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When I attend career fairs, hiring conferences, recruiting events, or through conversations with prospective candidates, I keep learning that the wrong people are attending these events and working as recruiters. As I walked the room at a recent career fair, prior to the event starting, I sought to introduce myself to some of the other company representatives. I was surprised that many of them were unable to communicate at a level that would properly represent their company.

The behavior I witnessed at this event and many others is predictive of how these recruiters behave in the office and how they represent their company through other communication tools such as social media. Later as the candidates flowed into the fair to meet the companies, I witnessed these individuals sitting behind their tables, eating food, talking on cell phones, and displaying body language that suggested they didn’t want to be bothered.

Fortunately, I witnessed several individuals that did exhibit proper career fair behavior and strong recruiting traits. They were the ones that had long lines of candidates and also the ones whose companies are always recognized as recruiting industry leaders. The difference in success was clear.

We can all gain market intelligence by speaking with prospective candidates and finding out where they have applied, who they have interviewed with, and what their experiences have been like. Some of the experiences that I have heard are horrific, yet not surprising. So why do HR and recruiting leaders continually hire or put the wrong people into recruiting positions? I don’t get it.

Each year there are new tools, technologies, and platforms developed to help take “recruiting to the next level,” as the cliche goes. The problem is, all of these wonderful breakthroughs can be fruitless due to inadequate operator behavior. Moreover, if companies and organizations really want to eliminate or lower their agency recruiting spending, then start hiring similar profiles and not promoting an individual out of customer service or demoting someone from another department and sending them to recruit.

Regardless of where your next recruiter comes from, I have developed some essential skills, traits, and qualities that successful recruiters should possess. Aside from the regular “good communication, ability to work hard, team player” skills that everyone wants — here are a few of the most important must haves: keep reading…

Back in the day, online career events were exciting only for their novelty.

To tell the truth, as recently as a few years ago, online job fairs were barely a step above what employers would get for buying a posting contract on a job board: a place to list open jobs, a corporate profile, access to resumes, maybe live text chat, a bulletin board discussion area, and some off-site advance promotion. These events would typically run for days or weeks.

Once the excitement of the Internet’s bursts of innovation began to wane, so did enthusiasm for the online job fairs. Relegated to the sidelines, they chugged along sponsored by colleges, the occasional job board,  tech companies, and some newspapers.

But now, with interactivity commonplace and budgets tight, new life is being breathed into online recruiting events.

Next week, two ambitious events will take place on successive days. One is a bonafide career fair. The other a Twitter-based jobs conference.

Tuesday, TweetMyJOBS will bring together, virtually, a raft of top-flight job search and recruiting professionals, to participate in panels and workshops on subjects from branding to networking to career changing.

Tweetnoting (as the press release describes it) the American Jobs Conference is presidential candidate and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. This is worth watching if for no other reason than to see how he manages to deliver his address — Getting Americans Back to Work — in 140 characters.

It starts at 9 a.m. PDT and runs until 3:15. The general hashtag is #jobs4US, and it’s already getting a workout. Hashtags will be assigned for each of the sessions once the agenda is completed.

TweetMyJobs was acquired a few months ago by the CareerArc Group, which also owns a few other career and recruiting focused sites.

On Wednesday, some of the largest newspapers in the country will participate in a virtual career fair as far from the old-school events as YouTube is from Hampster Dance.

To anyone who has ever played an online game or wandered around a virtual world, the environment of the Tribune Digital-organized job fair will be entirely familiar. Job seekers navigate by moving through a conference center to visit the various employer recruiting booths. keep reading…

McDonald’s is hoping tomorrow’s nationwide hiring push will get it more than the 50,000 workers it figures it needs to keep pace with sales.

As much as it wants to grow its workforce, the company is even more anxious to pump up its street cred as not just the place to go for a paycheck when you can’t find anything else. To combat its image as a provider of minimum-wage, dead-end, burger-flipping jobs, McDonald’s launched an ad blitz a few weeks ago to promote the event and its jobs as a pathway to a career.

Jan Fields, president of McDonald’s USA, told the Chicago Tribune that  company executives will appear at many of the chain’s restaurants to share their own career stories. Fields herself began her career behind a McDonald’s counter when she was in school.

In the interviews Fields is giving, she highlights the numbers of restaurant owners (50 percent) and corporate staff (40 percent) who started their careers working at a McDonald’s.

The company has also been beefing up its social media efforts. It now has a YouTube career channel with eight “Why I Love My McJob” type videos. None have received much traffic, despite being teased from the company’s Facebook page with a post saying, “Working for us can be much more than just a job. It’s a career that starts with you getting all the tools you need to succeed.”

The effort, especially when compared to companies like Starbucks or Hyatt, has a ways to go. For an event of the magnitude of a 50,000 target one-day hiring push, there’s nothing about it listed on the company’s “Events” tab.  Nor is there anything about it on the corporate careers site. keep reading…

As Johnny and Jane come marching back from war to prepare for the next chapter of their lives, they face the daunting challenge of turning their military experience into machine-readable resumes and elevator speeches that convince corporate recruiters to give them a second look.

“The novelette of their experience in the military,” says Sherrill Curtis, doesn’t always translate clearly.

Agrees Carl Blum, “The hardest problem they have is translating their military experience into civilian language so a recruiter can understand what they have to offer.

Curtis, Blum, and Blum’s partner in an organization called Tip of the Arrow, Bob Deissig, and Sgt. Major James Clark were the prime movers of a program last month at New Jersey’s  Ft. Dix called “Ultimate Warrior Career Workshops and Job Fair.”

They had plenty of help. The Garden State (New Jersey) SHRM council signed on early to the project, supplying dozens of recruiters, supplemented by career coaches from the state’s professional association, and representatives from federal agencies and area colleges.

But this was no ordinary job fair, although some 70 employers showed up and Blum tells us 200 of the participants expect offers. keep reading…

A new survey says students choose nursing because they want to help people. But the money doesn’t hurt.

The student nurses who frequent CampusRN by a margin of 4 to 1 say  they chose a nursing career for altruistic reasons. Even after a year or two of chemistry, biology, anatomy, and other challenging classes, 98 percent said they would still choose a healthcare career.

At the same time, 54 percent of the students taking the survey said salary is their No. 1 consideration in picking an employer. Close behind are hours and schedule, benefits, and the quality of management and staff, each with 45 percent.

CampusRN, which, as its name suggests is a niche career site for nursing students, conducted the survey in conjunction with Bernard Hodes. As do most of these online surveys, the report cautions not to draw far-reaching conclusions since the 661 respondents came exclusively from the CampusRN site and chose to participate, coaxed by a contest and $5. keep reading…

Monster launched its free, 47-city Keep America Working Tour in New York City today amidst a flurry of media attention and a jobseeker turnout that filled the Marriott Marquis and snaked into Times Square.

“This is not just a career fair,” Monster’s Eric Weingardner told us from the hotel as he stole a few minutes from the show floor. “This is a career experience.”

OK so it’s a little bit of hyperbole, but not as much as you might think. The job fair is about jobs of course, which is what prompted some 3,500 jobseekers to pre-register for the event. But the workshops occurring every half-hour covered marketing and branding yourself, career planning and, naturally, Monster’s new, online planning tools. Monster career experts circulated among the crowd while kiosks offered tutorials on using Monster.com.

More than 1,000 jobs were available from the 92 participating employers. Big names, such as Macy’s, Manpower, and Wachovia were represented, as were smaller employers some of whom may never have participated in a job fair before.

To coax employers to participate, there is no charge. Instead, says Weingardner, vice president of client adoption, “Do you have compelling work? That’s what we’re looking for.”

Any Monster customer with jobs available can participate in any of the 140 fairs the company is planning between now and the end of the year. “The only way we could do this is to bring this in-house,” Weingardner explained. In past years, planning and management of the for-fee job fairs was done by an outside firm. In New York, 40 Monster employees are running the show produced by the Global Events Team.

Monster’s partner, Adicio, is powering the registration process and hosting the career fair information site. Different elements of its virtual career fair platform will be used according to the needs of each stop on the Keep America Working Tour. A calendar of the upcoming job fairs is available here. Companies interested in participating should contact their Monster sales rep or call 1-800-MONSTER.

(the chart in this story was updated February 23)

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

keep reading…

A career fair with an international flair is coming to San Francisco later this month. No ordinary career fair, ICF’09 features companies from around the world with an especially large contingent of French firms and even including the Office for Science and Technology of the French embassy.

In years past, upwards of 1,000 engineering, science, or business management students and professionals have attended the fairs. In 2008 a third of the 1,300 candidates came from the U.S. But almost almost as many came from Asia. Another quarter came from Europe.

And what a smart group. In 2007, 55 percent of the attendees had either a Master’s or a Ph.D.; 28 percent were MBAs.

The job fair is organized by Apec (Association Pour l’Emploi des Cadres), a French agency specializing in the employment of engineers, managers, and executives. The agency has been running internationally-flavored events since 2002 and has a small team in San Francisco that manages the International Career Fair each year.

Among this year’s sponsors include LinkedIn, the provincial government of Alberta, Canada, the European Union, and Bundesagentur Fur Arbeit, Germany’s federal employment agency. At this point, the website lists 20 participating employers. Not surprisingly, the number is about half the 40 participants last year, though more are expected.

If you work at a company that has recently cut back on its recruiting budget, but not on its high expectations, attempting to deliver can be frustrating.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

keep reading…

Recruiters who don’t communicate with recruiting source representatives are passing up opportunities to drive efficiencies up, and cost of hire down. That’s because many sources will organize recruiting events, publicize them, and connect recruiters with candidates free of charge.

Yet recruiting source representatives say they rarely hear from corporate recruiters, only receiving infrequent calls when a recruiter needs to fill an immediate opening.

Says Bev Principal, assistant director of student employment services at the Stanford University Career Development Center: “If I meet with a company representative during the summer, and receive information about its entire breadth of career opportunities, not just the immediate openings, I can pass that information along to students during career counseling sessions or I’ll remember to invite that company to participate in specific career events here on campus.”

Principal says she regularly e-mails students about recruiting events, and sends a monthly newsletter to engineering students. If she has information to share about an employer or its job opportunities, she passes it along.

John Weitzel, internship coordinator at El Camino College, says that employers are often disappointed in student turnout when they schedule a last-minute campus recruiting event. He starts promoting the retail holiday job fair, for example, when students first return to school in mid-August, and companies like FedEx and Disney set up campus recruiting visits a year in advance. FedEx is on the students’ radar screens because it recruits on campus every Monday.

“Not every student knows what they want to do when they finish school,” says Weitzel. “If I know Northrop Grumman has jobs other than engineering, like grant-writing and marketing, I can talk about those opportunities with students who seem suited for those careers.”

Even sources that provide experienced candidates can be better used through proactive planning. Olin King, site manager for the West Covina office of the California Employment Development Department, says that employees who lose their jobs due to offshoring receive special benefits and retraining, and he can sway them toward specific courses — if he knows local employers have hiring needs.

“We can set-up recruitment sessions, where we’ll line up the candidates and employers can come to our office to interview,” says King. “There are opportunities for employers to provide career advice to 300 experienced workers at our older and wiser seminars, which cater to job seekers 40 and older. We also bring education and employers together to fulfill specific needs in the community, but the only way to do that is through collaboration, and I just don’t hear from corporate recruiters.”

There is a next-generation college recruiting strategy that is gradually making the traditional approach seem as outdated as phones with wires.

I call this new approach über college recruiting (über is German for superior) because it is so aggressive. This advanced approach began emerging in the late 1990s and was most often associated with high technology firms like Trilogy and Cisco.

The practices were so successful, so exciting, and so out-of-the box that urban legends still abound about what these true innovators were doing over a decade ago. Recently, über recruiting has been re-energized by the antics and the advanced methods of the Google recruiting machine.

Google has adopted the über approach in part because of its use of metrics. Most firms stick with mainstream college recruiting efforts because breaking free of the status quo isn’t easy, as few in the HR world seem willing to take on the challenge and make the business case for something different.

Google, being an organization full of advanced mathematicians, scientists, and engineers took the time to calculate that a top technologist from a graduating class is worth 300 times more than an average grad. When they talk about top technologists, they are not talking about the best who approach their college recruiting booth during a career fair, but rather that one truly unique innovator who may someday change the world. Having calculated the value of such exceptional talent, Google is willing to shift its approach and spend whatever resources are needed to become the #1 college brand. They have championed the über approach because the old traditional approach just can’t guarantee extraordinary hires.

Most Firms Utilize the Traditional Approach

I estimate that 95% of corporate college recruiting programs follow the traditional model because everyone is familiar with it and they are simply comfortable using it. I sometimes call the traditional model the “career center focus” model because it relies so heavily on services offered by the career center, and very little on actual scouting for talent.

The primary steps in the traditional model are simple and straightforward:

1. Pick your top schools in the U.S. and the majors to target.
2. Arrange with the career center dates for information sessions and interviews.
3. Place ads announcing the info session.
4. Develop brochures and recruiting collateral.
5. Offer food that is good enough to attract, and give a compelling talk.
6. Hold on-campus interviews.
7. Make your offers.

It’s straightforward, relatively inexpensive, and it produces enough hires to make everyone happy. Unfortunately, most executives, hiring managers, and recruiters are satisfied with it in part because they are unaware that there are other more advanced options that yield a clear competitive advantage. The advanced college recruiting model contains more sophisticated elements designed to ensure extraordinary results.

A Checklist of the Major Elements of Über College Recruiting

The advanced or über approach contains many elements that are either under-emphasized or completely absent from the traditional approach. The primary distinction between the traditional and über models is the reduced emphasis on campus information sessions and increased focus on branding, technology, relationship building, aggressive marketing, and fact-based decision-making.

If you want to be part of the “elite” 5% that use the advanced approach, here are 9 key elements that make the advanced college recruiting model so powerful:

keep reading…

In Boulder — where unemployment is around 4.6%, much lower than nationally — a group of employers are banding together to fly in top software developers for an unusual career fair.

Candidates will come in for two days during the week of October 27-31. They’ll learn the Boulder life, hear pitches from startups, and interview, probably speed-dating style. (You can bet they’ll be wined and dined at night, too.) Their flight, hotel, and transportation are all paid for.

Tim Miller, CEO of Rally Software, says “the general economy and the tech economy are booming. We’re all competing over what is is higher and higher demand for tech talent. It’s hard to get people locally.”

Rally hires about 1 or 2 percent of its applicants. If it hires a couple of engineers from the Halloween-week event in Boulder, Miller says the approximately $5,000 fee he’ll pay for the event will be a bargain.

Casey Schorr feels about the same way. He’s the CEO of Printfection.com, where you can design and sell T-shirts. Schorr says that signing up for the fair was “pretty much a no-brainer.” When one of Schorr’s friends — who is helping organize the event — told him about it, Schorr responded, “that’s an amazing idea, I’m in” before knowing the cost. The money, as it turns out, is about a quarter of what he pays a recruiter.

“Finding really high quality software developers is very, very, difficult,” he says, referring to folks such as database administrators, PHP programmers, and My SQL developers. “Anybody you want working for you is already working for another company. We need to ‘import’ our talent, I guess you could say. There are a lot of great programmers out there who live in [for example] Fargo, North Dakota, or somewhere in Mississippi.”

Schorr says of the recruiting fair: “It’s pretty ad-hoc. That’s pretty much how the community runs up here in Boulder.”

Employee referral programs are the most powerful tool in recruiting, routinely producing the highest quality and volume of experienced hires.

Yet for some unexplained reason, most corporate college-hire programs don’t have a referral component.

A few firms have pioneered in the college referral area. For example, the always leading-edge talent team at Intuit has produced amazing results with micro-cash bonuses (over 50% of their hires from one university came from their student referral program).

And Endeca found that Harvard and MIT students were willing to make amazing referrals with the promise of a flat-screen TV as a reward. Bold, but effective!

Not having a referral program as a key element of your college recruiting effort is a missed opportunity because no group of potential candidates are more connected with their peers than college students.

And the stronger the connections, the better referral programs work. Students connect through social networking sites, text messaging, online forums, face-to-face in classrooms, at social events, and in student organizations. If you understand their social connections, it’s relatively easy to develop a formal “college hire referral program” that can supplement your career-center efforts and produce a majority of your intern and college graduate hires.

Think about it, you can have others do more than “half of the work” in college recruiting (by making referrals), which frees up time and resources to focus on the other half.

The Referral Concept

The basic premise of all employee referral programs is that “the very best” know other top individuals. They get to know them because top performers learn from and compare themselves to other top performers. Professionals are constantly talking to each other on the phone, through text messaging, and Internet forums.

Shifting the focus to students, it’s clear that the best students know other top students because they identify them and compete against them in classes. They also meet each other in social situations, in student groups and clubs, in honor societies, and of course, online.

All referral programs work by getting others to share with your recruiters the names of the top individuals that they know. By merely asking or by offering a small incentive, they will likely share these names.

keep reading…

In the United States, students are just beginning to return to campus after the summer holidays. For most organizations, college recruiting will also resume with the timeless routine of information sessions and campus visits for job fairs, interviews, and other related events.

But smart organizations are foregoing the traditional campus activities, in favor of leveraging the Internet. In fact, if you want to attract and hire the best students, forget going to campus at all; it’s not necessary.

College students tell me they are confused by the entire recruiting process. Organizations on the leading-edge of technology are still using the most traditional of methods to recruit them.

While every student has a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile, most companies do not use them in the recruiting process at all. Students are actually a bit surprised that recruiters seem to use recruiting tactics that their parents relate to better than they do. Many are involved in virtual worlds, take online webinars, download lectures as podcasts, and learn from virtual professors. Yet, they must listen to a hiring manager and watch a PowerPoint presentation about some company in a stuffy room on campus.

Unfortunately, recruiters’ belief in the efficacy of past practices is reinforced with surveys by a variety of organizations and institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. But if you take a few minutes to sit down and actually talk to students, you get a different picture of what they would like, what would impress them, and what would engage them.

As demand for college graduates continues to steadily rise, the supply and demand figures for college students should be warning that times have changed.

The number of college students is fairly flat, growing at perhaps 1% a year, and is projected to remain that way for at least another four or five years. Another little-noted fact is that more women than men are enrolled in college and, unfortunately for the high tech and engineering worlds, women don’t tend to major in engineering, mathematics, physics, or computer science. All of these fields are facing significant declines in enrollments and in graduates.

Also consider the students of all age groups graduating from virtual universities that have no campuses. These students are valuable resources for corporations that are currently almost untouched and unrecognized.

Facing these challenges, I don’t see how organizations can focus on just a few campuses or limit their reach to elite schools. Here are a half-dozen tactics to guide your virtual efforts on campus:

keep reading…

The victors in this year’s college recruiting wars may attract Gen Yers by throwing lots of green at them. Not signing bonuses and hefty salaries, but trees. Towers Perrin intends to appeal to new grads by demonstrating its commitment to the environment, so the professional services firm will donate 100 trees to American Forests’ Global ReLeaf education and action program for each of the 50 career fairs it holds on college campuses beginning in September. It’s a new twist to recruit “green-minded” grads by a company that doesn’t specialize in environmental jobs.

Towers Perrin has also printed all of its recruiting brochures and materials on recycled paper and will distribute T-shirts embellished with the phrase “Go Green” to grads who attend the firm’s office recruiting events, according to recruiting director Jen Warne.

“We’ve tied an eco-friendly theme throughout our entire recruiting campaign, including our pending launch of a new page on Facebook,” says Warne. “It’s a clear demonstration of our corporate values, so we’re hoping it will differentiate us from our competitors.”

Part 1 of a 2-part series

Almost 10 years ago, when I took my first job in recruiting (third-party search), I read on my new employer’s website: “The difference is in the way we manage relationships.”

At the time, I suppose I thought it was a nice marketing line or one of those great company mission statements that companies use but never live. Sure, we manage relationships. I guess I hadn’t been in the business long enough then to fully comprehend how that might be possible because I was only thinking in terms of filling job orders.

I used to watch as the owner of the company spent endless hours on the phone with executives from all sorts of different companies, and talking about the most random things. He talked with one candidate about how she enjoyed Qi Jong, with another about the joys of piloting small planes, and listened intently as another candidate complained about how frustrated he was with his career at a Fortune 100 company.

All the while I was plugging away, sourcing for my open reqs and wondering how he could afford to spend so much time talking about nothing with so many people.

“Don’t think about the money,” he used to say. Easy for him, I thought. He’s the owner of the company, and I’m still making sure the rent is paid.

Sometimes he’d go for months without placing a single candidate and then suddenly he’d get a huge search worth six figures, and as if by magic he already knew exactly who he should be talking to in order to fill the role. Because he had spent the time building relationships, he had a huge network of contacts he could draw from when the time came. He was sourcing before he ever received a job order, and clients always returned to him because they could count on the fact that his database was filled with all the right names.

keep reading…

So many of us have wasted days going to local job fairs to come home with, well, nothing to show for it. Holding a company job fair at your location or a neutral space is a great way for your company to see a ton of employees who want to work for you all in one location at a time.

One company I worked with eventually stopped spending money on job fairs and now hosts its own once or twice a quarter.

keep reading…

Looking for a world class recruiter? This week ERE is hosting its annual West Coast conference, and there’s no better place to find the best recruiters than this event. First of all, the best recruiting managers and recruiters in North America attend it, because it’s the oldest and most prestigious electronic recruiting event. Firms like Microsoft and Intuit use it as a primary source for hiring recruiters. Second, and perhaps most important, professional events are one of the smartest ways to recruit employed top performers (the most desirable target for any top-notch recruiter.) I have found that recruiting at professional events, when approached correctly, produces the second-highest quality of hire of any source after proactive referrals. It works so well that critics are almost immediately silenced.

Why Recruit at a Trade Fair or Professional Conference?

Unlike a job fair, in which people decide to attend on their own, a trade fair or a conference is a gathering of the very best professionals in any industry, who all are sent by the company. Because they are sent by their firms, you can generally be assured that they all are the top-performing managers, salespeople, and technical experts. Having all of the top people in an industry together at once in a single building is an opportunity too good to pass up if you’re looking to recruit the best. One top firm found that 80 percent of the people who walked through their trade-fair booth at the largest industry conference were employees of direct competitors who were seeking out information about them. This provides a smart recruiter with a great opportunity to turn the tables on these “spies” and to recruit them away using the trade-fair booth. Most companies under-use or under-appreciate the value of recruiting at professional events, and only a handful or recruiting directors have even looked at the ROI of recruiting there.

A while back, when I was the Chief Talent Officer of Agilent Technologies, we looked into the efficiency of recruiting at professional events and even college vacation events. What we found was that, when adequately designed, this recruiting strategy produced spectacular results. Think about recruiting at industry conferences for a minute. Where could any recruiter get the opportunity to have literally thousands of the best people in an industry “locked up” in a building over a three-day period? For anyone who is any good at recruiting, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. They can’t get away, and if you have your top people recruiting there, candidates might even approach you. Some additional reasons why event recruiting is such an affective approach include:

• The best attend. If you’ve ever been a manager with the travel budget, you know that you always send your best people to the professional conference that represents your industry and function. You don’t send a below-average or average employee. You send the employees who will represent your firm well and who want to go. Top performers get to be top performers through continuous learning and networking.

keep reading…

One of the biggest problems facing directors of corporate recruiting these days isn’t the shortage of applicants, but rather the shortage of great recruiters. Magnifying the impact of the problem is the fact that only a handful of recruiting directors have taken the time to write a strategy or develop an approach that would improve their chances of hiring the best recruiters. In fact, the majority of the approaches that I have seen are so unstructured that they would be laughed at if they were used to recruit an engineer or an accountant. If you’re ready to hear about and try some new ideas and outside the box approaches, read on.

The Problem Is Here Today

Although many experts are talking about a shortage of talent that will hit in 2006, in many regions and industries the shortage is already occurring. Job posting sites that target recruiters, like ERE’s job board, have seen a marked increase in the number of job postings recently, many of which remain unfilled for long periods indicating a shortage. Some directors of recruiting expect to “rehire” the throngs of recruiters that were laid-off following the collapse of the dot-com bubble and the recessionary gap that followed, but little has been done to figure out if that workforce will return. There is no doubt that the demand for recruiters that occurred during the war for talent in the late ’90s brought record numbers of new entrants into the field. It seemed back then that almost anyone with experience or even interest in recruiting was in high demand. Unfortunately, when the boom ended and entire recruiting departments were eliminated, so too did a lot of interest in the role. The feast-to-famine cycle occurred so quickly that it left a lasting impression on every recruiting professional. The inability to get a job for a three-to-four-year period encouraged many recruiters to pursue alternate professions, including a number of professions less subject to cyclical demand.

Many of these “former recruiters” consider a return to this cycle that offers them no real job security a distant possibility. Were former recruiters to return to their desks, many companies would find that the skill sets they possess were developed when the business world, and thus the recruiting world, had not yet become truly global. As a result, most former recruiters just don’t have the skills and experience that is required to recruit and retain talent around the world. The tools and techniques they once mastered, while designed to recruit volume, could not begin to keep pace with today’s practices that have seen dramatic increases in Internet recruiting, the growth of referral networking, metrics, outsourcing and ATS technology. Related to this issue — and further compounding the recruiter skill shortage — is the fact that tight budgets have meant that few current recruiters have received any kind of formal recruiter training in the last three years. Corporate recruiting departments will not be the only ones that will have difficulty in recruiting recruiters. In addition, agencies and outsourcing firms that offer contract recruiting services will battle for what recruiting talent does exist. As a result, those corporate recruiting managers that expected to rely heavily on outsourcing may be disappointed. In fact, some vendors are already unable to accept new clients because they also lack the recruiting manpower. Many companies admit that those vendors who are accepting new assignments are delivering lower quality service because they are having difficulty recruiting and retaining even average recruiters.

Great Recruiters Are Different

The most crucial step in developing a world-class corporate recruiting function is to attract and retain top recruiters. Before you begin looking for recruiters, it’s important to realize that great recruiters are not in the same league as average recruiters. If you use the wrong “finding tools,” you almost guarantee that you will only get “average” recruiters as applicants.

As Chris Forman, the CEO of AIRS, so aptly put it, “A great recruiter is worth a thousand times more than an average recruiter.” I certainly agree with this assessment. For example, in one top firm, I calculated the impact on revenue of a single world-class recruiting professional to be over $20 million. In contrast, a poor recruiter can actually reduce your revenue by hurting your brand and either “missing” or scaring away top performers. The very best that you want to target are “aggressive” recruiters with excellent research and selling skills. I call them “warrior” recruiters. It’s important to realize that if you search for great recruiters using only the typical keyword search criteria, like the number of years’ experience in recruiting, you are dooming your process from the very beginning. You should also remember that many people who were or can be excellent recruiters are not currently in the recruiting field, so you might need to look outside of recruiting in order to find them. It takes a very special set of skills (or competencies) to be a great recruiter, and if your search utilizes the wrong tools and screening processes, you will be easily and frequently fooled. To recruit great recruiters, you need a strategy and a written plan to identify and sell the very best. The foundation of any successful strategy is determining at the very beginning whether you’re looking for active or passive candidates. Although great recruiters are certainly not “passive” individuals, they are very much like the so-called “passive” candidates that they are paid to seek out as recruiters, in that that the very best recruiters do not actively post their resumes on large job boards. In addition, while many read newspaper ads and attend job fairs as part of their job, they don’t use those tools directly to find their own next job. And yes (for those unemployed recruiters out there), I am saying that if a recruiter applies for a vacancy and is easy to find and sell, the odds of them being a great recruiter are so small that they probably aren’t worth the trouble.

Great recruiters are just like great salespeople, seven-foot centers, and great CEOs: If you want a great one, expect to have to poach them away from numerous other great opportunities. If you believe, as many do, that having great recruiters is as important as selecting a recruiting strategy, then it is critical that you use the most effective process for finding them when you do have the rare added headcount to hire for a recruiter position. There are three categories of approaches for recruiting great recruiters. They include:

1. Poaching away existing recruiters from other firms

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