“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.

What made this different were the one-on-one counseling sessions and workshops that prepped the servicemen and women — and some dependents — for the next day’s recruiter meet and greet.

Blum and Deissig, who founded Tip of the Arrow, began working with returning soldiers at Ft. Dix last year. Retired from careers in staffing and search, they both quickly discovered that while the men and women they met had held positions of leadership and responsibility, they were not skilled at explaining to a recruiter how what they did had value in the corporate world.

Blum told a story about a 24-year-old National Guardsman returned from Iraq who described himself as a clerk who had also been in charge of a security detail.

“I had to draw it out of him, really talk to him about what he did,” Blum says, learning the soldier had traveled Iraq returning money recovered from captured terrorists to their victims. In another assignment, he was in charge of protecting teachers and students from attack.

Saying he was a military clerk who also had worked security wouldn’t have meant as much to a corporate recruiter as explaining he was entrusted with a small fortune in cash and was responsible for the lives of a classroom full of children. Putting it that way, Blum says, lets a recruiter know that the soldier in front of them has integrity and has handled more responsibility than any job they may have is likely to require.

When Blum and Deissig connected with Curtis, who heads the state council’s Workforce Readiness committee, they found a firecracker of organization who mobilized the council and local chapters to provide the training the military personnel would need to launch successful civilian careers.

“I saw bright, articulate people,” Curtis reports. But like so many workers in the civilian world seeking a career change, “they have a very difficult time explaining what they are, what they have done, and how it applies.”

Career coaches and professional recruiters met one-on-one with the nearly 500 personnel — many of them  Army — who attended the workshop the day before the job fair. The volunteers would review resumes, teach basic job hunting techniques — there was a how-to session on career networking — and even do role-playing to help the job seekers get a feel for interviewing.

There was a panel of experienced, senior recruiters to answer audience questions on everything from what to wear to concerns about military related disabilities. International recruiting consultant Gerry Crispin, a principal in CareerXroads, talked about using technology for job searching. He also set up a LinkedIn group to carry on the day’s work.

The goal of the workshops was to get the military job seekers ready to “meet with an employer with confidence and articulate what they have done and how it applies to their job,” Curtis adds.

Curtis and Tip of the Arrow, which was founded to provide just that kind of help, are hoping that other state SHRM councils will pick up on the project and hold their own workshops and job fairs, with the Ft. Dix program as a model.

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.

Still, the results ring true (a comment that must be like a poke in the eye to our statistics professor). They jibe with other nursing surveys in the areas of demographics and career motivation. And (here I go again professor) there’s no reason to think the students who frequent CampusRN are much different from other nursing students, besides being more attuned to the Internet and willing to take a survey.

More directly of interest for recruiters, though, are the findings of how students seek or expect to seek jobs when the time comes. As might be expected from a survey conducted online, digital sources dominate, with 83 percent of the survey takers mentioning one or more online sources. Half mentioned healthcare or nursing specialty job boards.

Career fairs also were mentioned by half the respondents as a place to look for work. Clinical rotations are also a source of jobs and leads for 40 percent. In fact, in the report written by Hodes, rotations and externships were found to be among the most effective ways a student has of finding out what it would be like to actually work for a particular employer. “Clinical rotations are perceived as very effective at conveying a realistic perception of work environment,” says the report.

There are plenty more nuggets for recruiters. For instance, you won’t find most of these students by doing a resume search; 60 percent have not posted anywhere. Of those who have, 20 percent have posted to CampusRN, while 12 percent have posted to Monster and about the same to CareerBuilder and HotJobs.

Pay close attention to your career site. Almost 80 percent of the respondents said they look there for information about prospective employers. They notice what you don’t have. Somewhat more than a third of the students say these sites lack crucial information such as career development, benefits, and continuing education offerings.

Don’t want your career site to go into detail about some of those things? You should know these students spend an average of 3.6 hours a week on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and CampusRN2RN. The survey doesn’t say what they exactly do there, but at least occasionally asking about an employer would be a good guess. (There goes that A we got in statistics.) After all, 43 percent of the students are willing to hear from a recruiter connecting with them via a social network.

The report includes a section entitled Recruiter Checklist. Scan it, if all you have time for is a quick read.

“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.

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.

In the report, Crispin and Mehler put it this way:

“… the significant increase in the proportion of internal to external fills in 2008 versus 2007 (28%) is at least partially due to the deteriorating economic climate during 2008. We think this conclusion is further supported by the survey respondents’ estimate that the number of contingent workers employed by their respective firms decreased from 18% in 2007 to 10% in 2008. Clearly the data reflects a shift in emphasis to filling internally and squeezing external hires.”

The report also notes that some of the surveyed companies are filling almost half their vacancies by internal promotions and transfers. That’s something those companies should report on their career sites, Crispin and Mehler say, since it evidences their commitment to career development.

The survey report also identifies a few new trends and strengthens trends first noticed in previous years. Most notably:

1. Third party recruiters and agencies as a source of hires have been in decline since their zenith in 2005 when the survey indicated 5.2 percent of hires came from there. In 2008 that number had fallen to 2.7 percent, a decline exacerbated by the overall drop in hiring.

   “Don’t place your bet on this side of the market having much of an upside when the economic climate reverses. It won’t,” the report says.

2. CareerBuilder has overtaken Monster among the job boards (28.9 percent vs. 23 percent of the total hires coming from job boards), but the report calls it a pyrrhic victory. “We believe this SOH has indeed peaked and predict it will diminish in the future.” However, the report suggests that all of the big, national boards are losing share to the niche sites, which collectively accounted for 36.2 percent of the hires coming from job boards.
3. Perhaps not surprisingly, not one of the surveyed companies said it planned to increase hiring in 2009. Showing the depths of the downturn, the companies collectively expect to hire 15.7 percent fewer employees this year than last.

Recruiters have come to regard the annual CareerXroads Source of Hire Study as a sort of guide by which to measure their own company’s sourcing. However, Crispin and Mehler caution that, “we seek to stimulate discussion about staffing issues rather than encourage blind acceptance of data at face value.”

The report is compiled from data reported by 45 firms (out of more than 200 invited to participate) who collectively filled 309,600 openings last year.

Note: The chart accompanying this post has been updated to include two categories omitted from the previous version.

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.

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.

I) Recruiting Tools that Use “Other People’s Time”

If you’re short on recruiting funds and on hours in the day, the best approaches to consider are those classified as “OPT” approaches that use employee time and budget resources of other departments:

1. Recruiting at professional events. Ask your firm’s employees to recruit at local and national events, trade shows, awards dinners, and seminars they are planning to attend. This is a superior approach because your employees can easily approach potential candidates as “equals” and because their time and travel expenses are already being paid by their business unit or other sponsor. The key to successful event recruiting is to develop the expectation that each employee attending such events will bring back three names of individuals who would be outstanding recruits. Encourage your executives and superstars to speak at these events, because that exposure might result in some immediate candidates, as well as improvement of your overall employment brand.
2. Social networks. Having recruiters spend endless hours building profiles on social network sites can be expensive. Instead, shift some of the responsibility to your employees because there is a high probability that your employees currently utilize one or more social networks already (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) both on and off the job. Start by encouraging your employees to include in their profiles compelling facts and stories about the firm. Next, encourage them to proactively make group connections and to provide you with names of potential recruits.
3. Blogs. Recruiters can write effective blogs but it’s probably also true that many of your top employees probably already author blogs or are active participants in blogs relating to their field. If so, encourage them to talk about the positive aspects of your firm and to actively recruit on their blogs. Encourage other employees who read blogs to use them to also identify top talent.
4. Boomerangs/corporate alumni. The best way to ensure a high-quality hire who perfectly “fits” your culture is to focus on recruiting boomerangs (individuals who previously worked at your firm). During tough economic times, many of these individuals might regret their decision to leave but be hesitant to approach you about attempting to return. A simple phone call from an employee in their former department reassuring them that they would be welcomed back might be all it would take to land proven talent.
5. Videos. Videos are powerful recruiting tools because they allow you to more effectively “show the passion” at your firm. Rather than paying vendors to develop these videos, consider holding a video contest where employees throughout the firm compete to put together short, compelling videos about why your firm is a great place to work. The employees will do it on their own time and surprisingly, they may find many compelling features to display that you weren’t aware of. Post the best ones on your own corporate website or on YouTube.
6. Proactive employee referrals. Employee referrals need to be your number one focus because they shift a great deal of the recruiting “work” away from recruiters and on to your employees. Referrals produce high volume and high quality, but during tight budget times the cost of referral bonuses needs to be avoided. The best way to do that is to directly approach top performers that work in areas where you’re hiring and ask them to provide you with a handful of names of top people. Next ask them to make some contacts for you to begin the relationship recruiting process. Most employees are willing to do this work without an expectation of a referral bonus. Also consider expanding your referrals to allow referrals from customers, strategic partners, vendors, consultants, suppliers and retirees.
7. Ask past references for referrals. Individuals who served as references for previous top hires will often help out again in your search for new candidates if they were asked. Start identifying recent hires who have turned out to be exceptional. Call their references back, thank them, and then ask them who else they may know who is exceptional and could possibly be interested. Because these individuals have given good references once, it is highly likely these new names will also be of high quality. Most references are more than willing to help without an expectation of reward.
8. Traditional referral programs. During tight economic times you might need to shift away from individual referral bonuses and towards a “drawing” or lottery approach. This is where employees get a statistical opportunity to win trips, vacation time, lunch with CEO or other non-cash yet compelling prize. You can also make customers, employee’s families, suppliers and consultants that work with your firm eligible for the referral drawing program.
9. Hold a name-gathering Rolodex/PDA party. If you need help in sourcing or identifying top candidates, involve your employees who are likely to know the best and brightest in helping you put together a list of possible candidates. Rolodex parties are informal departmental or business unit meetings were top performers are brought into a conference room, given ice cream or treats and are then asked to “download” and share the names of the very best individuals that they know at other firms from their personal contacts. Those names might be stored in a Rolodex, a PDA, mobile phone, or email-based contact manager. Regardless of where the information is stored, the very best names are gathered at the party and are then targeted by recruiters to fill current and future job openings.
10. Chat rooms. Chances are that your best current employees are already active on Internet listservers, forums and chat rooms. Encourage them to talk up the firm and answer questions highlighting your best practices and technology.
11. Media coverage. Encourage managers and top employees to make themselves available to the press because the coverage can help attract candidates. Also encourage them to write articles in professional publications that highlight the firm’s best practices and technology.
12. Recruit at company events. Consider company sponsored business, PR, product and sales events to also be recruiting events, where you might be able to identify potential candidates.
13. Mentors and mentees. Mentoring relationships can be very strong. Take advantage of that by asking your employees if they are a mentor (or a mentee) of someone at another firm. If so, ask them to help you recruit the best ones.

II) Sourcing — Low-Cost Approaches for Finding the Names of Potential Candidates

If you’re looking to identify potential candidates, here are some sourcing approaches that will cost you little or nothing:

1. Ask candidates during the interview. Ask the best interviewees for the names of other good individuals they know during the interview. If you ask enough interviewees, you will get a pretty good list of top names.
2. Ask new hires during onboarding. Ask all new hires on the day they start who else is good at their former firm. Ask them to help you recruit any of the identified individuals that they know well.
3. Almost qualified – Re-look at “finalists” from previous hiring efforts for roles in a given job family to see what former candidates may now be more qualified.
4. Conduct Google searches. It’s almost impossible for anyone with any professional status to “hide” these days. Key people always have high online visibility, so identify well-known individuals by running their “Google score.” Names can be found by searching using major technical terms or job titles, along with a firm name.
5. Turned us down. Re-visit finalists who, in the past, rejected your job offers. Try a new approach and attempt to resell them. If they say no, ask them if you can contact them again later.
6. A find-you-again profile. Ask your current employees “how would I find you again?” Ask them what business and social events they attend, magazines and journals that they read, TV shows that they watch, etc. Use this information to identify the sources that are the most likely to produce results.
7. Retirees. Some retirees have second thoughts about leaving the world of work, while others are willing to work as “fill-ins,” so keep in touch with those that you might like to have return.
8. Community groups. Encourage leaders of community, service and church groups to make referrals and to let you speak at their events.
9. Contests. Technology firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are utilizing online technology challenges to identify the best problem solvers in the world. Finance companies are using “case contests” to identify teams of MBA graduates with the ability to rapidly apply their learning.
10. Clubs and organizations. Firms are beginning to realize that if you want risk-takers, you recruit at rock-climbing clubs. If you want people with discipline, you recruit former Marines. Several pharma organizations have begun hiring ex-cheerleaders as salespeople because of their discipline and their ability to get people’s attention. Pockets of labor usually share at least one extracurricular interest outside work. One hospital organization in Illinois found that nearly all pediatric nurses’ frequent arts and crafts supply stores regularly and began targeting crafts clubs and training classes in such venues as sources.

III) Selling Candidates — Tips on Convincing Candidates to Say Yes to an Interview or a Job Offer

1. Job descriptions. If you have a hard time getting individuals to apply, a dull job description is a common reason why. Rewrite your job descriptions to make them more like marketing pieces. Identify the WOW factors that you have and the features that excite your current employees. Put them in your job descriptions and make them compelling.
2. CEO calls. Have your firm’s CEO call top candidates directly and encourage them to sign on. CEO calls are incredibly effective.
3. Same-level calls. Many individuals make a habit of not returning recruiter calls. Instead, have someone at their professional level call them and you will get as much as a three times higher response rate. The reason for this is “professional courtesy” and the opportunity to learn.
4. Peer interviews. Many organizations have found that they get a significantly higher acceptance rate if candidates are interviewed primarily by the individuals they will work directly with. Because peers know the job, they can be more convincing and at the same time, more believable than hiring managers.
5. Side by side offer sheets. Provide your hiring managers with a single sheet that shows how your offer compares favorably with offers from competing facilities. This helps improve offer a acceptance rates.
6. Contact them on the right day. Constantly seek out information about top individuals that might “all of a sudden” be unhappy because their boss/friend just left, a merger has been announced, they didn’t get a raise, they got a bad performance appraisal or other “triggering event”. Contact them right away and close the deal.
7. Select a hiring team. Some managers just aren’t good salespeople (recruiters). Identify the employees that are good recruiters and salespeople and let them do most of the hiring. Give them recruiter training and reward them for their efforts. Because they do a lot of hiring, they will naturally be better at it than a single manager that only does hiring once or twice a year.
8. Free training. Offer top candidates you have pre-identified any vacant seats in your training classes in order to build a relationship and to assess their capabilities.
9. Involve them. Ask top individuals to help you “assess” a new idea or program, then build the relationship to the point where they know you well enough to accept an offer.
10. Sell sheet attached to your application. Attach a “sales sheet” to your hard copy application forms that highlights the best practices and features of your firm.
11. Promise them an interview. Guarantee potential recruits an interview. Consider giving them a reward (a $10 coffee card) or a free meal if they show up for an interview.

IV) College Recruiting Tips

1. Interns as on-campus reps. Ask your college interns/ part time staff to serve as recruiting representatives when they return to campus. Ask them to visit campus events and to provide you with the names of the best and what it takes to convince them.
2. Grad assistants. The grad assistants of top professors not only know the best students but they are very good at convincing them to accept your new opportunities. Officers of professional student organizations are also excellent talent scouts.
3. Use last year’s hires as sourcers/recruiters. Ask last year’s college hires to help you identify and recruit this year’s crop
4. Ask college professors. Ask college professors to be referral sources. Identify the best and begin selling them more than a year before graduation.
5. 2-years-out college hires. If you haven’t had a lot of success competing for students graduating, try re-contacting those you wanted but couldn’t get two years out of school. You might find recruiting them now is a lot easier as their preferences changed when they become more experienced.
6. CEO talks. Having senior executives speak on campus and give presentations and classes have unusually high impact on recruiting.

V) Other Miscellaneous Approaches

1. Create a hiring consortium to share costs. Consider going together with a group of similar firms to share recruiting ad and/or career-fair costs.
2. Win “best place” awards. Although it takes a major effort, winning a place on local or national “best place to work” type employer branding lists will have a dramatic impact on both the quality of your applicants and your offer acceptance rates.

Conclusion

There are literally thousands of approaches that have been used by recruiters to reach top talent. Some approaches are more mainstream and as a result have been monetized by entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to make money.

But the majority of approaches are simple, low-cost, and wildly effective when used in the right way. What works for the manager of the local tire and lube shop probably wouldn’t work for the software startup, but there are at least 100 innovative approaches that would.

The key to being a successful and innovative recruiting leader is trial and error; not random trial and error, but educated trial and error.

Look at the characteristics of the audience you are trying to recruit and identify approaches that make sense for that population. Top talent is used to being barraged by recruiters using mainstream approaches, so when you try something different you most likely will slide right past all the barriers they have erupted!

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.”

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:

1. Data-driven decisions. Under the advanced recruiting model, decisions are made based on data and facts rather than emotion or past practice. Which schools to target and what majors you focus on changes each year based on previous year performance measures. Recruiting tools and approaches like sourcing and advertising are selected based on the superior numbers they produce. Metrics also tell you in which jobs and with what individual managers new hires should be placed in order to produce the highest overall ROI.
2. A written strategy and plan. It’s difficult to have a strategic impact using a haphazard approach. Unlike the traditional model, the advanced approach requires that you have a written strategic plan to focus and direct your recruiting effort. Rather than using the campus career center focused approach, the über approach uses one or more of five possible approaches including:
   • Relationship recruiting. This strategy focuses on building relationships with “insiders” including faculty, students, alumni and staff. The strategy works because when you build long-term relationships with individuals that the students know and trust, these individuals will help you in identifying and selling top students on your firm.
   • Remote recruiting. This strategy is designed to allow a firm to “cherry pick” the very best students from a number of universities without having to actually physically visit each one. The remote recruiting approach emphasizes the use of technology, the Internet and social networks to identify and assess college talent remotely.
   • Continuous graduate recruiting. This strategy is a long-term approach that focuses on “continuous recruiting” long after the top students have graduated. One element of this strategy is the “delayed recruiting approach” where you identify the best while they’re in college but you “wait” until your targeted college grads “stabilize” and are trained by another organization for two years prior to recruiting them. Other firms utilize this continuous recruiting approach because they are unattractive to college grads and can’t successfully compete on campus. However as grads mature, they might learn to consider the firm for their 2nd or 3rd job. Working closely with alumni associations is another key element in this approach.
   • Off-cycle recruiting. This strategy emphasizes the “over-hiring” of top college grads during slack periods when there is little competition. This is an excellent approach for firms that can’t successfully compete for the high quality grads during most years but can “clean up” when there is little or no competition in down years.
   • Global impact strategy. This approach emphasizes developing the capability to recruit the very best 1-3 students from every top school located around the world. The strategy uses a combination of remote Internet recruiting methods and traditional approaches using corporate staff located in key countries to identify and assess the best in every country that produces top students. Each of the available approaches must “flex” to meet the changing supply and demand of college hires. As competition for grads increases, it is essential that your strategy “scale up” to meet the increased aggressiveness and competition. When no one is recruiting, the strategy should scale back to save resources.
3. Clear and measurable goals. Goals help everyone understand what they are working toward. Most traditional college efforts have simplistic goals like hire five interns and six EE majors. However, the goals of an advanced college recruiting program might include dominating the college market and getting a disproportionate number of exceptional students; building and maintaining a measurable competitive advantage in recruiting; building an employment brand that makes every targeted college student aware of your firm; the global capability to attract the best from every country around the world; and to win every “head to head” fight with our talent competitors over top targets.
4. Employment brand. In advanced recruiting, your external image as a “great place to work” is the cornerstone of the approach. Executing a formal plan to become an “employer of choice,” so that every college kid has heard of you and wants to know more about you, is the most critical element of advanced college recruiting. Google is the model to follow when it comes to employment branding. Key elements of college branding include winning “best place to work” awards, placing on the “best place to start a career” list, being written up for your best practices in media that your targeted students read, having executives speak on campus, and scoring high on the Universum employer brand ranking when compared to others in your industry.
5. Identifying top students to target. Advanced recruiting dramatically expands the number of available approaches for identifying top students by adding a comprehensive Internet component. Traditionally, students were identified through scholarships, and assessment of those who attended your information sessions. Advanced identification tools include the use of student and grad assistant referrals, online and on-campus contests, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and online forums. Other advanced sourcing approaches include using campus professional clubs and honor society meetings to identify talent and having interns act as on-campus recruiting ambassadors.
6. Convincing top students to apply. Advanced recruiting puts a lot of emphasis on having multiple “selling” approaches. These selling approaches are designed to get students to take the specific action of formally applying for a position on your website or signing up for campus interviews. Some of the advanced approaches that firms can use to get their message out to college students include blogs written by recruiters and employees, podcasts that highlight best points, and providing information to parents so they also encourage their child to apply. Other advanced ideas: compelling videos on your website or YouTube, texting recruiting messages, video games, encouragement from other students making referrals, and a separate corporate careers page that is designed specifically to WOW college students.
7. Assessing their capabilities. The most traditional aspect of the “traditional approach” to recruiting are the face-to-face interviews that are scheduled through the Career Center. The advanced approach varies in that it also develops a process that allows you to interview students off campus. Additional features might include computerized online assessment, online Internet interviews, and using contests to assess. The most effective assessment process, on-the-job assessment, can occur during internships and by offering students short-term projects that they can complete remotely during college breaks.
8. Making compelling offers. You can’t classify your approach to college recruiting as advanced unless you use some aggressive approaches. The foundation of the advanced approach is identifying each target’s “job acceptance criteria” and then tailoring the job offer so that best meets each of the criteria. Another approach on an advanced level are offers and direct calls from senior executives and recent hires at your firm to encourage them to accept.
9. Metrics for improvement. Most traditional and knowledge recruiting systems are “dumb” because they don’t learn from bad hires and immediate turnover. Key college recruiting metrics should include candidate and hiring manager satisfaction, the overall quality of the candidates, the percentage of diversity hires, new hire performance on the job, and 1-, 2- and 5-year retention rates.

Final Thoughts

There is a growing chasm between the corporate Directors of College Recruiting who live in an “unchanging world” and those who realize there are now many more exciting approaches and strategies available to them.

Shifting your approach is even more necessary because the way that college students communicate with each other and outsiders is changing rapidly. The growth of the Internet and new technologies now allow college recruiting to do things that just weren’t possible before. I hope this “checklist” has helped you assess your current program and understand what you need to do to transition into über college recruiting.

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.”

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.

In the case of most employee referral programs, the identification is made by your employees. In the college recruiting variation, you contact a broader array of individuals (students, faculty, and alumni) in order to compile a list of the very best. Because college students are relatively poor, it takes a much smaller incentive to get them to refer other top students.

The Advantages

Placing a significant portion of your college hiring effort into a referral program has some key benefits and advantages over relying 100% on the traditional Career Center approach. Some of these benefits include:

• Quality. Referral programs routinely produce the highest-quality candidates and new-hires. Top-quality college students are relatively easy to identify by those in the campus community because college life is performance-based. Students are constantly graded and ranked in professional programs. There are numerous awards and honors programs to recognize these individuals. And you can easily find them in the most advanced classes with the most difficult professors. As a result, if you design your college referral program correctly, it will target and accept referrals only from students and individuals who are likely to know top performers.
• Costs. Having someone else do your name identification and recruiting saves on expensive recruiter time. And because students typically expect little in return for referring their peers, effective referral bonuses can be as little as $50 or a free iPod (make sure to provide a choice of rewards to choose from to meet different student needs). If you have a strong employment brand on campus, getting student referrals is even easier.
• Remote capabilities. Most Career Center recruiting requires a campus visit. In direct contrast, most of the student referral process can be carried out electronically. This means you can identify top students at a lower cost.
• Assessment. In addition to generating names, college referrals add an additional level of assessment. This assessment may include the students’ fit with the corporation, their ability to work in teams, their leadership potential, their interest level, and their willingness to relocate. By having other students do some pre-assessment, you can end up with a candidate pool that is closer to your needs.
• Selling. Students who already know of and think highly of your firm will help your recruiting efforts by helping to convince or sell the targeted individual that your firm is a top opportunity. Peer encouragement increases the chances that top individuals will come to information sessions, apply for positions, and come to your interviews and plant visits.

Be Responsive

The key to any successful referral program is responsiveness, so treat your best referrals like they are gold.

If for any reason you fail to respond rapidly and to communicate often, you will forever “kill” referrals from your frustrated referrers.

The best way to ensure that you have the necessary time and resources for responding rapidly is to limit the volume of “average” referrals. You don’t want to clog your referral program with a high volume of students you could have found using other sources and who have little chance of ever getting hired.

To generate a small number of high-quality referrals:

• Restrict the number of referrals. Restrict the number of referrals you accept from any one individual to a handful each semester; after all, you are targeting the “cream of the crop” and need to limit referrals to truly exceptional individuals.
• Make the skill sets clear. Use detailed position summaries so that everyone who is considering making a potential referral knows precisely what you’re looking for and more important, what you are not seeking.
• Target your referrers. Rather than spamming the campus and asking everyone to refer, target your campaign toward individuals who have a higher likelihood of making quality referrals. If you have the capability, send “targeted invitations to refer” only to those individuals on a campus who you know by name or title. These students are likely to know the right candidates. This group of “targeted referrers” might include faculty, teaching assistants, heads of student groups, key administrators, and senior and honors students. Finally, when you use posters or websites that notify a large population that you are seeking referrals, be sure that these referrals are “coded” (Attn: Mary Sue or a separate webpage). This is so that your recruiters will know that these referrals are likely to be of a mixed quality.
• Avoid “they approached you” referrals. In traditional employee referral programs, it’s not unusual for a majority of the referrals to come from individuals who were “approached” by a relative stranger and asked if you would make this person a referral. I call these types of referrals “they approached you” or “stranger” referrals. The same “stranger referral” problem can occur in student referral programs when the student that “approached you” is not well-known by the potential referrer. These unwanted referrals can be minimized by telling your potential referrers up front that you don’t want them to make these types of referrals. Ask the person making the referral to answer how long they have known them; whether they have known them in a professional context; and what they know about the person’s specific skills and experience.
• Assess previous referrals. After final hiring decisions are made, identify which referrals turned out to be the best. In the future, you can weigh referrals from the best individuals and in contrast, limit or downgrade the referrals from individuals or groups with a bad track-record.

Next week in part 2, look for advanced approaches and tips for generating great college referrals.

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:

• Tactic #1: Become student-centered, not campus-centered. Create an employment brand specifically for students. Your goal should be to attract any student, from anywhere who has the skills and major you are looking for. Why focus on a handful of campuses when the Internet allows you to reach all of them?
• Tactic #2: Use social networks. Create a Facebook, MySpace, or other social network presence. KPMG in South Africa and IBM have created Facebook profiles that demonstrate what can be done to build interest and connect with students. And this is just the beginning of what is possible. By leveraging a customized Ning site, for example, you could create a network where students could invite other students and generate a viral marketing program for recruiting.
• Tactic #3. Create a dynamic, energetic, and exciting website geared to college students. This should be designed to inform and entertain a potential hire. It should allow you to gather enough information about the student so you can decide whether a face-to-face interview is in order. These websites should have video tours of your organizations, interviews about the positions you are hiring for, and lots of diverse information about why a student would want to work for you. These sites can also contain screening tools and allow students to build a profile or link you to their Facebook or other profile. Use the money you save by not going to campus to pay for this website. Combined with a social network presence, this can largely replace any need to go to campus.
• Tactic #4. Build a relationship virtually. Once you have connected with a student, use email, SMS, Twitter, or some combination of these to keep the student informed about your organization and also about the positions you have available and any other details about the recruiting process. Frequent Twitter updates to students who choose to follow you, or regular updates to a blog, can keep students interested for a long time. You can link to presentations about your organizations and you can email specific information to individual students as appropriate.
• Tactic #5. Build virtual job fairs. Virtual job fairs have become common and are even more useful if you have already established a talent pool of interested students with your social network profiles and website. There are a host of virtual job fairs and more organizations are discovering them.
• Tactic #6: Use every source you have vigorously. Ask every new graduate you hire to tell others on campus about your profiles and website. Get them to recommend a few friends and then pursue them with good virtual advertising and a telephone campaign. If you hire interns, use them as both in-person and online ambassadors to other students. Have them act as talent scouts. Ask employees to recommend family friends. The goal has to be to pursue every avenue to find students who meet the skill needs your organization has. Cast a very wide net and let your website and social network profiles be your filter.

There are many more ways to leverage the Internet for campus recruiting. Over the next five years, virtual recruiting will be commonplace, and organizations that still plod around campus with presentations and cheese platters will be viewed as the dinosaurs – the companies no one wants to work for.

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.”

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.

And each of his contacts was someone with whom he had already established trust, the kind of thing transactional recruiters struggle with constantly. Back then, I just didn’t get it. If you wait until you have a job order to source, you’re already too late.

Now that I’ve moved into college recruiting, I realize how similar it is to executive search, and I find myself coming back to that phrase time and again: “The difference is in the way we manage relationships.”

So many companies go to campus as a transaction: attend career fairs, post the job, hire the best of the bunch. Even best-in-class companies go only a step or two beyond this, but the end goal is always a short-term requirement to get Y number of hires. And the benefits of relationship-building quickly go out the window when candidates and contacts see this as your only focus.

Truth is, there are two kinds of recruiters: transactional recruiters and relationship recruiters. Early in my career, I spoke the words but didn’t fully understand what it meant and what it took to successfully manage relationships in recruiting.

It’s easy to just source, fill a job, and move on; for some types of recruiting, I’m sure this model works. I’m sure lots of college recruiters across the country find the transactional model useful, as you only place an entry-level candidate once. But when you can step back from viewing candidates as placements, the benefits of the relationship-building model are clear.

As a college recruiter, too much focus on filling specific requisitions often results in missing a great candidate pool.  For example, many hiring managers indicate a preference for Business or Finance majors, when in fact someone with a Liberal Arts degree would also do well in the role.

Don’t be afraid to challenge assumptions about what is required to be successful in a given position, and encourage your managers to be open to all majors. But when you do reach out to this group, be ready for a different kind of conversation.

Maybe it’s the fact that everything has gone online and students are moving away from actually walking into their Career Services office. Or maybe it’s the failed promise made to Gen X and Y that we could do anything we set our minds to. A lot of college candidates are very lost when it comes to what they want to do when they graduate, and despite the abundance of helpful information at their fingertips, it’s not getting any better.

Some have taken a job in their majors only to find that they hated it; others have no idea what options are open to them given their course of study.

The good news is that today’s graduates are exploring, looking at a very wide variety of career opportunities across many fields. The bad news is, you may have to be their tour guide.

Transactional recruiters tend to pass through the sea of lost students rather quickly, saying, “If they don’t know what they want, I can’t help them.”

And it’s hard when you’re busy trying to fill reqs to see the logic in spending time talking with a large number of candidates who may not meet your requirements. In these circumstances, the best companies will hold Information Sessions or Open Houses to speak to larger groups of candidates and address general questions about the company or job opportunities.

Regardless of where you engage with a candidate, talk more generally about their passions, motivations, and career aspirations rather than immediately focusing on filling a specific job requirement. Sometimes it turns out that you’ll have a position of interest to them, and other times they do some soul-searching and realize they’re looking for something completely different. ‘

The candidate might be able to be successful in sales, but if she is truly excited by forestry or law enforcement, she’s probably not going to stay in the role very long once another opportunity presents itself. Of course, not everyone gets to work in their chosen field, and sometimes our college hires need a little time out in “the real world” before they can settle into a career that wasn’t exactly what they were planning.

Either way, spending a little extra time with the candidate on the front end can help better inform your hiring decisions and improve your company’s retention. Worst-case scenario, you’ll have a nice chat and the candidate walks away with a good feeling about your company, whether or not they ever work for you.

Too often, campus recruiters who focus too much on marketing specific job opportunities miss the opportunity to ask for referrals, delve deeper into student organizations, and learn more about people of influence on campus.

Once I spoke with a journalism major who was passionate about reporting on the inequities in public education and immigration issues. She absolutely lit up when she was talking about the things she had been uncovering through her reporting. While she wouldn’t have been interested in any of my open positions, I learned that she was heavily involved in several major student organizations on campus.

In the 10 minutes I spent talking with this candidate, I got quite a few tips on how best to engage with those student groups. At the end of our conversation, she even offered to introduce me to other key group leaders to kick-start my efforts.

As it turns out, building relationships and maintaining a strong pipeline of candidates involves a lot of talking about nothing.

Editor’s note: Check out part 2 tomorrow, which will explore specifics to become more successful at building relationships in the college space.

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.

Step One: If You Plan It, They Will Come

Assuming you have a space available at work that you don’t have to reserve, you can plan it in one week. To do this the right way, be sure to follow these six logistical planning steps:

1. Reserve the room. Get a room filled with 10 to 15 computers so everyone can enter their information into your applicant tracking system at the same time. Obviously that isn’t always possible, so you’ll want as many computers as possible, or a room with tables and pens out for paper applications to be completed. Remember, they aren’t even applying for a specific job at this point.
2. Find helpers. Get one to three helpers to greet people at the door, point them in the right direction, and give them an application and list of open jobs and their requirements. If you can’t enlist that much help, put up signs to point people in the right direction, and have one person take and give out applications.
3. Assign a numbers system. Hand out numbers so you can keep track of who is next for an interview. If there is no time to prepare them, add all new resumes to the bottom of the pile and read through the pile from first to last.
4. Maintain a list of current openings. Have a list of open jobs and their requirements for both people coming to the job fair and those conducting screenings. At a minimum, have one copy per table where applications are being filled out, a few hanging up on the walls, and one for everyone screening.
5. Train the trainer. Have a skilled group of five to 10 professionals trained in the mechanics and art of interviewing. Have an interview form that has two to three basic questions you want asked, a space for their name, the interviewer name, any jobs they may be a fit for, and a quick ranking to circle “Probably,” “Maybe,” “Definitely Not.” If five to 10 recruiters or HR reps aren’t available, grab whomever is willing to stay late from any department. Include admin support, people from any of the jobs you’re looking to fill, interns, etc. Give them a crash course on what they should look for and what they should do with good people. Remember, these are two- to five-minute interviews.
6. Organize the resumes. Have a pile for “Probably,” “Maybe,” and “Definitely Not.” Make sure each interviewer includes their notes page and puts the application, resume, and notes in the correct pile.

Step Two: Publicity Counts

While there are as many ways as you can imagine attracting people to the fair, here are six of the most common and time-effective approaches:

1. Publicize the event. On the Friday before, post on your online job boards and include in the title “On-Site Career Fair: Entry and Professional Level. Immediate Interviews.” or whatever is true for your organization. Make sure in your job-ad body you include all of your keywords that a person may search for. If you have a large variety of positions, you may want to run a few online job ads targeted to the different groups.
2. Send a press release to the paper. Small-town papers honestly report on anything. For whatever reason, people still think there’s a bad economy (see the election results) and hiring makes news.
3. Use a display ad. If you have unskilled or general labor needed, advertise using a display ad. It’s more expensive, but you get better results.
4. Network, network, network. Use your ERE, LinkedIn, MySpace, and any other job networking area you have created contact lists in. Send out a notice to all of the people in your group letting them know what you will be doing and to send people they may know.
5. Offer a referral bonus. Send an email out to your employees and retirees letting them know when you are having it and what you are hiring for. If you offer a referral bonus, remind them of that; or, offer it just for this event.
6. Use your ATS. Send an email out to people in your database, if you have an applicant-tracking system. If you don’t, you and I need to talk, because it is 2006 and there are a lot of very affordable options that are good out there. You can target this as much or as little as you want. Even better, send an Evite. In some ways, this will feel more personal than an email and will help you manage invitees.

Prepare for a large turnout but relax if it bombs. It very well might. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it again; it may just mean that wasn’t the right time. You can’t control the weather, television, and sporting events.

While not the norm, and possibly totally unexpected, there are a few additional things you can do with a little more planning to really make your job fair a success. Enlisting the help of professional sourcers, like Maureen and others, can help you specifically call and target people within your competitor’s organizations to personally invite them to the job fair.

If you do this, I strongly recommend having a way to fast-track these busy professionals that you invited to come. There’s nothing worse than a true recruit feeling like another sheep.

Another tool that I’ve seen lately is a video interviewing online software by HireVue. It sends Webcams that can be set up with any computer and allows candidates to answer interview questions that you have written in general or based on position requirements. The interview is saved in a very recruiter-friendly online interface and is easily accessible by a recruiter or manager. Employers can “view” the interview as if they were really there.

While obviously more impersonal, it sure beats making someone wait for an hour or two for their two-minute interview with the accounting intern or bringing someone back for a full interview because you didn’t have time to screen everyone in person during the event.

If you are still wondering if this will work for your company and the types of positions you offer, I say it’s worth a try. I’ve seen company job fairs bring in hundreds of candidates and generally a much better quality turnout than public job fairs.

Candidates are being recruited for positions ranging from skilled/non-skilled labor to management level. The draw of an onsite interview and confidentiality it gives will often attract working professionals that you may not otherwise meet. Often, they’re afraid to go to public job fairs since their current employer may have a booth.

Company job fairs are also often held during off hours, such as 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., when busy people can leave work a little early and still make it home at a decent time, or make it home to change and come back to meet with your company.

The key is making sure that you are clear in your emails and advertising what types of positions you are looking for. In fact, some companies I have worked with have actually grown out of holding them at their own location and now rent out meeting rooms or halls at a local hotel to handle all of the traffic.

All in all, while not currently practiced by most recruiters, it is a relatively easy and cost-effective technique that can be used by corporate and agency recruiters alike.

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.
• They’re great for recruiting diversity. There are few things more difficult than identifying whether a candidate is diverse when attempting to scan their resume for indicators. Scanning resumes involves a lot of guesswork and stereotyping and is inaccurate. At a professional event, it’s much easier to identify diverse individuals because you can actually see them in person. I know this concept bothers some politically correct people, but the fact is that you can better identify women and people of color when you meet them face-to-face at an industry conference.
• Unbelievable access. Every recruiter knows that top performers are busy people. However, at conferences and seminars their time is much more flexible. In fact, you can just walk up to them and talk to them. Most conferences have so much scheduled free time that you might get to spend a significant amount of time with them. If you have a booth in the vendor fair, they might even come up and talk to you.
• Their guard is down. Most professionals are relaxed at conferences and some even view them as a mini-vacation away from their hectic work schedule. The dress-down mode, as well as the opportunity to browse through the vendor hall and even attend parties, puts these top performers in a relaxed mood. As a result, their guard is not up, which is precisely why vendors like these events, because they can get easy access to sell their product. Recruiters need to be as smart as vendors and realize it is much easier to recruit individuals at conferences.
• Identifying individuals from benchmark firms is easy. Because most conferences issue name badges, it’s easy to document individuals who impress you without being blatant. In addition, because the name tags also have the individuals’ company on them, you can quite easily track down individuals from benchmark firms.
• Finding people with the right skills is easy. Because every major conference has clearly labeled sessions and “tracks,” you merely need to attend the sessions which involve the skills and the job type that you’re recruiting for. Invariably, there will be someone with the right skills in the room.
• There are great opportunities to assess their skills. One of the best features of recruiting at professional events is that you have many opportunities to identify top people through their actions. Obviously you can assess the knowledge and communication skills of presenters and panelists just by observation. You should also look for individuals who ask great questions and highlight their best practices before, during, or after the individual learning sessions.
• It is inexpensive. If you use managers to recruit for you at conferences, the cost to HR can be zero, because the top individuals from your firm are attending anyway.
• You can send your best recruiters. Incidentally, because the individuals who attend conferences are the very best people at the top of their game, they also are well qualified to identify and assess other top performers. In addition, you get an added bonus because these well-qualified individuals are much better salespeople because they actually share professional values in experiences with the people they’re trying to recruit. Few HR recruiters can even hope to obtain the degree of credibility that colleagues have with each other.
• You can recruit and learn. An added advantage to recruiting at conferences is that the people you send to recruit ó whether they are managers, employees or recruiters ó have the added benefit of learning more about the subject matter they recruit for.

If You Need Proof That the Very Best Attend Conferences…

Finding out or testing if the premise that the very best attend professional conferences is true is actually quite easy if you have a little time. Simply go to your performance-appraisal professionals and ask them to give you a list of the top performers in each of your critical departments. Then go to the travel department and ask them to give you a list of the individuals in the department who have traveled to the largest industry event in the last two years. Inevitably, you’ll immediately see the overlap within your company. The same would be true at other leading companies.

Trade Fair Recruiting Requires a “Subtle Recruiting” Approach

Because the people you’re targeting are sent by their firm to the trade fair or conference, they are often in the midst of doing their job. This means that they need to be approached in what I call “a non-recruiting-recruiting” manner. Although it is possible to set up a direct recruiting booth at some events, it is much more advisable to look at trade-fair recruiting as a name-gathering and relationship-building process that starts at the product booth. Identifying people and starting up a relationship with them is about all you can expect at a trade fair. In-depth selling and convincing is best done at night after the conference recesses or later through email or follow-up phone calls.

Design Elements of a Great Conference Recruiting Program

I recommend that recruiting put together a written plan with goals and measures before they embark on a conference recruiting initiative. Even though conference recruiting can produce excellent results at minimal cost, a well-designed strategy will still impact the quality and the volume of the people you recruit. Some of the key design elements and approaches that I have found to be successful over the years include:

• Data-based conference selection. Pick the right conferences to recruit at by asking your own top people which ones top employees attend.
• Determine who to target. Attempt to get an attendee list before you go, even if you have to purchase it. If it’s not available in advance, check as early as possible after arriving at the conference. Try to guesstimate which sessions top individuals will attend.
• Make attendees accountable. Once you have identified who you are going to target, you should “pair up” your employees who are attending with your targets. Set expectations so that everyone understands their role.
• Referrals are king, even at conferences. At conferences, as in almost all aspects of recruiting, referrals from “the very best people” are the key to success. As soon as you get the conference brochure, you should be identifying knowledgeable and well-connected people who are speaking at the conference. Then use your contacts and relationships to encourage speakers to provide you with the names of individuals who impress them during the conference. HR should also work with line managers to identify the influential people who are attending (based on an attendee list) so that they can be used as referral sources.
• Use “take a smart person to lunch” tickets. One of the tools that I recommend is a “take a smart person to lunch” ticket. This coupon merely states in writing that each individual from the firm is expected to look out for “smart people” and take them to lunch while attending a conference. You might not think that it’s necessary, but using this form causes a dramatic increase in the number of lunch offers that are accepted. It just turns out that is quite flattering to be approached and told that you’re the smartest person in the room.
• Seek out opportunities to present and be visible. If your people are good enough, serving as moderators, speakers, and panelists are excellent ways of demonstrating to the attendees that the conference developers consider you to be leaders in your field. The visibility of speaking or moderating gives you the opportunity to talk about your company’s best practices. If you give a great presentation, you will become a magnet and people will approach you throughout the conference.
• Ask questions to identify the best people. One of the best techniques for identifying top people is by asking questions during the educational sessions. By standing up and asking a question, everyone will notice you and, provided you ask a good question, top people will likely approach you after the session regarding any best practices that you might have mentioned as part of your question.
• Using vendor booths. If you’re not giving out something silly like yo-yos, you will find that most of the people who go through booths will be serious professionals interested in what you have to say. In fact, a majority of the people that walk through your booth will be competitors, so I recommend that you have a recruiter in the booth. When people manning the booth talk to someone who seems to be at the top of their game, they signal you to come over and enter into the conversation so that it can be shifted towards recruiting. I also recommend that you offer some significant giveaway that is tied to a drawing, so that you can gather business cards (for later recruiting purposes) of all the people who come through your booth. This is especially important if the conference does not give out an attendee lists.
• Focus group recruiting. Often, companies hold focus groups at conferences to gather information about issues and to evaluate new products and services. But focus groups are also great opportunities to recruit because you have people “locked in a room.” You might consider doing focus groups just for recruiting purposes on the topic of “what does it take to be an employer of choice.” You can use the event to highlight your great people-practices and benefits, as well as to gather information about what workers expect in a great company.

Most recruiters select their approach based on emotion, not facts or data. As a result, they spend a great deal of time use recruiting sources that produce mediocre hires at best. One prime example of a time-consuming and expensive approach to recruiting is attending “recruiting events.” It might seem on the surface that recruiters should attend “recruiting events,” but the fact is that you should do the opposite. You should attend the same events top performers in the field do, not job fairs, diversity events, and career centers. The world of business is changing so rapidly that it is becoming critical for the top professionals to attend industry events to learn about best practices and upcoming problems. As the economy improves, travel budgets will increase and more professionals will be attending. Because their “guard” is not up at these events, approaching high quality potential hires is easier and more effective than via other sources.

It seems strange to me that a recruiting approach so effective is so underused by most major corporations. I’ve asked many people why they have underused professional events for recruiting and the best answers I can come up with our that some events have rules against open recruiting (I recommend a subtle referral-based approach, even when the rules allow open recruiting) and that HR’s travel budget is frozen so often that they just can’t send recruiters to these events. The latter argument is the most formidable one, but it is easily overcome if you take the time to work with the CFO’s office to build a business case for recruiting at professional events. The ROI is high and it’s relatively easy to attribute any success directly to the event. I have outlined the approach you need to take; the only remaining impediment is the courage to try something different.

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
2. Convincing “non-recruiting professionals” to become recruiters
3. Convincing the few former recruiters who are currently qualified to return to the profession

If you want to hire the very best “warrior” recruiters, here are some approaches and tools to consider. A

Toolkit for Recruiting Recruiters Obviously no firm uses every one of these tools and techniques, so the key is to scan through them and pick the ones that best fit your culture, your timeframe, and your budget. Some approaches may be too aggressive for you, but read on, there are also conservative approaches included in the toolkit. (Note: The highest impact tools and approaches are generally listed first).

Referrals from recruiters, employees and others. Referrals are almost always the best source for top performers and that remains true in recruiting where the very best are highly visible.

1. Recruiter referrals. There are no secret great recruiters. Because the best recruiters compete daily in head-to-head competition, great recruiters know who the other great recruiters are. Start by developing a recruiter referral system that rewards your recruiters who gather recruiter names and refer the best recruiters. Develop a “who’s who database” of recruiting and use it to identify the recruiters that you will target for hiring during the next year or two.
2. Proactive (”Give me 5 referrals”). Rather than relying on the very best recruiters having the time and interest to refer others using the traditional referral program, instead develop a proactive approach that directly asks your top recruiters who else is good. Ask them in person to list the five recruiters that have impressed them the most during their careers (this could include former classmates, bosses, mentors, competitors, colleagues, and mentors). Then ask them to call the five on their list. Use these five for direct hiring or for additional referrals.
3. Top performer referrals. The only people that know great recruiters better than other recruiters are top performers who are constantly hounded by recruiters. As a result, you can assume that your very best employees have already been identified by and recruited by the best recruiters in your industry. Ask your top performers which recruiters have been successful in getting through to them, and then ask which ones were good enough to get them to return their calls. Next, ask which ones made great sales pitches. Reward them for a making great recruiter referrals. If you are clever, you can also ask them to record which approaches have the most and least impact on them and use that information to train your own recruiters.
4. Regular employee program. Every employee knows some recruiters because they either currently get calls from them or else they knew them from previous jobs or job searches. Add recruiter jobs to the traditional employee referral program.
5. New hire referrals. Ask new hires (in all hard-to-hire positions) on the first day of orientation to give you the name of the other top recruiters that were pursuing them during this job search. Also ask them to go through their contacts and give you the names of recruiters that targeted them in the past.
6. Ask references for referrals. Call the people that acted as references of your best recruiters (and finalists for recruiting positions) and ask them who else they know that is excellent at recruiting.
7. Hire their references. Call the references of your best current recruiters and those recruiters that you have looked at in the past (either as a finalist or just any recruiter applicant) and try to recruit them.
8. Ask the experts. The leading authors, speakers, and consultants in recruiting almost always know the top recruiters by name. Ask them who was good, who they mentor, and who they learn from. Use these names both for direct hiring and as referral sources.
9. Recruiter mentors and “mentees.” Ask the best recruiters in your network “who” they mentor. Not only are “mentees” almost as good as the top recruiters, but their mentor is very likely to help them during a new assignment. Also ask your junior recruiters to convince their mentors to join the firm.
10. Professional association officer referrals. The leaders of national and local professional associations related to recruiting like EMA, Staffing.org, NAEA, and AESC generally know the best recruiters. Ask association officers to be referral sources and to help you identify high influence individuals or any other “up and coming” recruiters.
11. Ask vendors. People that make a living off of you, including vendors, consultants, agencies, and ATS suppliers have a vested interest in your success. These individuals are almost always well connected, and many know exactly what’s going on at major firms. Use your own judgment, but where appropriate ask them to be referral sources (when there’s no direct conflict of interest). Incidentally, quite often these individuals themselves are interested in returning to the “corporate environment,” so don’t forget to ask them directly if they would consider a recruiting position at your firm.

Recruiting-related events

When you are looking for professionals, events are routinely the second best source for high quality recruits. This is true because professionals attend association events and seminars on a regular basis. It’s also true that companies send their very best people to these events while the mediocre stay at home. Another advantage of recruiting at non-recruiting events is that most people are off guard, and invariably the room will be filled with employed people and not active job seekers. Of course you have to use a subtle approach at some events (so as not to offend the event organizers), but event recruiting is still the number two best way to find great recruiters. Start your search by asking, “Where do recruiters all gather in one room?” Also check with corporate travel to see which events recruiters routinely attend. Some event-related ideas:

1. ERE events. The best event by far at which to identify great recruiters is the semi-annual ERE Expo (http://www.ere.net/events) recruiting conference series. Firms like Microsoft have been known to utilize it as a primary source for top recruiters, and I have found that the best recruiters and recruiting managers in the corporate world attend it. If you really want to make an impression, offer to speak and ask questions during sessions. Also, use other speakers as referral sources.
2. Recruiter training sessions. Individuals that seek out recruiter training and who are good enough that their bosses will pay for it are excellent targets. Ask your employees who attend to identify star students. In particular, look for training offered by AIRS or by individual recruiters like Shally Steckerl, Michael Homula, or Lou Adler. Also consider using the people teaching these classes as referral sources or even as targets for direct hiring if you are really bold.
3. Sales training classes. Ask employees who attend sales training classes to look at individuals who could also serve as recruiters. (More on converting salespeople later in this article series.)
4. Recruiting seminars held on your site. If your firm does not have a great employment brand or reputation, one of the best ways to convince recruiters to consider you is to sponsor a monthly recruiting association event (or a technical seminar on a particular area of recruiting) and hold it at your facility. By getting a well-known speaker, you will attract almost everyone. And because the seminar is onsite, you will invariably have an opportunity to offer attendees a tour and to provide them with an opportunity to mingle with your current staff and learn about your best practices. This is an effective tool when your name isn’t that great but your people, practices, and facilities are!
5. Recruiting events. In addition to ERE’s conference, there are other recruiting events that attract less aggressive but still good quality recruiters. These events occur both locally and nationally. Some of the organizations that sponsor these events include AIRS and Staffing.org as well as EMA, NAEA, AESC, IQPC, and Kennedy Information.
6. Local recruiters roundtable. A few cities have less formalized “recruiters roundtable” groups that meet quarterly to benchmark and share best practices. If one does not exist, you should consider developing your own (as Michael Homula did at FirstMerit). Utilize this small recruiting roundtable to benchmark, to assess recruiters, and to impress other recruiters with what you’re doing. Use it both for direct hires and referrals.
7. Regional recruiting associations. Many cities and regions have their own localized recruiting associations. I have found that the Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. areas are particularly strong, but ask any local recruiter which ones they attend. I recommend that you speak at and attend their meetings and ask for referrals. In particular, look at officers, speakers, and those that ask great questions.
8. Job fairs. Although most top recruiters loath going to job fairs, you occasionally get lucky cruising job fairs, not for candidates but for recruiters. Ask around and see who the other recruiters recommend. Also consider sending one of your own employees to different booths in order to assess the recruiters at them.
9. Trade fairs. One of the top sources for hiring top-performing professionals is targeting attendees and industry and functional trade fairs. As a result, the very best firms send recruiters to these trade fairs to recruit. They position themselves in company product booths and subtly target people with name badges from key firms. Use your travel group to identify which of your employees are attending the targeted association and trade events and reward them for identifying the recruiters that are active there.

Next week, in Part 2, we will focus on poaching and using Internet sources.