ERE.net

Alan Strauss, who’s doing a talent-acquisition project for Lockheed Martin and is well-connected in the D.C.-area corporate recruiting community, talks below about bringing in “A-players” to corporations; what the best recruiters are doing to keep their jobs; and what sorts of questions recruiters should be asking their customers. keep reading…

“It’s a really unique situation where you have someone who is at a crossroads personally and professionally.” — Elliot Wilson

If living and working in this economy of disappearing jobs, tiny budgets, and little recruiting is getting a bit old, then perhaps you have arrived at your own personal crossroads. This metaphorical location is the intersecting point where what used to work for you in the past ends and what you will need to change in order to be successful in the future begins. As I see it, you have only two options:

1. You can continue to do what you are doing and wait for the economy to “get back to normal.”
2. You can make some fundamental changes to your core assumptions of how businesses that survive will operate so you might survive as well.

Personally, I have grave concerns about Option 1 because no one knows exactly what the new “normal” might be, and for all we know, this aberration might be the new “normal” and will remain such for years to come. If you share my concerns, please consider the following thoughts: keep reading…

If you’re like some corporate recruiting leaders before the current downturn hit, you had your staff balanced with a solid mix of regular full-time staff, supplemented with contract staff to get you through the hiring peaks.

But maybe you weren’t quite as fortunate, and your crew was heavily loaded with regular staff recruiters, who were going full steam to keep up with the incredible hiring requisition load. Or maybe you have shed the contractors, but even your remaining staff is struggling to stay busy. Unfortunately, now that the economy has gone south, they’re running half the req loads they once did. Not only are they questioning their own job security, but you’re constantly fending off queries from your boss, the rest of HR, and maybe even the CFO as to just what the recruiters are doing, and why should you be maintaining the same staff you had when the current workload has shrunken so dramatically. Sounding familiar?

Hopefully, back in January of this year, you took Lou Adler’s sound advice that “hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.” Perhaps you’ve done just that, and are now well positioned to address any coming business increase. Or possibly you didn’t get that opportunity, or your business still hasn’t begun to bounce back.

In any event, you do have alternatives — methods you can use to gainfully deploy your staff resources in ways that clearly, and measurably, demonstrate their ongoing value to the business. The challenges will be different, depending on the size of the company you’re in. In a small firm, you are likely to have more latitude in initiating change — but possibly fewer resources available. In a larger firm with more resources, you are likely to need to build a support coalition of colleagues, business partners, or executives to create the right atmosphere for change. But in either situation, it’s critical that you build the “business case” — show the ROI through well-tracked and supportable metrics.

In my more than 20 years of recruiting leadership, predominantly in hi-tech, I’ve had ample opportunity to face this challenge, given the cyclical nature of that business. And as you can imagine, I willingly responded to a blog posting earlier this year asking other recruiting veterans for their experiences in facing the same issue. 13 of us shared our stories, from a variety of industries and backgrounds. The following are a few snapshots of some of the proven practices and strategies that have been successfully implemented by others to preserve their key recruiting assets during previous business slowdowns.

Some of these are creative twists on previous themes, while others represent really out-of-the-box thinking. [NOTE: All of them are predicated on the assumption that you know your staff --- their skills, strengths/weaknesses, and backgrounds. If you're new in the role, you might want to begin with a resume review and light career discussion with each of them.]

I do hope you find some of the suggestions below fascinating, creative, and useful. I will be presenting a seminar/workshop on this very subject, and with a lot of additional detail on implementation, at the upcoming ERE Expo in Florida in September, and we’d love to see you there. keep reading…

In normal economic times, search firms make a lot of money placing candidates corporations should be able to find on their own.

“How do they do it and what can be done to prevent them from doing it to us?” is a question many corporate recruiting leaders are asking. The underlying premise here is that if corporate recruiting departments could be organized and run like contingency recruiters and executive search firms, lots of money would be saved.

Despite the promise of the objective, very few companies have been able to successfully pull it off.

keep reading…

Can a situation ever arise where a company is too successful for its own good? Scott Pitasky from Microsoft addressed this very question at the ERE Expo 2009 Spring in San Diego.

While Microsoft is one of the greatest success stories in modern business, Pitasky said that success can cause a company to become complacent. When this occurs, companies may become set in their ways and fail to adapt with the times. As he simply put it, “you can’t just know what you know.”

Not content to let this happen, Microsoft has made numerous efforts to stay ahead of the game, including its Web 2.0 initiatives for which the company recently received an ERE Recruiting Excellence Award. Microsoft’s Marvin Smith will be covering this in greater detail at the ERE Expo 2009 Fall.

As the presentation went on, Pitasky covered some of the ways to transform your staffing organization “from checkers to chess.” In other words to know where you want to go and think ahead, in place of a more reactionary approach. Pitasky continued on this topic and discussed ways to dramatically change the focus of your company’s workforce within five years.

In addition, an important point was made about the necessity of knowing not just about your company’s demand, but the available supply. By using a funnel methodology, Microsoft developed a system of quickly finding which candidates are qualified for interviews, narrowing down the market, and saving valuable time. Elaborating on this, Pitasky covered Microsoft’s index for quality of hire, helping to identify the most effective sources of hire.

Lastly, the importance of telling your company’s story was made clear. The crucial question brought up was “do you want to create your employment brand or do you want to let someone else do it?” Pitasky discussed some key strategies for using your employment brand to communicate with people in a way that is relevant with them. Watch these highlights from the presentation to learn more!

keep reading…

It was agreed by all that the meeting was to be held in the strictest secrecy.

Only first names were to be used, and nothing was to be put in writing. Even though I was the head of recruiting and staffing for a large, multi-national company, I was putting my team in serious jeopardy just by having this conversation. Fortunately, the liaison was successful — we were not caught that day, and so far no one has discovered that we met together.

What am I describing? An international spy ring? The sale of competitive intelligence? keep reading…

Think there’s not much about recruiting you haven’t seen or heard? How about a NFL-style draft of experienced corporate leaders and MBAs?

That’s what a small group in Washington State is proposing and for no less a location than New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, where the National Football League draft is conducted.

Here’s the game plan, according to Corporate Draft and its organizers, Nolan Wheeler and Mike Gazdag:

Fifty companies are to pay $30k each to have a crack at 2,000 fully vetted veteran senior corporate managers and executives and 500 MBAs. There’s to be two days of “meet and greet” followed by two days of draft picks, during which the participating companies get to “draft” one of the hopefuls sitting in the Music Hall audience.

The companies, who also are present in the Music Hall, get five minutes to make a pick. When they do, they telephone their selection to the draft staff which delivers a custom stitched jersey to the master of ceremonies while the lucky job seeker is escorted to the stage as their 30 second video backgrounder is shown to the assemblage. keep reading…

Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of its recruitment marketing that is matched only by an equally ambitious overhaul of its recruitment technology.

When the decision was made a couple of years ago to update its talent acquisition system by tying together all the company’s far flung offices with an SAP system, Microsoft decided it was a good time to rework its global careers face. As happens with companies that grow from a bright idea to a 100,000 worker worldwide enterprise in barely 30 years, Microsoft’s recruitment efforts had sprouted dozens of online iterations for different countries, different regions, and even for different business units.

Bewildered candidates looking for opportunities around the world had to visit multiple sites since there was no central jobs listing. Behind those career sites were different tracking systems, making it challenging for Microsoft to manage promising candidates.

Even in the U.S., where centralized recruiting has been the rule, Microsoft’s online recruiting presence has become so bloated that candidates can become lost in the navigational maze. The sheer breadth and depth of the content can become an obstacle itself, causing information overload that could keep job seekers from getting to what they wanted to know.

In the words of the woman whose job it is to bring order, and consistency, and, yes, excitement to Microsoft’s global recruiting presence, “We wanted a consistent global message for Microsoft; consistent storytelling and improved transactional capabilities.”

Margie Medd, Microsoft’s director of employment branding, says the work to update the software company’s online recruiting began about two years ago, when the company decided to invest in a new talent acquisition system. It made no sense, she explains, to roll out a global ATS, “but then have all these separate sites.”

Thus was born the recruitment marketing initiative that Medd leads. Her team includes recruiters, recruitment marketers, web developers, a validation group, and representatives from some of the countries where Microsoft has a recruiting presence. Not all of them work on the project fulltime (about 10 do that), but all of them have a part in developing the new Microsoft global careers site. keep reading…

About 25 years ago when the self-help gurus came on the scene, I heard Jim Rohn say something that still sticks:

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed. keep reading…

I have often heard it asserted by people within the recruitment industry that we are all involved in a war for talent. The mantra asserts that in our role as corporate recruiters, we are in aggressive competition with other organizations for the same individuals. As a result, and despite the best efforts of media like ERE, there tends to be suspicious relations between the recruitment faculties of different companies.

As we enter a new and more challenging phase for the global economy, we’ve all seen a sharp increase in the numbers of capable candidates who are available. With a market like this, which should dispel any competitive fears talent acquisition teams feel, I think we have a great opportunity to re-assess how we relate to each other. keep reading…

Okay, I’m probably going to break some dishes here (and in an in-depth article on the topic in the print Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership coming up) and maybe even discuss a few taboo subjects that somehow never seem to reach the light of day. Despite all of our HR and staffing-related publications, I have yet to see an article that addresses the often tense and troubled relationship that can exist between human resource generalists and the Staffing department. Yet, if you get a group of staffing professionals together and raise this question, we can all easily describe some of those relationships that were either highly effective or incredibly dysfunctional.

I suspect that our colleagues on the HR generalist side could also do the same. Why is that? What causes the separation that sometimes exists between staffing and generalists? Why is it we work so well with some HR generalists and have a terrible time with others? What can we do to minimize the friction and maximize collaboration? keep reading…

Are we rusty as corporate recruiters? We haven’t had the amount of positions to fill as we have in the past. Volume is lower. Search assignments are scarce. I almost believe we are sharper when the volume is high. With only a few searches to work on, we may forget some of the steps we need to cover, when we haven’t been working at the capacity we once were, like it was just last year.

Our skills need to be sharp — even sharper than ever. It’s more important now that we bring in the best candidates possible, and actually get the candidate to accept the offer. No room for errors. We need to go through our recruiting process and make it perfect.

It takes all you know now, when that important search comes up and once again, you kick into high gear, ready to fill it with the best this market has to offer. What we used to do with 60 jobs on our plate at once is all different, now with only a few key positions to fill. Being in “auto pilot” is something that went away last fall. Now it’s a new game, and we need all the expertise we have to pull it off.

keep reading…

“I don’t have to tell you that things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody is out of work or scared of losing their job…banks are going bust.”
–Peter Finch, “Network”

Can you hear that sound? It is the groaning reverberation of a deep and protracted recession. It is the sound of layoffs and loss. Of homes foreclosed, 401(k)s decimated, and of violent shifts in the professional and financial worlds. It is the sound of unsinkable companies … disappearing. It is deep and it is wide and it is ugly, and it has either already affected you or it will. No matter; Les Brown said it best. “It does not matter what happens to you. All that matters is; what are you going to do about it?”

So let me ask? What are you going to do about it?

I will tell you what most recruiters I am communicating with are currently doing. keep reading…

The March 2009 issue of Fast Company lists its take on the 50 most innovative companies in the world.

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

keep reading…

It’s hard to believe how fast time goes by when our days as recruiting professionals are easily filled with overwhelming amounts of day-to-day operational activity. As the days, months, and sometimes years pass, inevitably the dreaded question will come — “What’s our recruiting strategy for this year and the years to follow?”

The usual recruiting leader response: “Hmmm … let me get back to you on that!”

The more the global recruiting landscape continues to change and shift, the greater the need for recruitment planning. Recruiting strategy is probably one of the most misunderstood and misused terms tossed about in our industry today. Try asking your clients and colleagues to define the term, and we guarantee that you will get very different responses. Recruiting strategy means entirely different things to different stakeholders (line managers, hiring leaders, HR professionals, recruiting professionals). Try Googling the term or searching through respected and trusted recruiting industry resources. Good luck … you won’t find much of relevance or interest!

Whenever we get the chance, we put the recruiting strategy definition and conversation to test with industry experts and leaders. We usually spend a good hour or two talking about the tired-and-true recruiting hot buttons:

• Recruiting processes and policies
• Recruiting programs
• Candidate attraction and sourcing techniques
• Recruiting technology (ATS’s and career websites)

These things are most definitely enablers, tools, or drivers of your overall recruiting strategy, but are not in themselves an organization’s recruiting strategy. So what exactly is a recruiting strategy then, and how do we as recruiting professionals create one for the organizations we work for? We don’t claim to have all of the answers, but the working definition we discuss and circulate with our clients goes something like this:

“An organization’s recruiting strategy is a blueprint consisting of levers or enablers (structural and organizational delivery design, strategic programs, policies, and technology) that drive desired recruiting outcomes (quality of hire, world-class hiring leader, and candidate experience, etc.). “

Think of an organizational recruiting strategy as a framework or model — a blueprint to drive desired outcomes. A great place to start in creating your organization’s strategy is to define the desired outputs of recruiting. These outputs should be closely linked to your organization’s unique mission, values, and goals.

Your organization’s desired recruiting outcomes will most likely touch on some common themes:

• Better fit hires who are more productive and stay on the job longer (quality of hire)
• World-class hiring leader and candidate recruiting experience
• Ability to meet peak demand of recruiting cycle or reduce costs and overhead during slower periods
• Key recruiting metrics and reports are readily available

After you have successfully outlined your organization’s desired recruiting outcomes, start outlining potential drivers of these outcomes. Some common drivers are:

• Structural delivery options (in-source, outsource, hybrid)
• Recruiting organizational design (centralized, decentralized, hybrid)
• Recruiting talent level and competency
• Hiring leader and other stakeholder recruiting capability
• Recruiting processes and policies
• Recruiting programs
• Candidate attraction and sourcing techniques
• Recruiting technology (ATS’s and career websites)

One of the biggest challenges we are faced with as recruiting leaders and professionals is getting on the same page with our clients, internal or external. How we define recruiting strategy with our clients is critical to expectation setting. If our mission is to build best-in-class recruiting capability, then we need to think macro and educate our clients accordingly. Ensure that you are speaking the same language as other recruiting stakeholders, or be prepared for disappointment. Recruiting or HR should not be creating an organization’s recruiting strategy in isolation.

Get the business side of your organization actively involved in the creation of the recruiting strategy. The recruiting strategy should be presented and approved in the same fashion as any other critical organizational strategy, the sales and marketing plan, the financial plan, or the overall talent or human resources strategy. As successful recruiting leaders, we need to be as focused on the big picture plan and objectives as we are on the details of our day-to-day accountabilities.

Microsoft this morning said it would lay off 5,000 of its nearly 100,000 workers over the next 18 months starting with 1,400 today.

The layoffs will be spread among many, but not all, divisions including HR, which was specifically mentioned in the announcement. At least some of the company’s 250 or so internal recruiters are among those laid off today.

One recruiter, who works outside the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters, told us he and his colleagues were “still sorting it out.” He was not directly affected, “as of now.”

Another recruiter, who works far from Microsoft headquarters, confirmed she was among those let go.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I understand. Things happen with the economy.” She had few details about the severance package or other terms of the layoff, explaining she would be meeting with HR later. However, she was certain from she had been told so far that the company “is not going to leave you out in the cold.”

keep reading…

Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

keep reading…

Most fear to even to use the word “depression,” but now is the time for corporate HR to begin thinking about such an eventuality. As most people know, there are two key economic drivers that impact our economy: 1) productivity (product and service output) and 2) employment.

The government has done a great deal recently to boost the productivity (output) of the economy through its trillion-dollar bailout and coordination of merger activity, but freeing up credit and keeping well-known firms alive have not halted job losses in many industries, including those in the housing, mortgage, and financial sectors.

Both government and corporate leaders have under-emphasized the role of the job market in the economic downturn to the point that in my opinion, the time has come that we must consider the real possibility that the job market will move from a recession into a depression.

keep reading…

Corporate recruiters are certainly not the most praised employees in any firm. During tough times they are laid off in numbers, and even during high growth, blame is frequently heaped upon them for not producing miracles.

While external third party recruiters at least have a chance of making “big bucks,” corporate recruiters all-too-often can only be classified as under-paid and under-appreciated.

Given that it’s the holiday season, now would be the opportune time for recruiters to receive thank-you cards from the many people they’ve helped throughout the year. Unfortunately, the majority of recruiters won’t actually receive one, but if you did, here’s what I hope it would say.

keep reading…

As we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner (here in the United States), let us be thankful for the new era that is dawning.

This economic slowdown is not just about the failure of our banking system or of the credit markets. This failure is a symptom of the major changes that are occurring as we enter a new century. The Depression of the 1930s redefined the agriculturally based banking and finance world and made it competitive and efficient for an industrial age.

We are now in a similar period.

keep reading…