Most organizations need to work on how they develop and articulate their employer brand strategies. Just over half of employers claim to have an employer brand strategy (51%), a fifth (19%) are in the process of revising one, and 24% are working towards one. That’s what Bernard Hodes Group learned from our new research, called The Growing Value of Employer Brands.

Of those employers that claim to have a strategy, the average age of it is 4.3 years. The results suggest that many employers are using strategies pre-dating the Great Recession. Relying on an old strategy is a recipe for disaster given the changes in workers’ attitudes wrought by turbulent labor markets and the rise of new channels such as social media.

The survey polled 175 employers across the U.S. in a spectrum of industries from education to manufacturing. About 240 employees were surveyed and were not necessarily employed by any of the participating employers. When comparing the two sets of data, there are some stark disconnects (see the graphic in the upper right). Some of the most noteworthy include:

• Only 25% of employers indicated that compensation is one of the most important attributes of an employer brand, compared with 64% of employees.
• Job security was ranked highly by 41% of employees, but only 21% of employers.
• Just 15% of employers felt that recognition is important in attracting new hires, while 33% of employees ranked it highly.
• Nearly half of employers (44%) felt career growth and advancement opportunities are important to attracting talent, while just over a quarter of talent (27%) agreed.

Looking at the data, one gets the impression that many employers may have lost common sense. keep reading…

I met with a client today who made me smile — a Cheshire-Cat-Eating-Grin Smile, as a matter of fact.

He said, “Heather, I need to invest in the screening phase to figure out if these candidates are a good fit for our culture and our clients. That way, I don’t have to give up resources when I fire them later.”

DUH! 

After I wiped the grin off my face, I told him I was proud of him and glad to hear it. (I refrained from reminding him I’ve been preachin’ that for years.)

Pay now or pay later … either way you’ll pay. 

If you are a recruiter, HR professional, supervisor, or leader who wants to fill the seat, there is no need to read more of this post. Good luck to you.

However, if you want to fit someone with your organization and have him stick, read on. keep reading…