ERE.net

If you’re into brown, blue and green you ought to go be a doctor or a forest ranger. See how easy picking a career is when you know your colors?

Like white? Then interior decorating is for you. (Too easy. Everyone knows white goes with everything.)

How about if your favorite colors happen to be black and red and orange? Maybe you just really like Halloween. Otherwise, you are “The Evaluator,” says a press release from CareerBuilder (profile; site), which just added a color wheel (parked on the old CareerPath.com website) to help jobseekers better assess their personality.

Before we get scolded for making light of a serious assessment tool let us note that the Color Career Counselor has been scientifically vetted with the results published in the North American Journal of Psychology. You can read the paper here, but fair warning: it’s full of the kind of statistical analysis we avoided in college.

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During hard economic times, it’s survival of the fittest. Yet many corporate recruiters fail to understand or acknowledge the cyclical nature of our business; every five to seven years, recruiters are let go en masse.

If you work for an auto company in Detroit or an airline or a mortgage company, the time to prepare for layoffs has already past. For the rest of us, the time is now to improve your job security.

While recruiting can be a team effort, it is also essential that you take some time to be selfish in order to protect your own career.

Here are 15 concrete steps to improve your job security as a corporate recruiter:

1. Make the business case for the department. Before you start being concerned about your own job, consider building up the reputation of the recruiting department as a major contributor to corporate success. The best approach is to lead a team that builds a strong economic case for the direct dollar impact recruiting has had on business revenue (work with the CFO’s office to make those calculations credible). Help the department demonstrate the catastrophic recovery time required following the last dramatic reduction in the recruiting function. Not only will this effort help limit departmental layoffs, it will also demonstrate to recruiting leadership that you know how to make a strong business case and that you’re doing your part to support the team. Build the case for continued hiring during tough times because of the wealth of talent that is available. Demonstrate to managers the high quality of hires who can be obtained by poaching the very best from firms that have been weakened by the economic downturn.
2. Be recognized externally. If any recruiters are to remain, those who have received external recognition for their excellence traditionally have been much more likely to be retained. External recognition can include winning awards (like ERE, RASBIC, or Optimas) or becoming an officer in professional recruiting associations like EMA. Write articles for the leading recruiting websites (like ERE.net) and the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. Speaking at local and national recruiting events can also improve your credibility internally as well as your visibility externally at other corporations that might consider hiring you.
3. Focus on growing business units. Most corporations have learned the value of continual hiring in certain key strategic business units even while simultaneously laying off employees in others business units (ask someone in strategic planning to point out the growth areas). Focus on requisitions for these key business units or consider a transfer so that you become the assigned recruiter for one of these growing business units, because this will decrease your chances of being laid off. If you can impress the GM of that business unit by producing some significant recruiting results, they might agree to go to bat for you with your director of recruiting. If you make yourself indispensable, some business leaders might be willing to actually fund your position during down times.

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• “I just happened to fall into recruiting.”

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You would probably be very surprised to know what the CEO of your organization thinks about you. Rather than having a negative view, most CEOs I have spoken with believe you have almost magical powers. They assume you know where talent is located and how to find it. They assume you are well connected to the business goals of the organization and are striving to find candidates who are good cultural and technical fits.

They also assume you know the language of business and both understand and speak it fluently. It is a language centered on business concepts and a handful of assumptions they make daily. Many of our issues may simply be that we don’t speak or understand that language as well as they think we do.

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Calilfornia’s governator, Arnold Schwarzennegger who, if anybody, ought to know a thing or two about engineering having played a cyborg in three Terminator movies, has declared a statewide engineer shortage and a plan to solve it.

“California needs more engineers to achieve the improvements to our roads, schools and other infrastructure that voters envisioned when they passed the Strategic Growth Plan bonds last year,” says the Terminator in a day after Christmas message.

How many is more? 20,000 in 10 years, according to the press release that reads, well, like even the government writers are on strike.

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As experts in careers, those of us involved in human capital are well aware that most people usually change careers several times over their lifetimes. That’s a given. This applies to candidates as well as the people who recruit them because we, too, are counted among those with multiple careers. But the really cool thing is that each of those changes presents an opportunity for even greater success.

That’s why I am here today to build on the theme from my article about candidate spotting. Today, we’re focusing on career spotting, or scanning the horizon for changes in your environment that will lead you to that next better thing, while at the same time scanning your history for unique experiences and insights that give you a competitive advantage.

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Quite often, recruiters ask me to recommend today’s best books and blogs. I’ve compiled some links to blogs that are a bit out of the recruiting mainstream and are not written by recruiters. These blogs provide you with a slightly different view of things and often from a wider perspective as well.

Out of the hundreds of books that are published every month, only a very few make my list. I try to recommend books that I will refer back to and that carry a message that isn’t faddish. The three I list here are all keepers.

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Companies spend millions of dollars a year trying to develop compelling employment brands by interviewing current employees, surveying external job-seekers, and validating the conclusions they draw from the data. But even after all that, there’s no guarantee that the brand statement will perfectly reflect what an organization offers potential employees.

If branding is that difficult for a company with money and resources, how in the world can you and I figure out what our own brand is, let alone try to publicize it to our customers, without consultants, ad agencies, or budgets?

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In the past few months, I’ve been working with organizations that are talking a lot about the internal mobility of employees. They want to know how employees should be selected for movement and what criteria should be followed.

Many HR professionals and hiring managers look at internal mobility as something they should control and as something that is somewhat independent of the employee’s wishes or timeframe.

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Corporate employers would be wise to offer interesting work, regular recognition and rewards, and clear advancement opportunities to recruit top talent because job seekers value traditional benefits and personal growth over increasingly common corporate citizenship and diversity programs.

That’s according to the findings of a global recruitment survey released by Accenture, which polled more than 4,100 job seekers in 21 countries in North and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region to identify the most-valued career goals of both entry-level and experienced job seekers.

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It is one of the oldest clich?s in sales: “What happens when you promote your top sales rep to a manager? You lose your top sales rep and gain your worst manager.”

Chances are, many readers of this article completed the statement before reading the answer. Why, then, do so many companies continue a practice that sales executives deride? A vacuum of viable career options, unset expectations, and a culture of “earning your stripes” are just a few of the answers that plague sales organizations today. Unfortunately, there’s not much research based on the performance data of managers who have been promoted from top performing sales reps versus those who were either moderate sales reps or had no sales experience

However, there’s ample data to prove that the behavioral profiles of those who succeed in the two roles are dramatically different, meaning that those who succeed as sales managers are not the same as those who succeed in direct selling. A seller’s business attitude heavily influences his ability to succeed. If an individual possesses a progressive attitude about business in general by seeking to use new strategies and techniques in his role and always striving to reinvent his work, he has a leg up on other salespeople. On the other hand, a strong sales manager seeks a more conventional approach, in which success relies on what is proven instead of on the latest fad.

Another key difference is a star salesperson’s need for stress in his or her environment. For better or for worse, our data shows that higher levels of stress are conducive to top performing representatives, while more moderate levels are needed by managers. Spend one day in most sales organizations where a top performing rep has been promoted to manager and you’ll see a nearly manic environment in which tactical and strategic changes are the only constant. While the team may be able to adapt and change, these are not practices that lead to results. While the things that make a salesperson successful are related to culture, personality and cognitive skills are more important for a leader.

One example of these leadership skills is verbal reasoning ability. Without the ability to rapidly and effectively process and communicate information, the chance for success is diminished. This is connected to the importance of “mental flexibility” or one’s ability to “think on his feet.” While not as critical for the rep, the leader must be able to rapidly think through scenarios and adapt to a changing environment to maximize performance. Interestingly, as substantial as the differences are, similarities exist as well. Both top salespeople and top sales managers need something called “leadership impact,” which is willingness to take action when the situation requires it. Basically, can one take charge and lead naturally? Both star salespeople and star managers must possess this in abundance. A sales representative must lead the prospect, while a manager must lead the team. All of this discussion of behavioral characteristics really boils down to one simple fact: You must understand the differences between successful salespeople and managers to understand how to (or if you should) promote. What if the top performing salesperson is not the right fit for a management role? Are you necessarily going to lose him or her to another company’s sales management opening? Not if you’ve thought through suitable career path alternatives for the sales professional. You’ve got to have a place for top sellers to advance. Too often, the alternative to management is more cold calling with a higher commission level.

Other paths could include more strategic prospects such as national accounts, project-based leadership in which a sales rep manages an ad hoc sales team to land one client, or training and mentorship opportunities. Whichever components you include in your sales professional career path, it must be thought out and communicated. Too often, a senior sales executive or HR professional believes that these options exist while field sales reps have not been adequately sold on why this may be a smart career move for them. Selling your sales team on why progressing their careers along a sales professional line instead of management must start early - as early as the initial recruitment process. It comes down to setting adequate expectations at the start and following through with your actions. The reason why most sales people expect to one day be promoted to managers is precedent.

Unfortunately, this is still the most common practice in companies. “Sell your heart out and one day you’ll manage a team of your own,” is the motto. You can change this by informing all sales candidates, pre-hire, that this is not the practice in your organization. By carefully illustrating that there are other good paths for their careers besides management, and by showing clearly what those options entail, you can help the potential rep select the most appropriate role for him or her. When combined with constant reinforcement of this message at review time, a deliberate decision can be made by both rep and manager on the best course for the rep’s career. To promote the sales managers who will drive your company’s bottom line growth, you need to understand the unique role of the sales leader and what type of person is needed. You must then provide options to retain those who are great sellers but stand little chance of success as a manager. And, you must communicate and sell the alternatives to your current and future team members.

Because retaining people is more challenging now, it’s time to look beyond traditional new employee programs and focus on providing new hires with not just the tools but the skills to help them succeed in their new workplace. The majority of new hire on-boarding and orientation programs focus on providing new hires with high-level information about the company, rules, policy, and procedures. Some companies go the extra step by providing their new employees with tools to help them navigate their new work environment; new-hire checklists are popular items in this genre, but that’s not enough.

But today’s savvy Gen X and Y employees (the bulk of whom you’re hiring) quickly need confirmation from their new employers that they made the right choice. Throwing them into the fray to see what happens can no longer be the litmus test for determining new employee fit. What new employees really need are the skills to quickly succeed in their new jobs and build platforms for continued success. Here’s a look at five critical skills that support immediate and long-term employee success. You might think that some of these are basic or common-sense. That may be true, but my experience is that most companies aren’t doing them.

Goal-Setting Skills

To prepare new employees for success, you must ensure that they know what is expected of them and how success is defined. Once your new employee is clear on his objectives, he can begin to identify goals that align with the company, project, and his personal objectives. Help your new employees define six- and 12-month objectives so that they have a roadmap and clear direction. As part of this process, make sure their goals are realistic and milestones are identified. Milestones are critical to ensure they are on track to success, and they provide valuable check-points for managers. When helping your new employees set goals, remember the following:

• Set goals that are realistic and provide a challenge.

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In this Sarbanes-Oxley environment, I’m going to start with full disclosure and hope you will keep reading: I am not a recruiter. I’m not married to a recruiter. My children are not recruiters. I don’t even have any close friends who are recruiters. But I know a lot of former recruiters who’ve used what they learned starting out in recruiting to build successful careers in something else. Some of them even asked my advice somewhere along the line or took one of my company’s assessments — and, interestingly enough, most of that happened after we ran into each other at a holiday party.

So here it is: A hot job market for recruiters again, and young recruiters’ hearts lightly turn towards thoughts of career progression. But the problem with assessing your career in recruiting is that recruiting is a very complex function. Rarely does someone perform all the aspects of it by themselves. In fact, there are ten distinct facets in recruiting which interlock to get the job done. Even if you are a sole proprietorship recruiter working from your laptop and cell phone, you aren’t likely to be doing it all. (I am referring to strictly recruiting tasks — not making coffee, which, quite properly, belongs to the barista at the local coffee purveyor/wireless network emporium where you probably spend some work research time.) Here they are, one to ten, in no particular order. Start by checking the one, or ones, you really like to do and crossing out the ones you don’t. The ones you feel lukewarm about can stay for now, but really, do you want to do something you aren’t passionate about for the rest of your life? If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life at it, why waste the next year or so?

1. Networking. This is something that people either love or hate. If you are neutral about networking, you haven’t really tried it. This could be due to not knowing where to go to find people to network with. There are professional networks (including recruiter and HR organizations), social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Ryze, and some organizations that provide both. ERE is one with both: Between the networking opportunities on the website and at conferences, everyone’s covered, even the very shy.

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Recruiting is a strange profession. It’s one of those jobs that you “fall into” but rarely ever think about doing when you are a student. In fact, in an informal survey I took recently of nine corporate recruiters, one had been an actress prior to starting as a recruiter, three had been business people with degrees in finance or management, two had been engineers, one had been a teacher, one had been a small business owner, and one had been a consultant for a major consultancy. Not even one of them had begun their career as a recruiter.

As far as I know, no university offers a degree in recruiting — the closest thing is a degree in human resources. No one gets tested, certified, or licensed to be a recruiter. In short, it’s a professional almost anyone can get into, but few can do well. Those who do excel combine a love for the hunt with keen interpersonal skills, good salesmanship, and an ability to use technology well. Recruiters a decade or so ago often acted as a pair of extra hands for a hiring manager. They placed ads in newspapers, screened incoming resumes, and even conducted most interviews. The work they did was largely administrative. They tried to act as if they were human applicant tracking systems, but didn’t always really understand the jobs well enough to make good judgments. Their existence was based on an assumption that plenty of qualified applicants would send in resumes, and when this didn’t happen, they turned to outside agencies or posted everything on job boards in the hope that someone would be there. They had little to no skill in sourcing or in helping the hiring manager think strategically about the position. They really couldn’t help the manager define competencies for a position or where people who had them could be found.

Today’s competitive marketplace, scarcer talent pool, and global marketplace have changed what it takes to be a successful recruiter. Recruiters today are strategic players in keeping their organizations competitive by finding the best possible talent. Here are the five most critical of these new skills:

1. Relationship builder. Most important and on top of the pyramid of skills is the ability to find great people and build relationships with them. This is what all great recruiters do. Every executive search guru is really a guru at building and maintaining relationships. Recruiters within organizations need to get out of the organization and get to know people at all levels and professions that might be useful to their firms. They need to utilize technology to help create the initial relationship, and then they need to leverage that by talking on the phone, sending frequent emails, having breakfast or lunch with possible candidates, and by always asking one candidate to recommend a few more. Those who possess this skill-set are good at knowing who the best performers are, because they also have good relationships with the hiring managers and other employees who can tell them. They assess why those people are the best and then try to find more with the same skills.

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If you look at best practices as “us” and see worst practices as “them,” I can assure you there are more of them than there are of us. As a matter of fact, I suspect the numbers are not even close. Be that as it may, this New Yorker has always been short of patience as it relates to problems that can be fixed yet remain the same year after year. Here’s a list of my personal favorites — and some ideas on how you might make changes that others are either not bright enough or don’t care enough to make themselves.

Wanting a Lot for a Little

Nothing annoys me more than companies that want a candidate who has 1,127 key skills but is unwilling to pay the price it will take to hire this candidate. The bottom line for these sad organizations is that the candidates they like are too expensive and the ones they can afford are not good enough to hire. Honestly, aren’t you just a bit tired of this? You are almost never, ever going to get a Cadillac for the price of a Chevrolet, because the first rule of money is that you don’t get a lot for a little. If you run into this Neanderthal line of thinking, I suggest that you present candidates who can clearly do the job and are available to hire regardless of salary, because what a qualified candidate is earning at another organization is not your problem and not your responsibility. Beyond submitting qualified candidates, consider utilizing such sites as Salary.com to provide data and support you efforts.

Having HR In Charge

Long ago, HR was probably a reasonable place to have recruiting report to because it was an ancillary function in a world that was very different than the one in which we live today. I have nothing against HR people, but that solution is no longer viable. Recruiting now plays a major role in building the organization and, if done well, providing a competitive advantage. The author Robert Anthony wrote, “If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem.” Clearly, having recruiting report into HR fits Mr. Anthony’s sentiment perfectly. The time has come for every organization to have a Chief Talent Officer, either in spirit or in title, because the job of recruiting, as with most other jobs, will get done most effectively if someone who can do the job is clearly in charge of getting it done in the first place. If you are a recruiter reporting into an HR person who does not get it, I suggest that you consider yourself the person in charge and learn how to manage your boss. See How to Manage Your Boss: Developing the Perfect Working Relationship, by Ros Jay. Even if you can’t change the structure, you can still get great results.

Bashing Job Boards

“Monster first” has become my mantra, and I seem to be in good company. Industry darlings such as Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, and Amazon all post positions on Monster. Thus, Monster, as well as those companies, must be doing something right. You can bash the boards all you like, but Monster is so pervasive, so visible, and so entrenched that not posting there makes it look like you are not really serious about hiring in the first place. I know that passive candidates are all the rage, and I go after them as well as the next person; however, I have found such amazing candidates on Monster, many whom have lead me to other candidates, that not shelling out the money to see who you will identify is just plain silly. By the way, to my corporate recruiting friends, how many passive candidates did you source, cold call, convince to interview, and successfully hire last year?

Seeing Poaching as Stealing

God bless John Sullivan. He might wear that funny-looking vest a lot, but he had the courage to take the social work out of recruiting and make so many people understand that business is business and you can’t steal a person because you can’t own one in the first place. You can steal clothing, computers, or Lou Adler’s iPod, but you can’t steal a person. All organizations that compete are competing for customers as well as the human capital to serve and add value to these customers. You can’t very well do that if the very best people are working for the competition; the best people need to be working for you! I suggest that you build your company and, not incidentally, your future as well, by sourcing the best people from anywhere you can find them. Hiring the best people is what you are paid to do and that is how you win big in this phenomenon we call business.

Not Managing Your Career

Recruiters are some of the most interesting and colorful people I have come to know. Unfortunately, many do not manage their careers very effectively, for reasons I do not fully understand. I personally know recruiters who are extraordinarily good at what they do but keep on working for companies who do such clever things as:

• Not valuing their contributions

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The employees you already have are a prime source for the positions you have to fill. As the shortage of experienced, skilled talent becomes even greater, organizations that have developed solid internal recruiting practices and policies will be better off than those that haven’t. Your current workforce is a “diamond mind” of skills, corporate culture, and loyalty. By tapping into them as a source for open positions, organizations achieve greater loyalty, lower turnover, improved productivity and profits. Yet, very few organizations that I work with have effective, modern internal transfer and promotion policies. There are many reasons for this. One of the major reasons is that they have little information about the current workforce. Even though ERP and HRIS systems can usually accommodate storing and allowing a search for employees’ education, experience, and skills, very few organizations have input this data. Therefore, employees have to raise their hands if they are interested, and recruiters or hiring managers have no way to search for passive internal candidates.

The other major hurdle is that HR policies that were written in a time when labor and skills were abundant, and turnover low. These policies are often restrictive and discourage employees from moving. In fact, I was at a company a few days ago where employees are not allowed to apply for jobs that are posted on the Internet unless they have an okay from their manager and have been in their current position for at least six months! Surprisingly, most of the HR staff saw no problem with this practice and were even supportive of it, despite the fact that there are no similar constraints on an employee looking outside the organization for a position. What they have done, in effect, is create a disadvantage for themselves for no discernable reason other than a belief that “this is what should be.”

Unfortunately, we live in a real world where the market rules. HR has to be responsive to that market or lose good employees who most likely would have stayed if they could have made a move. Today, more than ever, employees are investors in our organizations and they can choose whether or not they share their expertise and skills with us. Each employee has a built-in return on investment meter that is constantly sampling the atmosphere and deciding if she is gaining or losing from a continuing association with their organization. As long as the employee feels that they are gaining skills and are being stimulated, they don’t look for different jobs and they contribute to the best of their ability within the system. But whenever the balance shifts even slightly, employees become vulnerable to any offer that may present itself. That is why having managers who have a history of good employee loyalty and low turnover are so valuable. Internal Recruiting I define several types of internal recruiting:

• Active: When an employee chooses to look for a new position

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In my article entitled The Next Great Weapon in the War for Talent, I contended that all the technology, job boards, and recruiting software in the world will never replace or generate the kind of results a great recruiter can deliver. In other words, the next great weapon in the war for talent is the skilled and artful recruiter.

I do not challenge the notion that technology may make important recruiting initiatives less cumbersome. Activities like name generation and sourcing are made a bit easier thanks to the Internet and other technological advancements. But really great recruiting results can only happen because of the hard work and effort of skilled and artful recruiters who can make the right calls, develop centers of influence, build relationships, interact with prospects and candidates, understand the opportunity gap in a candidate’s current situation, determine the decision-making criteria a candidate will use to make a change, work with a candidate to help them land a better opportunity, and navigate the delicate offer, negotiation, counteroffer, and notice-giving minefield. All that’s just a highlight the things great recruiters do well.

Many articles, discussion groups, and blogs all around the recruiting landscape extol the advantages of hiring sales and marketing types as recruiters. I couldn’t agree more. While it is true that recruiting is fundamentally a sales and marketing role, simply stating this obvious fact really misses the deeper behaviors and skills that must exist in a recruiter in order to generate better results and higher performance. Hiring a candidate with proven and verifiable results from a sales and marketing background does not necessarily mean you have hired the next great recruiter. So what should you look for in a recruiter? What critical behaviors and skills should you identify and then hire for? How will you know the talent can be coached and developed? How can you more accurately predict how well they will perform in the future? In my years of experience working as a recruiter (both third party and corporate) on teams with some very high-performing recruiting talent and having to hire and lead recruiting teams myself (including the very talented award-winning team I currently lead at FirstMerit) I have discovered eight key skill and behavioral competencies that exist in great recruiters. Not so creatively I call them “The Great Eight.”

These eight key recruiting skills and behaviors must be part of your identification, selection, and hiring strategy if you want to hire great recruiters. If you aren’t in a position to lead and hire recruiters, these eight key factors should be areas where you strive to develop and improve in your daily recruiting behavior. (Or they may send a message that you are in the wrong profession.) Though I have performed some analysis on these behaviors in my recruiting teams and tied them to performance outcomes, The Great Eight are derived from my experience in working with great recruiters as well as hiring and leading high performing recruiting teams. I do not claim these eight items are the end-all be-all for hiring great recruiters. I do, however,believe the following Great Eight skills and behaviors apply to both third-party and corporate recruiters.

1. Interaction: The ideal recruiter is able to communicate with others in a warm and helpful manner while building credibility and rapport. I have raged on an on about the importance of relationships in recruiting. Talent relationship management (TRM) is another critical function of a great recruiter. In order to truly be successful, a recruiter must possess this interaction skill or behavior. I have yet to meet a great recruiter who wasn’t exceptional at building rapport quickly during a sourcing or direct call situation. When contacting a talent prospect or candidate for the first time, you have a few limited moments during which you must establish credibility and, at the very least, a surface-level rapport. Once the talent prospect or candidate gets engaged with you, it becomes your responsibility as the recruiter to further strengthen your credibility and deepen the relationship. Great recruiters get this. They work hard at carefully scripting their calls to very deliberately gain instant credibility and lay the groundwork for a firm relationship. This is primarily done by focusing more on the talent prospect or candidate than talking about actual opportunities.

2. Spoken communication: The ideal recruiter is able to present information clearly through the spoken word. He or she listens well and influences others through oral presentation in either positive or negative circumstances. Listening well. It is a dying art in the recruiting world. As we will see in a minute in a discussion on insight and needs analysis, too many recruiters spend way too much time talking and not listening. With all the focus on scripting, overcoming objections, or getting a client or candidate’s attention, many recruiters neglect this critical skill. Tone of voice, verbal cues, and word choice all provide valuable insight into what a candidate’s values are and what pain they might be experiencing in their current position. Prospects and candidates give up so much information about these important variables through these kinds of cues, but few recruiters are savvy enough to pick up on them. Though this skill and behavior is called spoken communication, the importance of decision influencing should go without saying. The focal point for me is listening.

3. Commitment to task: The ideal recruiter is able to start and persist with specific courses of action while exhibiting a high degree of self motivation and a sense of urgency. They are willing to commit to long hours of work and make personal sacrifice in order to reach goals. Great recruiters are motivated and driven to succeed by a fire that burns inside them rather than a fire that is lit under them. The drive and push that comes from being passionate about recruiting and finding great talent cannot be taught. You either have it or you don’t. Recruiters that have it require very few “pep talks” or motivation by any external factor. As the labor pool shrinks and the war for talent becomes more intense, the recruiters who possess this sense of commitment and the selfless drive to sacrifice in order to reach a goal will win and be deemed great. Great recruiters also see their most important positions as urgent. In many CEO and executive-level surveys, the chief complaint against HR as it relates to recruiting is the apparent lack of urgency when it comes to acquiring talent. Great recruiters know how to prioritize their work based on corporate business goals and strategies and then create a sense of urgency in the recruitment process in order to be more efficient and effective.

4. Insight and needs analysis: The ideal recruiter is able to 1) interpret verbal and non-verbal behavior, 2) develop accurate perception and understanding of the needs and values of others while using a systematic approach to gathering information, and 3) attempt to meet those needs through analysis and evaluation of alternative solutions. Maybe these could be two separate skills, but I couldn’t find a good word to rhyme with nine so I put them together for the sake of poetry (just kidding). Perhaps no where in the recruiting profession is this skill or behavior more important than in the profiling of talent. All too often, recruiters are too busy pitching a job rather than understanding the needs of the prospect. For example, I get this kind of call all the time: “Hey Michael, my name is Joey Recruitemall with ABC Executive Search (or ABC Company). I am currently working with a Fortune 100 company to identify a high-performing, results-oriented leader to take their global talent acquisition team to the next level. I understand you are a smart guy who leads a successful recruiting practice, and I think you would be a great fit for this opportunity. Would you be interested or do you know anyone who would be?” Don’t laugh, I actually got that call recently. I just changed the names to protect the innocent.

The used car salesman flattery garbage aside, this is an absolutely awful call from a desperate recruiter who is just trying to fill a job. High-performing passive talent will not leave their current situation unless they get a better opportunity and trust that you, the recruiter, have their best interests at the front of your agenda. Even active candidates are offended by recruiters who put filling a job ahead of the candidate’s needs. This means taking the time to be more interested in the talent than you are in filling a job. The only way to accomplish this is to make the effort to fully understand the talented prospects and candidates you talk to. If you’ve done your homework and gained a proper amount of competitive intelligence about the talent you are calling, you should know the person is talented, meaning you have some evidence that they are a high performer and that they posses special, often creative, mental or artistic gifts. Once that information has been gained, great recruiters use their intuition and engage in needs analysis — i.e., profiling — to find out who the talent is, what decision making criteria they will use to make a change, how they will decide if the opportunity is better, when they might be open to moving, who influences their decision, etc. Great recruiters get this information before even talking about a specific job or opportunity with a prospect or candidate. As a result, they fill more jobs with better talent for their company or bill more placements than their peers in third party. It’s all about properly profiling the talent.

5. Creativity: The ideal recruiter is able to develop unique and novel solutions to obstacles or challenges. He or she uses intuition and a new way of thinking to give birth to new ideas and presents information in a way that gets attention and holds others interest. Whether it is name generation, networking, or relationship management, great recruiters are quick to get out of normal thought patterns and traditional recruiting tactics. They are risk takers. They have the courage to keep trying new things. Using their previous experiences and intuition, they give birth to new ideas in the recruiting space and aren’t afraid to execute them. Great recruiters also know how to articulate their creativity and outside-the-box thinking in clear and exciting ways. When talking to a prospect or candidate, they know how to inspire candidates and hold their interest throughout the recruiting lifecycle.

6. Tolerance of ambiguity: The ideal recruiter is able to withhold actions or speech when important information is absent or lacking. He or she can deal with unresolved situations as well as frequent changes, delays, or unexpected events. Let’s face it, things change very rapidly in the field of recruiting. Client hiring managers change their mind, candidates change their mind, expectations change, job requirements change and even candidates decision-making criteria can sometimes changes. But great recruiters are flexible and capable of changing with the business, the economy, the labor market, or any other changes that might occur. Often, recruiters get limited information and have to resist the urge to react and make a decision in absence of this information. Great recruiters don’t get lured into presenting candidates to client hiring managers before they have the right information for a send out. They don’t present the position to a talented passive prospect until the expectations are clearly defined and the success profile is complete.

7. Reading the system: The ideal recruiter is able to recognize and use information about an organization’s culture and its key players to accomplish legitimate organizational goals. He or she possesses a healthy awareness of the importance of timing, politics, and organizational process in managing change. Every company is different. The systems and politics that exist within each require a knowledgeable and savvy recruiter to navigate what can be a treacherous labyrinth of confusion. Candidates can be sucked into an organization’s little nuances, quirks, and structure and never be heard from or seen again. Great recruiters know these difficulties exist and know how to navigate through them with great skill and effectiveness. They know when to put their foot down, when to back off, how to push something through, and when to grease the skids to make it seem seamless. Keeping the corporate goals and business objectives in mind throughout the recruiting process, great recruiters mesh all of these things for the benefit of the talent and the company.

8. Tenacity: The ideal recruiter is dedicated to customers, client hiring managers, prospects. and candidates. He or she is willing to maintain long-term relationships, to take commitments seriously, and to follow through on promises. A commitment to the people that matter most and a desire to do everything it takes to meet the needs of those people separates the great recruiters from the merely good. Great recruiters act more like a career coach or consultant to the candidate and as a subject matter expert with the client hiring manager. They extend themselves past the boundary where average recruiters stop. They meet passive candidates on their terms and under conditions that are optimal for the candidate rather than what is convenient for them. This sometimes means doing the things that are less than glamorous, but these kinds of actions can be the difference maker in these critical relationships. I have talked much about relationships and the ability to maintain them for long periods of time. The best in the recruiting profession do that and more. They know that every interaction could lead to a talent referral, a new networking source, or center of influence. Great recruiters exhibit a dogged pursuit of excellence with candidates and clients that is reflected in their recruiting results.

My Great Eight sets the bar high for excellence in recruiting. Using these key skills and behaviors to identify and select your next recruiter will give you an advantage over many in the recruiting industry. Trying to model these behaviors in your own daily recruiting activity will separate you from your peers. But failing to do either will only make you less valuable to your corporation or clients, and ultimately lead you into recruiting mediocrity — if not recruiting obscurity.