The Yankees are perennial winners (many call them a dynasty) not because of their superior equipment, IT processes, or their financial or marketing prowess, but rather their extraordinary recruiting and talent management strategy.

Discover How to Learn From Other Industries

If you are a corporate recruiter, you might think that it’s silly to learn lessons or emulate practices from professional sports, but you would be wrong. Ignoring the many valuable lessons the sports industry provides could cost your organization millions! While sports analogies are not loved by all in HR, it’s hard to find a CEO who doesn’t like them or who has not used them in their memoires.

All leading organizations strive to learn and improve by benchmarking against other organizations in and outside their industry.

The New York Yankees, like Sony, Disney, Apple, the Los Angeles Lakers, and GE (NBC), are a corporation that produces an entertainment product. They book revenue by selling a wide range of products and services that extend far beyond the playing field. As a corporation, the Yankees operate under the watchful eye of shareholders, unions, customers, and regulators.

In my experience, the key resistance factor that keeps corporate recruiting leaders from applying sports lessons is not whether they would work, but rather a lack of courage or aggressiveness.

The most common excuse offered is that the scale of recruiting solutions employed by professional sports simple doesn’t align with that possible in your typical organization. While it is true that even the smallest Fortune 500 company dwarfs the Yankees with regard to employee count, most organizations are organized into organizational units much more on par, making the application of approaches at the unit level more than feasible.

If you expect to generate a quantum increases in performance, seek out successful practices in places where few others would think to look. Then, you must have the courage to adopt some approaches that, at least initially, will make some in HR cringe.

16 Lessons That Corporate Recruiting Leaders Can Learn From the Yankees

Listed below are numerous recruiting and talent-management approaches used by perennially successful sports franchises. These ideas are relevant and have been applied by leading talent management organizations:

1. Make the business case for great recruiting — the Yankees have built the strongest business case for great recruiting anywhere! Almost everyone agrees they have an abundance of extraordinary talent in literally every position. They routinely have the highest player salary expense of any MLB team. But the team owners are willing to pay such extravagant amounts because player personnel executives have successfully made the business case demonstrating a huge ROI in attracting the very best players. Although it’s expensive to recruit and retain top talent, the Yankees have calculated that the benefits far outweigh the costs. In fact, they have learned a valuable lesson which is that the most costly mistake that a team can make is to “save money” by placing an average player in a key position.
2. Recruit top talent away from competitors — while many teams try to build their talent pool by recruiting and developing entry-level talent, the Yankees have learned the value of tracking and then recruiting away the top talent from other firms. Rather than seeking out “hidden talent,” they instead continuously identify obvious top performers on other teams and directly recruit them away (we call it poaching). Direct poaching has an added advantage in that it helps your team immediately, while simultaneously hurting your competitor.
3. Stars attract other stars — The Yankees have learned that working alongside other star players and having a significant chance at winning a championship are at least as important as money is in attracting top performers. Corporations should also focus on attracting noteworthy talent because they are a key attraction factor for top performers with many career choices. Firms should also publicly boast about their successes so that they build up their external image as a winner and an industry leader.
4. Prioritize your positions — an important lesson to learn is that all positions do not have an equal impact. In reality that means that a starting pitcher or the cleanup hitter might be five times more impactful on the team’s winning percentage than a right fielder, a first baseman, or the batboy. Corporations need to realize that if they can’t recruit the best for every position, they need to focus recruiting resources on the 20% or less of that can be classified as high-impact openings.
5. Prioritize individuals — a related lesson to learn is that top performers need to be prioritized and treated differently. Top performers might produce five times more than the average player, so as a result, they are given more playing time, are put in critical games, and sometimes they are even shifted into the most critical positions. For corporate recruiting leaders, this means that first of all they need to focus their recruiting resources on top-performing departments and managers. It also means that they must shift their best recruiters to priority candidates and also to change their recruiting approach and temperament dramatically when they encounter a star candidate. It’s a mistake for corporate HR to even attempt to treat all employees the same.
6. Identify their decision criteria — in sports, the relative bargaining power of top talent is immense. If you don’t realize upfront that the power has shifted toward them, you won’t win many recruiting battles. The Yankees have learned that it’s not enough to simply plan to attract the very best, you need to institute a sales approach where you identify and then meet each of the factors that cause the top player to accept a job. It’s equally important for corporations to stop acting arrogantly, as if they possess all of the power in the hiring relationship. At least for talent that is in high demand, they need to realize that the candidate is the one who holds most of the power. This requires corporations to develop a more candidate-friendly recruiting experience and in addition, a formal process to identify and then to completely meet each one of a top performer’s job acceptance criteria.
7. Global recruiting is required — if you look at the significant percentage of Yankee players who come from Japan, the Caribbean, and Latin and South America, you would realize almost immediately that it’s a mistake to recruit exclusively in your backyard. Corporate recruiting leaders must learn they can’t just recruit locally; maybe as much as 50% of your talent must be global.
8. Recruit team players — over the long run, you can not win unless everyone works together. In addition to raw performance, every individual must demonstrate the capability of working alongside with and developing others on the team.
9. Hire them, so your competitor can’t — rather than hiring just enough to fill your needs, follow the Yankee approach, which is to occasionally hire top talent just to prevent your competitors from having it. The goal is to get an “unfair” talent market share.
10. Recruit rather than train — no one would even attempt to argue that Alex Rodriguez became a star as a result of classroom training offered by the Yankees. In fact, rather than taking the risky approach of relying on training to develop skills, the Yankees almost exclusively recruits individuals who are already fully trained, proven performers who only need minimal guidance and coaching in order to excel.
11. Performance over loyalty — the Yankees are notorious for attracting the best, but they are equally famous for heartlessly dropping those who fail to live up to the required performance levels. The best organizations make it clear to all that they put current performance first and thus they use a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? approach (in lieu of rewarding loyalty or tenure). Assume upfront that a certain percentage of new hires and employees will fail to produce. This approach requires that you have a quality of hire measure and then a strong performance tracking system. In addition, have the courage to admit when you’ve made a hiring mistake so that you can quickly swap your mistakes for new outstanding recruits.
12. Lose your tolerance for hiring mistakes — if there is a differentiator between sports recruiting and corporate recruiting, it would be the fact that in sports, every talent decision is highly visible. Unlike corporations, if you make a significant recruiting or retention mistake, it will be made visible and amplified by countless newspaper headlines, sports talk shows, and bloggers. The visibility of their personnel errors forces them to develop recruiting processes that are significantly more precise and error-free than their corporate counterparts. Becoming more precise, more data-driven, and recognizing failures early on are also excellent goals for corporate recruiting leaders.
13. Continuous workforce planning is needed — even before the Yankees won the World Series this year, they already began the process of workforce planning for next year. The process includes internally identifying surplus or duplicate talent, potential voluntary turnover, and individuals whose performance is declining. External planning requires identifying and courting desirable external talent at other teams for vacancies or to swap for current players in order to improve the overall performance at a particular position.
14. Continuous recruiting is required — even though the down economy has affected revenues at the Yankees, the recruiting effort hasn’t been impacted at all. The lesson to be learned is that recruiting needs to be a continuous process that is independent of the short-term revenue fluctuations. Organizations must adopt a long-term funding model that allows an increase in recruiting when top quality talent is available. The recruiting process for key jobs must also start a year or two ahead of when you actually must-have the talent in order to build relationships and to more accurately assess the talent. If top talent unexpectedly becomes available, you must have a “speed hiring” process so that you can hire it immediately, even if you don’t have an open position.
15. It’s not the location — many corporations argue that they can’t recruit the best because of their physical location. Yes, the Yankees are located in New York, but so are the New York Mets, a team that stinks almost every year. In fact, both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia won sports championships last year in spite of not being located in a most-desirable city. The key lesson is that if you have great players, great managers, and a great product, you can attract the best to any location.
16. Great managers are also needed — the Yankees are equally as willing to recruit great managers because they realize that top talent can only get you close to a championship. They realize that if you want to win continuously, you need a great manager to integrate and manage the egos that many top performers develop.

Final Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that in the sports world, recruiters are treated as heroes? They have huge budgets, and their managers spend a great deal of time and resources on the continuous identification and recruiting of top talent. Everyone on the team knows who recruited Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or A-Rod.

In sharp contrast, the typical corporate recruiter is rarely respected and woefully under-resourced.

I hope that the recent recession has taught every recruiter that getting a significant increase in budget, or respect, will require that you dramatically improve both your business case and your observable and measurable business impact.

You can’t reasonably expect more than a 5% to 10% improvement if you limit your benchmarking and copying to the firms that are similar to yourself. A dramatic improvement in results might require you to examine practices that are dramatically different than your current ones. In short, if you want to have a “major-league impact” you might need to study the recruiting practices of the major leagues!

Life would be grand if we could sprinkle a few seeds in the ground, fertilize, add water … and a great salesperson would sprout. This is truly a pipedream, but one often pursued by small business owners and sales management executives in their quest to find great sales talent. Rather than grow their own, they attempt to steal the crops from their competitors. Why not — their competitor is much better at growing a sales organization than they are. They will grab some magic from their competitor’s land and they too can enjoy great success.

When did the competition begin building a better sales organization than your company? Before you harvest their crop, consider these five myths when hiring your competitor’s salespeople.

“Hiring from the competitor means the salesperson will hit the ground running with no training.” Some of the attraction to the competitors’ salespeople is sheer laziness. Hire a salesperson from the competitor today … instant revenue tomorrow. No need to train them; they already know everything. Needless to say, this is flawed thinking. Salespeople always need training and development regardless of who their former employer was.

That said, every once in a while, lightning will strike and you will hire a rainmaker. More often than not, this approach is a recipe for a making a bad hire. A thought: What salespeople do you really think are available from the competition? Rarely is it the top performers. It’s the bottom 20% that, truth be told, the company is glad to see leave.

“Our industry is so complex that we must hire a salesperson from within it.” How can this be true? No one ever came out of the womb mastering your industry — not even you. You were taught it and so was everyone else. If you truly feel that industry experience is the top requirement, be prepared for another major challenge: scalability. There are only so many people in your industry and very few that you will consider hiring. At some point, your talent pool will run dry.

Salespeople need to have a certain level of knowledge to effectively sell in an industry. Determine what they need to know to be effective and develop training tools to quickly get them up to speed. Identify resources in your company that can help them with their questions. Test their knowledge assimilation along the way to make sure they are getting it.

“They’re going to bring a book of business with them.” Before you buy that argument, consider these three points. First, despite what they tell you, it is extremely difficult to move clients. The pain of change is not one that is easily resolved with clients. It is rare to find a salesperson with that strong of an influence to overcome that issue.

Second, the salesperson doesn’t own those clients; their employer does. While non-competes don’t usually hold up in court, client list protection does. And, you can be at risk in the mess. Do you really need that headache?

Third, don’t think for a minute that the salesperson you hire today will one day retire with your firm. They will leave your employ some day. Imagine your salesperson attempting to take your clients with them when they go. It doesn’t feel overly ethical, does it? And, it’s a flawed reason to hire a salesperson.

“We’re a little firm and we could really use a salesperson who comes from one of our large competitors.” This statement is true if, and only if, your company and the large competitor are identical twins. A synergistic match between your company and the candidate is needed to put together a long-lasting sales marriage. There are a number of nuances that affect this synergy.

The flaw with this statement is that it assumes a complete sales culture match. Every sales organization is different, even within the same industry. The large competitor may have a ton of sales support for prospecting and presentations, while in your company the entire burden is on the salesperson. The salesperson at the competitor may enjoy great name recognition in the marketplace while you do not. Thus, a different skill set is needed to get in the door with prospects. The list goes on and on. The key is develop a profile of your ideal sales candidate with the required and desired attributes and interview accordingly.

“Since they have been in the industry, they are passionate about it, and passion sells.” Absolutely true! Passion sells, but it’s an incorrect assumption that these salespeople arrive with passion. Salespeople who bounce from company to company in an industry become “vanilla.”

Years ago, I had a salesperson on my team who had sold for three of our competitors prior to joining our company. I participated in a ride-along sales call with her, and the meeting was interesting to say the least. She could have had any of her former employer’s business cards in her hand, or ours for that matter, and everything she said was accurate. There was no passion. It was all vanilla information that failed to arouse any excitement in the prospect.

Sales hiring is daunting for companies of all sizes. The key is to have a profile of your ideal sales candidate and interview the prospects against it. This will help you find the right sales talent for your team whether they worked for your competitor or not. Need help interviewing sales candidates? Send me an email for my 28 favorite interview questions for sales candidates.

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.

Unfortunately, many recruiters and recruiting leaders choose an opposite path, becoming more conservative in their approach. When markets head south and fear about economic issues grip the populace, consider a counter-cyclical recruiting strategy that sends a clear message to everyone inside and outside your organization that talent truly means something to your organization.

One controversial yet extremely public, effective outside-the-box recruiting approach you might consider is “proximity recruiting.”

You Must Do Internet and Physical Recruiting

Even with the tremendous growth of Internet recruiting, not everyone is actively surfing the Internet looking for a job or combing through their email in anticipation of your generic form letter introduction.

Reaching a greater percentage of the population relevant to your job searches often requires using at least three channels to reach them, one of which should be physical. The underlying concept of physical recruiting is a simple one, just as robbers target banks because that’s where the money is! Recruiters need to target physical locations where a large number of potential hires can be found.

While nearly everyone in recruiting is familiar with the dreaded job fair, there are numerous other approaches to physical recruiting that are far more effective and fun. One such approach is “proximity” or event recruiting. Proximity recruiting at professional events (tradeshows and seminars) is clearly becoming more mainstream, but one location in particular really elevates the visibility of your efforts and qualifies as “outrageous.” The location? Across the street or in the parking lot of talent-competing firms in trouble.

Proximity Recruiting with a Taco Truck

If you have been paying attention to the business press lately, you are probably aware that Internet giant Yahoo! was planning to lay off approximately 1,000 employees worldwide, the greatest percentage of which would come from its Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

What you may not know is that despite a multi-year trend of notable voluntary exits by key employees, Yahoo! is still considered by many to employ some of the greatest engineering talent in the industry. This talent is extremely valuable to hundreds of upstarts working on next-generation technologies.

Yahoo!, like many organizations planning a reduction in force, kept its plans secret until the day when the axe actually swung. Because employees knew pink slips were coming, but no real guidance was offered as to who would be impacted, more people were concerned than would actually be cut.

Seizing on that fear and the actual swinging of the axe, Tokbox, an upstart enabling free voice and video calling over the Internet without any software download, engaged a proximity recruiting strategy that some may consider outrageous.

While pink slips were being handed out, Tokbox executives were setting up a taco truck across the street from Yahoo’s corporate campus, offering employees affected (and anyone else that wanted to chat) a hot lunch and information about employment opportunities.

Their approach was a simple one. They leased a taco truck and driver for the day, set up across the street in plain view, and offered a hot lunch to any Yahoo! employee who wanted to talk. Company executives were on hand and the atmosphere was light.

In order not to make anyone overly nervous, the conversations were kept short. While proximity recruiting has become more common in the Silicon Valley, Tokbox’s efforts still garnered a great deal of press both on the Internet and via the mainstream news media, earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free PR and employment advertising.

Other Proximity or Event Recruiting Opportunities

If you are not ready to offer free food or display a banner, consider additional proximity recruiting approaches:

• A van with a recruiting banner. If there was a most commonly used form of outrageous proximity recruiting, it would have to be the use of the recruiting van (usually with a large banner) that is parked within easy view of a large corporate site or a commuter site frequented by target talent. The “banner van” parked across the street approach has been used both in high-tech and healthcare to target firms that are currently going through acquisitions, union problems, and workforce reductions.
• The “across the street” bar, restaurant, or gym. Almost any firm with a large number of employees has a bar or restaurant close by where a significant number of the site’s employees go for a drink or meal with a colleague. These locations are packed with employees wearing IDs, who incidentally, often have their guard down. Health clubs and gyms are also great spots to target.
• Award events. You’re almost guaranteed to meet the best and brightest at events that offer awards or prizes for excellence and innovation. Not only should the recipients be targets but you should also look at award presenters as both potential targets and as referral sources.
• College recruiting approaches. Because college students love to attend events, proximity recruiting should be a major part of your university recruiting effort. Place a “banner van” key across the street from college campuses. Consider recruiting at campus club meetings, at college sports events, at music concerts, on the beach during spring break, and even at both on- and off-campus college poker events.
• Conventions. If you’re trying to hire a nurse, it only makes sense to recruit at a bar inside or outside a nursing-related convention, or where nursing continuing education is being offered. Here again you have the advantage of almost everyone having a name tag with their own and their company name on it.
• Clubs and groups. If you are seeking individuals with certain skills or attributes, consider recruiting at clubs, societies, or organizations where individuals with these attributes are common. For example, if you’re looking for risk-takers, target rock-climbing clubs. If your search includes disciplined individuals, consider military groups, math societies, and music groups.
• Hotels where company events are held. When you think about it, companies do send their very best people to meetings, seminars, and events. Occasionally, corporate events are announced on the hotels marquis for everyone to see, making it easy to schedule your next pub crawl. This time of year, immediately before a firm’s holiday party gets underway, is another time to begin building relationships with potential targets.
• Corporate training centers. Many firms send their best employees to corporate training. Because a good deal of corporate training can be long and dull, there is a high likelihood that a large group will go out for cocktails in the host hotel or at a nearby bar. So, if you have large corporate training centers near you, consider them prime targets.
• Shareholder meetings. The bar across the street from the location of the annual shareholders meeting will almost always include a number of company employees and leaders. Go before or after the event to make contacts and build relationships.
• Miscellaneous. Firms have practiced “proximity recruiting” at other events and sites including wine festivals, home shows, in shopping malls, and at charity events.

Final Thoughts

If you are put off by the concept of boldly “raiding” other firms, you should realize that “stealing” another firm’s customers is already an accepted and common practice. Both sales and recruiting are competitive functions where the most desirable targets have already been captured by your competitors. As a recruiter, your job is to provide your coworkers with the best teammates that can be found anywhere, period.

No matter what you do, you can never successfully recruit a firm’s employees unless the firm that the employee currently works at has already failed to offer them opportunities that are superior to yours. If you are even slightly hesitant about raiding firms like GM, Ford, Chrysler, Citigroup etc. that have clearly failed their current employees, don’t be surprised when you are replaced by a recruiter who is more aggressive, bolder, and more willing to try something new.

For great recruiters, this is an historic opportunity that can’t be missed. The elite of the elite are teetering — firms that have for decades had their way with the best talent from around the globe. If you haven’t already developed a recruiting plan to poach the best individuals and yes, even intact teams, there is no time to waste.

Target Top Performer and Innovator “Survivors” Who Hate Stagnation

The obvious recruiting move would to be to target the thousands of financial professionals and MBAs who are about to lose their jobs. While that is OK, if you want to land a true “find,” my recommendation would be to instead target the “survivors.” Survivors are those top performers and innovators who are almost guaranteed to still have a job because they are so valuable. Normally these extremely high-value individuals would be untouchable by corporate recruiters outside the financial industry. However, for a brief period these top performers and innovators will be considering other opportunities because these individuals have difficulty coping with the frustration that comes with frozen budgets, cost containment, limited risk-taking, and the politics of mergers and acquisitions. These top performers and innovators are so good that they will almost certainly survive any buyout, merger, or even a bankruptcy.

This state of uncertainty and stagnation doesn’t bother most employees because they are just happy to have the security of a job, but top performers and innovators hate stagnation. They want to be “in the competitive game” constantly. They don’t want to take a break from the competition. Take Tiger Woods, as an example. If he was on your golf team but senior managers decided with little notice to play no matches for the next year, what would his reaction be? You could assure him till you were blue in the face that he would have a job and a paycheck, but it would matter little; Tiger wants to play against the best every day.

Great players and great employees want to be competing every day. They want to try new ideas and face new challenges. And that can’t happen in an organization where budgets are frozen and executives are laser-focused on trying to restore stability. Anytime an organization freezes hiring, pay, promotions, or budgets, the loyalty of top performers and innovators shrinks immediately.

Perhaps an example will help to illustrate the point. I know an exceptional top performer who had worked only at great high-tech firms from Intel to Cisco. Eventually, he moved to an emerging firm because it promised him fast decision-making and the opportunity to innovate on the “bleeding edge” of technology. He was energized and excited and he threw himself into the opportunity. But suddenly, with no warning, he abruptly quit one day. I was startled because he was so excited about the opportunities and challenges that he faced. So, I asked him: ‘Why the sudden turnaround in loyalty?’ He said, ‘I had no choice, because they froze all development budgets for the next year.’

Because I work at a university where budget decreases come on a weekly basis, I was puzzled. I asked him why the budget freeze was such a big deal; after all, it wasn’t a cut, only a freeze. He answered without hesitation, ‘I couldn’t stand the thought of not taking risks and innovating for an entire year. The stagnation would kill my spirit!’

He made a year with no budget increases sound like an eternity, but to him it was.

Corporate recruiters are always talking about becoming more strategic, but unfortunately few find the time or develop the courage to take advantage of strategic opportunities when they are presented with them. While the turmoil on Wall Street is a terrible thing, it has presented stable companies with cash in the bank a very rare opportunity. Not only is it a great time to recruit top talent away elite firms, it is also a great time to swoop up smaller- and medium-sized firms that rely on credit to fund operations because credit will be in short supply. Acquiring companies for their talent is not a rare occurrence; unfortunately, it is rarely one proposed by corporate recruiting functions. Truly strategic recruiters should understand the employer pecking order in the labor markets, the business models of talent competitors, and be able to build a short list of “labor investments” that offer great return.

Action Steps for Identifying Top Performers at Troubled Firms

Identifying who you should target to “poach” is easier than you think. Here are some tips on how to do it:

1. Remember: don’t look on layoff lists. Stars will still be employed.
2. Use social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) to identify individuals from these firms. Ask those who you do identify to help you out by naming others.
3. Search blogs written by employees at target firms for the names of top employees.
4. Ask your own employees and especially new hires if they know any top performers and innovators at your target firms.
5. Use “names” search firms (research firms have ways of identifying these individuals). There are numerous research firms that, for a relatively small fee, will provide you with the names and the contact information of anyone at a target firm if you know their title.
6. Identify famous or well-known individuals by running their “Google score.” Key people always have high Google scores. They can be found by searching for major technical terms or job titles, along with a firm name.
7. Search seminar, association events, and trade show brochures for speakers who come from these key firms. These survivors are likely to be authors and/or speakers.
8. Offer an increased referral bonus (bounty) for the next few months for top-performer referrals from these key firms.
9. Purposely include a representative from key competitors in your interview list for job openings. During the interview tell them that you assess top talent in part by their ability to “name other top talent.” If the same names appear across multiple interviews, you are getting close.
10. Contact former employees at these key firms and ask them for names.
11. Ask suppliers, customers, and consultants who work with your firm for names.
12. Use sites like Jigsaw (which collects business cards) to identify individuals with key job titles at these firms.
13. Use executive search firms that specialize in these industries.

Selling Them on Your Firm

Once you identify the individual, obviously you still have to convince them to make the switch from an unstable firm to a stable one. Some tips that might help you include:

• Put together a portfolio of arguments demonstrating that your firm has the resources and the executive support to invest in innovation and new ideas.
• Put together an interview team of executives and innovators who excel at exciting and “selling” others on the vision of your organization. Use this team to convince your target to make the move.
• Expand your offer letter process to include information on the type of resources, budget, and opportunities that the new hire will have if they accept your offer. Make whatever promises you need in order to convince them that a switch to your firm offers challenge and financial support.
• Directly ask your candidates what they would need to be successful at your firm, and what it would take to convince them to make the shift. Obviously, you need to use that information to better “sell” the candidate.

Final Thoughts

In a competitive business environment, recruiters must learn to be proactive and seek out opportunities to hire truly exceptional individuals. The turmoil that is resulting from the current financial crisis will affect not just the well-known firms that are going through bankruptcy and mergers, but also many tangential firms that will freeze their budgets and limit innovation as a result of the crisis.

If you have the courage and the ability to act quickly, now’s the time to cherry pick a handful of the survivors and bring them into your firm. Incidentally, if you’re successful, it is highly likely that each one will also bring along a handful of top talent with them, making the ROI of your initial recruiting initiative even higher.

That is, until recently, when Microsoft raised the level of its recruiting aggressiveness to the point where it would have to be rated an “A” on the aggressiveness scale.

The first indication came prior to the initial merger offer to Yahoo, when its central sourcing team directly emailed recruiting messages to Yahoo engineers, playing on their concerns about Yahoo’s future. Just last week, they ran a full-page color ad in the paper announcing in bold type…“Microsoft has search jobs in the valley”.

There is no secret who the ad was intended for, despite daily defections from Yahoo there is still some top-notch talent inside the company that the competition would love to poach. No subtlety here!

Develop Talent, Hire Talent, or Buy the Competition

In nearly every industry, talent is the primary driver of both a firm’s capability and its capacity to perform. For firms that are growing, either holistically or through industry consolidation/expansion, there are really only three options to ensure access to talent.

Some companies opt to build or develop talent; unfortunately, development is often a “slow” option that provides mediocre results in a fast-changing world.

A second option, growth through mergers and acquisitions, allows the firm to increase its capabilities relatively rapidly as a result of “buying” or merging with a major competitor. It is one of the most common and fundamentally sound business strategies available, and one in constant use around the world. However, M&A is expensive, and often leads to defections of the very key talent you have liked to have retained. Mergers and acquisitions can be hostile or tame, something we have witnessed with Microsoft’s attempt to acquire in recent months.

When M&A doesn’t work, companies have yet another option, one that is less complex, less time-consuming, and much less expensive. This option is to poach away most, if not all, of the talent that provides the competition with its capacity to exist, something Microsoft is obviously doing in a very public way.

The “Neutron Bomb” Recruiting Approach as an Alternative to Mergers

The “Plan B” poaching strategy that firms should consider a feasible alternative to mergers and acquisitions focuses on using strong recruiting approaches to directly “poach away” the target firm’s key employees. This effectively gives you access to all of the capability that produced their intellectual capital without the internal drama that led to the competitor’s chaotic state.

I call this recruiting-based alternative to mergers the “neutron bomb” strategy, because much like the military’s neutron bomb after detonation, “the buildings” are left intact but the people are gone. (Yes it’s the same neutron bomb metaphor that earned Jack Welch the former CEO of GE, his nickname “Neutron Jack.”)

Microsoft not so subtly revealed its new recruiting emphasis by running a full-page color ad last week in the San Jose Mercury News (the key newspaper of the Silicon Valley). While it’s generally true that employed engineers don’t read newspaper career sections when they’re looking for a job, the act of placing a full-page ad garners buzz on the Internet, blogs, and social networks.

In that ad, Microsoft made it clear that it was investing heavily in search technology (the strong-suit of competitor Yahoo) and that it wanted to grow employment in that area. It also noted that it currently has over 2,000 employees in the Silicon Valley, thus indicating to potential Yahoo employees that relocation wouldn’t be necessary.

Advantages of Recruiting Versus M&A

If you have enough courage and a strong recruiting function, there are many advantages associated with implementing a “neutron” recruiting strategy in lieu of buying a competitor:

• Opportunity to select the best. Recruiting allows you to “cherry pick” the target firm’s key innovators, game-changers, and top performers in just the critical knowledge areas where you need help. With M&A, unfortunately, you have to acquire every employee, including unnecessary administrative staff and a significant number of slackers. While you can get rid of them post-acquisition, it’s a messy process. Using professional football as an analogy, in lieu of buying the entire team complete with its facilities, you would instead focus on recruiting away the best coaches and top quarterbacks, running backs, pass rushers, and wide receivers. In the end, you would have “cherry picked” a small number of individuals but a significant portion of the team’s capability to win.
• Avoid merger pains. When you merge two large companies, you must also merge different corporate cultures, business processes, and management structures. This integration is a major effort that can distract your employee’s attention away from the customers and the product. In contrast, when you recruit away a firm’s employees as individuals or in small, intact teams (known as “lift outs”) these new hires don’t carry with them as high a level of hope or expectation that everything will remain the same. Instead, these individuals immediately realize that they are expected to change and adapt to the existing processes and culture.
• No complicated negotiations or approvals are required. Unfortunately, firms have to get the government’s approval of any large merger, but you don’t have to get anyone’s permission to recruit away a firm’s key employees (this is because employees are not owned and are free to leave at any time. Consequently, there are few legal issues if your recruiting effort focuses on recruiting the individual employees for their capability and not the firm’s proprietary technologies. In fact, your recruiting effort can even be general enough that you don’t have to mention a competitor firm by name. For example, in the case of the current Microsoft recruiting effort, Yahoo’s current search and advertising employees already know that the recent advertising “deal” with Google carries with it the possibility that their job and their impact will be lessened at Yahoo. Merely letting the world know through advertising and word-of-mouth approaches that Microsoft is doing significant hiring and investment in a particular functional area is sufficient on its own to attract at least the interest of most of the targeted employees.
• Recruiting processes are already in place. Recruiting new employees is an everyday occurrence, so there are processes and staff already in place to handle any upturn in volume. In direct contrast, M&A activities occur infrequently and as a result, they require the firm to put together a new M&A and transition team each time they make a major move. If you have a strong employment brand (as Microsoft does) the odds of reaching your recruiting goals under this strategy are extremely high.
• No need to lay off. Under the M&A approach, you acquire every employee. Unfortunately, you may get a “surplus” with some weak employees or unnecessary duplicates. If you use the “neutron” recruiting strategy, you won’t need to plan for and execute the massive restructuring and the almost inevitable layoffs that are commonly associated with M&A. As a side benefit, it allows you to avoid the upturn in job-seeking among your most valued employees that research shows happens as a result of even modest downsizing.
• Recruiting may result in lower turnover. When you recruit new employees, you don’t have to give them the complicated and uniform stock option and severance benefits that are generally associated with employees acquired as a result of a merger or acquisition. Because these new hires were hired as “individuals”, the hiring package doesn’t have to be uniform across the board, as it is with mergers. As a result, you are able to negotiate a tailored package with these “recruited” new hires, which is more likely to directly meet their individual wants and needs (thus limiting the risk of future turnover). In addition, because these individuals were “cherry picked,” they are much more likely to stay with your firm because they have been selected to closely “fit” your corporate culture and your business growth areas.
• Others will follow. Fortunately, it’s not necessary for your recruiting function to initially target a huge number of employees. The reason behind this is the fact that once you successfully recruit away a company’s key leaders and influencers in a particular functional area, it’s highly likely that many others will choose to follow. Some will come on their own volition, while others will come as a result of referrals from newly hired employees.
• Leave behind damaged remnants. If you are successful in recruiting away a significant number of the targeted key employees, you leave your former competitor in a confused and often weakened state. This gives your firm an opportunity to move ahead rapidly, while your competitor must take time to regroup. This might seem harsh to some in HR, but remember, the business world is highly competitive and if you frequently use the phrase “war for talent,” it’s only natural that you would use more “war like” approaches when recruiting.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, HR and talent management are seldom brought into a merger or acquisition situation until after the deal is already done. Even then, their primary role is just to smooth the transition into a single firm.

However, there is a role for talent management prior to the decision to even begin M&A activity. That role is to offer senior management the option of achieving almost the same results (gaining a large volume of quality, trained talent quickly) without the associated complexity and costs related to mergers and acquisitions.

In my experience, not very many Directors of Talent Management or Chief Talent Officers have had the courage to step forward and intervene before major merger plans are underway. However, because M&A activity is continually increasing, even in our troubled economy, now might be the time to make an exception and to propose the “neutron” recruiting option as Plan B.

Recruiting talent is a business function, and business activities get branded as hostile or aggressive all the time without the negative connotations that are often associated with aggressive or hostile recruiting. As global competition heats up and the balance of global economic power shifts away from the United States, recruiters are going to have to get over their personal objections and embrace business realities.

By Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

As the global war for talent continues to manifest itself in an ever-increasing manner of ways, a nasty practice left over from an era long ago continues to handcuff recruiting organizations around the world. The practice we speak of is the gentlemen’s agreement made between two organizations not to poach one another’s employees.

Once incredibly common among strategic partners, suppliers, resellers, and even direct competitors, such agreements can quickly isolate a large percentage of the suitable talent supply needed to fuel growth in an organization outside the direct reach of the companies’ recruiters.

Such agreements were always a nuisance but not a major obstacle impeding organizational growth when talent was in abundant supply, but that isn’t the case anymore. Today the worldwide demand for skilled labor has outpaced supply and the role of talent has changed. From the Industrial Age to the birth of the Information Age, talent was merely a resource, but as knowledge and the ability to continuously innovate have become primary differentiators for companies, the role of talent has significantly increased in importance. Today such agreements stand to do much more than constrain labor costs by preventing bidding wars for top talent? they stand to pre-determine the winners and the losers in the global battle for top talent.

Anti-poaching agreements do not ban the recruiting of employees from other organizations; they merely prohibit recruiters from directly sourcing such talent. If employees in other organizations reach out to recruiters on their own, they are fair game.

So the question arises: are there things that recruiters can do to encourage/convince targeted talent in non-approachable companies to “approach” them seeking employment opportunities? Luckily, the answer to that question is yes.

Tools for Acquiring Candidates Without Directly Recruiting Them

If you are a recruiter or recruiting manager who works for an organization handcuffed by archaic anti-poaching agreements, our first recommendation would be to quit and join a company that truly understands the value of top talent and is willing to fight hard for it.

Recruiting top talent is never easy, but strategizing, selecting tools, and initiating the chase is almost always fun unless you are prohibited from using the best approaches and tools. Recruiting top talent in an organization that doesn’t demonstrate its respect and desire for top talent is frustrating. It’s like fighting in a war where you are not able to plan or execute an offensive maneuver against your enemy. In other words, you’re always fighting defensively, not proactively.

In addition, since most companies do not have a formal retention program, fighting a war for talent in an organization covered by anti-poaching agreements is tantamount to lining your army up in plain site, unarmed, and instructing them to let the enemy do as they please.

However, if quitting isn’t an option, this article covers a variety of tools and approaches that individual recruiters and recruiting leaders can use to garner the attention of a talent competitor’s employees without directly contacting them.

Approach One: Employment Branding

Employment branding has been characterized by some as the science of establishing a velvet rope behind which talent will line up clamoring for an opportunity to be let inside, much like patrons at a hot night club; that’s a great characterization.

Employment branding is a far-reaching set of activities aimed at managing the employment opportunities put forth by a company much like a company manages the feature set of the products/services it produces to ensure desirability, and leveraging PR and marketing approaches/tools to make sure targeted segments of the labor force qualified to buy the products are aware of and desire them. Unlike direct sourcing, employment branding leverages indirect communication designed to influence targeted talent to reach out to you.

To increase the flow of inquiries from employees currently employed in un-approachable firms, consider the following:

• Have your people-management tools and approaches “talked about” in the media. One of the best ways to get people to approach your firm is by developing and implementing exciting or “sexy” management tools and best practices. However, merely having them is not enough. Make sure that these tools, approaches, and processes are known about by the individuals you want to recruit. Secure mention of them in articles, television programs, and blogs that targeted talent are sure to see. When targeted talent sees that your firm’s practices are routinely written up and celebrated by leading authorities, they will develop a sense of interest that in time will influence them to proactively approach your firm.
• Build interest by giving presentations at professional events. If you do it right, nothing is more powerful in attracting targeted talent than having an employee tell a compelling story designed specifically to resonate with the captive audience at an industry trade show or seminar. Having your CEO address an audience that doesn’t normally hear directly from C-level leaders is particularly effective. In fact, if you do it right, those speaking will be approached almost immediately following the presentation and throughout the event by some of the best employees currently employed in talent competing organizations provided your public figure doesn’t disappear immediately following his/her presentation. Remember, once they approach you about your firm’s opportunities, it’s perfectly ok to recruit them.
• Increase interest by winning “excellent place to work” awards. Getting your firm listed as an excellent employer by Fortune, Working Mother, or BusinessWeek is something that is often noticed by everyone in your industry. If your firm’s ranking is superior to that of your talent competitors, you can most certainly expect a significant number of their employees to proactively approach your firm in order to find out how good your firm really is.

Approach Two: Employee Referrals

If you were to examine the social networks of your entire employee population, it is safe to say that your employees are already in direct contact with a significant portion of the population you as a recruiter are prohibited from reaching out to. Those existing connections represent a significant opportunity to influence targeted talent, one most organizations significantly underutilize.

The idea here is not to get your employees to directly source talent you can’t, but rather to leverage their existing connection to influence the targeted talent to ask your employee to refer them.

Some of the best referral-related approaches to accomplish this include:

• Develop a story inventory. As recruiters, you spend a good portion of your day figuring out new and effective ways to approach possible talent and position your organization as the best employment option. But for the most part, the rest of the employee population in your organization doesn’t. A survey conducted by us in 2007 that reached more than 15,000 employee referral program participants in a number of organizations found that more than 72% were uncomfortable and ill-prepared to talk to potential referrals about joining their company. If the idea is to influence others to approach you, they need to hear stories that lead them to believe what you can offer far exceeds what others can and what they already have. For that to happen, your employees need to be sharing stories within their network on a regular basis. If you aren’t working to make sure that “wow!” stories develop in your organization and are shared in a non-propaganda-like way, shame on you. For example, the question isn’t have you heard of a little company called Google, but rather how many stories have you heard?
• Create “ask me!” buttons. One of the cheapest and most powerful tools for convincing a competitor’s employees to approach one of your employees is an “ask me about my firm” lapel button, t-shirt, backpack, etc. If you can convince your employees to wear them while traveling or attending a professional event, you’ll find that can be all it takes to get individuals to take the initiative to approach your firm. The phrases on the buttons can vary, but samples include “I’m proud to work at ______”; “I love my job at______”; “We’re hiring at ______”; or “Ask me about working at ______”. Incidentally, it might also increase your product sales opportunities. Increase the number of employees who are willing to wear these buttons by reminding your employees that it’s every employee’s job to be a 24/7 talent scout, and that anyone they introduce could earn them a referral bonus.
• Refresh your referral program. Almost all employer referral programs lose their effectiveness within 18 months if they’re not periodically refreshed. If you are not hiring at least 30% of all external hires via your employee referral program, either your organization or your program needs serious work. One of the areas to focus on is educating your employees on the acceptable and unacceptable ways of approaching your competitor’s employees and communicating candidly about what talent is needed, how finding top talents benefits them, and what top talent might need to know to adequately be influenced.
• Use referral cards. If your organization has a relatively loose anti-poaching agreement, encourage your employees to hand cards directly to individuals they run into whom they feel may make good additions to the company. Even if your organization is more conservative, referral cards are great sales tools. The key is to design them so that the individual receiving them feels special and unique when they are handed one. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD A REFERRAL CARD POINT SUCH TALENT TO THE WEBSITE TO FILL OUT THE SAME PAINFUL APPLICATION ANYONE COMING TO THE SITE UNINVITED WOULD FILL OUT. REMEMBER, THEY IMPRESSED US, SO WE SHOULD IMPRESS THEM.
• Have former employees plant the seed. Many firms find that their former employees are more than willing to help in recruiting if only provided an opportunity and an incentive to do so. A corporate alumni group can encourage these individuals to either talk positively about your firm or to make direct referrals (with or without receiving a referral bonus). Because former employees are not recruiters or even employees, they can (in many cases) approach competitors’ employees without violating any agreement.
• Have your vendors plant the seed. The employees of vendors who sell services and products to both you and your non-approachable talent competitor are a great resource. Influence them to spread the word about how great it is to work at your firm by making sure they hear the same “wow!” stories your employees hear. This effectively creates a Trojan horse capable of spreading your stories behind enemy lines, thereby influencing targeted talent to line up behind your velvet rope.

Approach Three: Web Attraction

Competitors routinely visit each other’s websites, and if they find your corporate site exciting, they might take a minute and flirt with your careers or jobs website, assuming that it allows flirting (i.e., the ability to interact in a personalized way without going all the way.)

Unfortunately, most corporate websites are pretty dull and do nearly everything possible to chase valuable talent away. There are a few sites demonstrating a new perspective, such as those operated by Google and Microsoft. Some of the Web-based approaches you should consider include:

• “People like you work here” profiles. Almost every employee from a competitor wonders whether they would fit in at your firm. Demonstrate on your website that a significant number of people like them work for you. By providing names and profiles, you give visitors an opportunity to contact these individuals to find out more. If you provide compelling profiles of the success of these individuals (whether narrative or video), you can also excite them and convince them that they too would have an exciting future at your firm.
• “Wow!” them with a video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a “moving picture” (a video on the Web) must be worth 10,000 words. If you really want a potential recruit to “feel” the excitement and passion at your organization there is no better approach than offering them an opportunity to view a video of your employees and what it’s like to work there. When you put these videos on your corporate site or on a popular site like YouTube, you will find that they are powerful attracting tools. Some of the best are offered by Google, Microsoft, Deloitte, and the U.S. Army.
• Use blogs and social networks. Because most blogs and online communities allow visitors to comment, they provide an opportunity to engage in a real dialogue and to build relationships with a competitor’s employees. Google, Microsoft, and even Ernst & Young are excellent examples of firms that effectively use blogs and social networks to communicate their message.
• Use a “friends of” newsletter. It’s only natural that a competitor’s employees would wonder about what’s going on at your firm. By offering visitors a chance to keep in touch and to learn more about the firm (even as a competitor), you can provide yourself with an opportunity to build a relationship with this person over time. The best mechanism for that is an e-newsletter (Google has one) which talks about products and things that are happening at the firm. In addition, once they have approached your firm and asked to receive more information, you can now actively recruit them under many anti-poaching agreements.
• Research “answer guy” sites. The very best employees at your talent competitors are constantly seeking out best practices and answers to current problems. If your corporate website contains information that allows them to improve themselves, they will visit regularly and over time, begin to consider working there. As an alternative, you can sponsor an external “neutral” answer guy site or just develop a process to ensure that your best practices appear regularly on websites, chat rooms, and listservs that the best regularly visit.

Approach Four: Miscellaneous Approaches

• Sponsor a professional event on your campus. If you can get your competitor’s employees on your campus, the number of opportunities to successfully WOW them increases dramatically. You can accomplish that goal by convincing local profession associations to hold their monthly meeting on your site, by sponsoring a learning event on your own, or by holding a “bring a colleague to work” event. Learning-focused open-house events often attract the curious from your talent competitors.
• Wine festivals and social events. Cisco pioneered the process of “non-recruiting” at wine festivals and social events. Because your competitor’s employees attend these social events, they provide an opportunity for them to approach you without expecting to be recruited. Instead of recruiting, you have your employees build relationships. This relationship-building makes it more likely that one of these individuals will ask during the next day, week, month, or year “what it’s like to work at your firm.”
• Trade fair booths. It’s quite common for your talent competitor’s employees to visit your firm’s booth at trade shows. Obviously, this is an opportunity to begin to build relationships. However, it’s also possible to provide a box for business cards which states “yes, I’d like to learn more about ______”. Once they put their business card in that box they have “approached” you and are now fair game. Offering a prize drawing can significantly increase the number of individuals who put their cards in your box.
• University alumni events. Because most competitors recruit from the same schools, university and alumni events are great opportunities to run across your competitor’s employees. Use these events to build relationships, or encourage your employees to use them to find employer referrals. These events can include learning events, social events, or even sporting events.
• Benchmarking opportunities. Individuals who contact your firm directly to learn about your best practices are considered by many firms as having “approached” your firm. If you have exciting practices to share, you will increase their interest in applying for an opportunity at your firm.
• A “friends” program. If you want individuals to approach your firm, make it easy for them to find someone to contact. By posting on your website the names, titles, email addresses, or even the phone numbers of your professional employees who have volunteered and are willing to answer questions, you increase the likelihood that a competitor’s employee will call. In addition, you’ll find that an employee in a similar position is much more persuasive than any recruiter. If you have difficulty getting volunteers, offer them a referral bonus if the people they talk to are eventually hired.
• Magnet hires. Targeting and hiring a single well-known star from a competitor can send a clear message to others that this is a place worth exploring.
• Mentors. Continuing a mentoring relationship with college students who don’t actually join your firm can help convince them to someday approach you about joining your firm.
• Praise their work. Sending brief comments to individuals praising their ideas (that are found in publications and on the Internet) can lead to future inquiries.
• Reward those who interview. It’s difficult for individuals who work at a competitor to interview at your firm because it can cost them their job. If you reward those who come in for an interview for targeted professional positions with a dinner for two or a great bottle of wine, the word will spread rapidly throughout the industry. You can also help break down the barriers to interviewing by scheduling interviews at night, on weekends, or at professional events where most of the targeted individuals are already attending.
• Contests to identify and build relationships. By holding contests (usually on the Internet), you can attract competitive individuals who wouldn’t normally consider applying for another job. Use the contest results to identify the best performers, and because they approached you, you can begin building a relationship with the best in order to eventually convince them to formally apply for a position.
• Target a competitor’s “former” employees. If you’re super conservative (actually you shouldn’t be in recruiting if you’re super conservative) you can avoid almost all criticism if you target individuals who are leaving, or have already left, your competitor. These individuals were still trained by and still know the best practices at your competitor but because they’re not current employees, no one can accuse you of poaching. You can use social networks like Linkedin, Facebook, or MySpace to identify these individuals. Or ask successful hires from your competitors “who left recently?” and “who else is good?” that we should subtly target.

Final Thoughts

Great recruiters tend to be extremely competitive people and often find it unbelievably frustrating to work in an environment that handcuffs their ability to build the best organization possible.

Organizations that continue to forge or honor anti-poaching agreements are doing themselves a great disservice and sending a message to everyone that acquiring the best talent really isn’t important to them. Maybe they fear they can’t compete in an open talent market, or maybe they are still operating under the insanely asinine belief that containing labor costs a few percentage points is more important than securing top talent capable of delivering 200% to 300% more return.

Regardless, such leaders should be asked to step aside. We know it’s unlikely that people with engrained beliefs will step aside regardless how antiquated their thinking may be. So the question becomes how to manage in spite of the restrictions. We hope these thoughts help and encourage you to share your own with others.

Ever since the unsolicited offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, recruiters have been literally “circling” Yahoo in a manner that would have to be labeled as aggressive even by Silicon Valley standards. The tactics vary from the relatively tame practice of “cold calling” into Yahoo in order to find nervous employees to the more aggressive “trolling” by recruiters outside Yahoo’s parking lot and in local spots where Yahoo employees hang out.

Even though Microsoft hopes to gain a significant amount of Yahoo’s talent through acquisition, a number of groups at Microsoft are not waiting. Already on the Internet you can find copies of emails sent by Microsoft recruiters to known top talent at Yahoo, offering them an opportunity to explore a Microsoft career in this time of uncertainty. Those interested in reading one such email can check out this blog posting.

However, the most aggressive approach has to be a firm that has aggressively posted “we are hiring” posters in the entrance way and in the bathrooms of the building that they share with Yahoo’s famous San Francisco “Brickhouse” innovation site. I call it “bathroom recruiting” and by the way, I’ve heard that it has already yielded results. The firms that are actively attempting to poach talent away from Yahoo range from the very small startup Cake Financial to the recruiting machine Google, which recently successfully hired away a key Yahoo executive, Steve Souders, their Chief Performance Yahoo.

The Majority of Hires Are Poached

If “bathroom recruiting” shocks you, it’s only because most aggressive recruiting approaches are kept secret in order to maintain a firm’s competitive advantage. If you think that poaching (the direct targeting of current employees from another firm) is rare, you would be totally wrong. I estimate that nearly 75% of key hires in major firms are directly recruited away from other talent competitors, and that nearly 100% of CEOs (that are external hires) are poached.

Sometimes the person is lured away from their current firm not by a corporate recruiter but instead by an intermediary (a third-party recruiter or agency), but the net result is the same. One firm gains a new employee and another firm loses a current employee as a result of a recruiter paid directly or indirectly by the corporation. Even the practice of recruiting away individuals is being superseded by a more aggressive approach, known as “lift outs.” In a lift out, an entire team is poached all at once (Yahoo once lost an entire team to the software firm Nuance). Some firms now even keep score of their poaching activities. They calculate what I call their “giveaway/take away ratio,” which tells the firm whether they successfully recruit away more individuals from their competitors than competitors successfully poach away from them.

Poaching is Becoming a Global Phenomenon

Because of the almost continual poaching between giants like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, many individuals think that the United States is at the epicenter of worldwide poaching, but that wouldn’t be true. China, closely followed by India, would win the award hands down.

The widespread economic growth in China has made the demand for managers with experience working and managing in China stratospheric. In my many visits to China, I have learned about how firms literally “bid” for experienced managers with amounts of money that would double a manager’s present salary.

India is no slacker either in the fight for top talent. I once met a CEO in Bangalore who was willing to open a plant across the street from Nokia in Finland just to increase the likelihood of directly recruiting away their engineers.

In Europe, the mobile phone firm Vodafone recently poached one of Microsoft’s top executives to head up its new Internet services division. In Canada, EA once placed a billboard in the vicinity of a competitor in order to incite them to switch employers.

Since the late 1990s, U.S. firms that are perceived to be in trouble or those that are being threatened with a merger have been subject to aggressive “across the street” recruiting efforts. It happened to PeopleSoft right before the Oracle merger. One Chicago-area hospital recruiter confided in me that their hospital unabashedly placed a recruiting van with a large canvas sign outside of a competing hospital that was having labor trouble.

But Isn’t Poaching Illegal, Immoral, or a Cause of Global Warming?

Whenever anyone brings up the topic of poaching, there are invariably squeals from the timid or the un-informed claiming that it’s illegal, immoral, unfair, unethical, etc. It’s funny that much of the talk comes from third-party recruiters who get a majority of their recruits from among the actively employed population.

Even some corporate recruiting managers somehow think that it’s better (or less dirty) to “poach” employees from another company by using an intermediary, as if somehow using a third-party recruiter and poaching the talent circuitously is more ethical.

Such an argument is just silly. If you pay a recruiter (whether it’s someone on your payroll or a vendor) to entice someone to leave their current firm to go to your firm, you have poached an employee. Hiring someone else to do the deed indirectly still means that your firm has gained an employee and another firm has lost one.

Incidentally, poaching away employees is not illegal because employees are not “owned.” (Ownership by one human of another has been illegal since the Civil War). Today, nearly all states and all corporations embrace “at will” employment, meaning that at anytime, either party may sever the relationship with or without cause.

Poaching May Spur Competition

Some HR professionals or managers are reluctant to poach because they are afraid that other firms will retaliate. Unfortunately, if you act this way your fears are misguided and you are probably hurting your firm with your timid approach. Using this fear of retaliation logic, the products division of your firm wouldn’t offer new products that competed directly with a competitor’s product because that large competitor might retaliate and squash your firm’s new product! In the same light, your sales people wouldn’t compete head-to-head for the same customers out of fear of retaliation.

Competition is everywhere. Business people expect competition everywhere; only HR people see “ethical issues” that just are not raised in other business functions. I have difficulty understanding HR professionals who keep saying they want to be business partners. It seems that when they are given a chance to actually compete like a business-person, they fail to act like real “business people” do every day, and that is to compete in the marketplace.

Executives and senior managers actually enjoy competition. If you have the best jobs in the best recruiters, you really have nothing to fear because you’ll win more than you lose. It’s a recruiter’s job to provide their current team with the best possible talent, so it’s time to stop being a pacifist.

Recruiting great talent is always a fight (some call it the “war for talent” for good reason) and if you want the very best well-trained candidates, you really have no other option other than to poach from your competitors.

The other option, hiring exclusively from “non-competitors,” invariably means hiring candidates without experience in your industry, candidates from outside the region with high relocation costs, or those candidates without any relevant experience. Hiring unemployed people with out-of-date training or individuals from other industries means extra costs to the firm because of their slow start up and their long learning curve.

Poaching objectors should also understand that, whether you like it or not, large competitors in any industry are continually targeting the employees of smaller firms and those in trouble. Large firms in every industry invariably look at smaller firms as their “farm teams,” so if no one is attempting to steal your employees, either you have a great blocking strategy or you may have some pretty undesirable employees! Any company that has good employees needs to constantly battle to keep them. It’s just part of business.

HR’s Dirty Little Secret

Refusing to poach may actually be illegal. One of HR’s dirty little secrets is that senior executives routinely make “pacts” where they agree not to poach each other’s employees. On the surface this might seem okay, but the reason these “gentlemen’s agreements” are always unwritten is because they probably violate the restraint of trade principle.

By agreeing not to compete, they are essentially hurting their current employees by restricting their freedom of movement. Under the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, employees are free to leave and go to any employer that they wish. When a firm agrees not to hire a competitor’s current employees, essentially what the firm is doing is legally limiting the freedom of its current employees.

Some unscrupulous firms attempt to “scare” their current employees and further restrict their freedom of joining a competitor by forcing them to sign odious non-compete agreements which are almost always unenforceable unless significant trade secrets are involved. Because no one can successfully hire them away, the current employer has an increased opportunity to poorly treat and underpay these individuals. Yes, competition forces employers to treat their employees better. A lack of competition allows employees to be abused because they have few options within the same industry or city.

As an employee, you might think that you didn’t get an interview at a competing firm because of some weaknesses in your work experience. Unbeknownst to most, the real reason they get no response are these secret, hideous, under-the-table non-compete hiring agreements.

The Benefits of Hiring Away Your Competitor’s Talent

If you’re unsure about whether you should poach, consider the many benefits that come from taking the best employees away from another firm. First, because they are currently working, they’re probably well-trained, up-to-date, and above-average employees. When you hire individuals from another firm, you get with the employee an understanding of your competitors’ processes, tools, and approaches.

Effective poaching will probably also force the competitor to focus more of their efforts on employee retention, which will in turn limit resources available to any recruiting effort that they might undertake against you.

Final Thoughts

Despite the inevitable whining that comes whenever anyone suggests that poaching is a positive thing, it exists and is getting more aggressive. You can either bemoan the point or accept it as part of the ongoing, continuous war for talent.

If you find yourself battling for talent, maybe it’s time to realize that in a war, you have to use aggressive tactics in order to win. Instead of blaming other firms for your current employees choosing to go elsewhere, instead look in the mirror, and blame yourself for not providing them with a superior opportunity. If you consider poaching to be war-like, so be it.

If Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft can practice it out in the open on a regular basis, I would instead label it as a standard business practice in the 21st century world of global recruiting. Any of you who think poaching away talent from Yahoo when it’s down on its luck is poor form needs to realize that it is being targeted not just because it’s weak, but instead because its human resource function and its managers did a world-class job in attracting some of the most desirable talent on the planet.

You see, it is extraordinary success that draws poachers, not weakness!

If you are a fierce competitor who wants to practice competitive advantage recruiting, this second part of the article will continue to discuss action steps to take to identify and then counter your competitors’ recruiting actions.

Part 1 in this series introduced the initial three steps for building a competitive advantage in recruiting, which included applying counterycyclical hiring, learning to hire when they’re not hiring, and providing competitive job descriptions. This week, here are 14 more steps to take when building your competitive advantage:

1. Block them when they’re hiring. If your firm is any good, it’s obvious that whenever the competition is hiring for a particular job, they will target the best at your company. You can put your head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening, or take a superior approach and visit their website every day to identify what jobs they are hiring for.

When jobs appear that would make the competitor likely to target your top employees, rapidly implement a blocking and retention strategy. The point here is to identify the employees they are likely to call and “re-recruit” them so that the inevitable call from their recruiter goes un-returned.

Of course, you should also revisit your blocking strategy so that receptionist and call screeners know the names and numbers of your competitors’ recruiters who are likely to call.

An additional step to take when they have a job opening where they will likely raid you is to have someone call them and find out by name which recruiter is on the requisition. Use your profile of their recruiters to identify what they are likely to do in the best approach to counter them.

2. Raid them when they’re in trouble. Whenever a competitor is going through some difficulty, such as the termination of an executive, a merger, stock price crash, or a major product failure, your competitors’ employees are likely to be disillusioned.

If you’re a true competitor, this is the time you should begin making calls and offering them opportunities with more certainty and security. If you need to be reminded, remember that employees are not owned and that you are offering them an opportunity to get out of a bad situation. Shame on the competitor for not offering superior opportunities to yours.

3. Interview to learn as well as to hire. If you’re a true competitor, you want to learn as much as you can about what your enemy is doing. As a result, make it a standard practice to include at least one candidate from your competitor in the interview process for all key positions. Remember, every time you hire a competitor, your company’s value goes up while their value drops.

Interviewing competitors has an added bonus in that you can use it as an opportunity to test them about their problems and what approaches they are using to solve them.

4. Compare your website to their website. Invariably, most candidates will visit both firms’ websites before they make a decision on where to apply. True competitors are constantly comparing your website features and content to their website.

It’s your job to ensure that your website contains better information, better profiles, and a higher level of excitement. This is a continuous process because if they are any good, they’ll match every change you make.

5. Identify their best recruiter. If your competitors are competitive, their recruiters will be constantly probing and calling into your company to find out who the best are and who’s vulnerable.

Rather than being na?ve, attempt to find out which of their recruiters are getting through and what their arguments are. They should be part of any blocking strategy, but the secret is to offer small reward to any of your employees who will take notes whenever a competitors’ recruiter talks to them. Ask them to get the name, phone number, and make a list of the arguments they make. Then use this information to block their top recruiters.

6. Identify their sourcing, assessment, and selling approaches. If you and your talent competitors use the exact same sources, neither of you has a competitive advantage. The same is true of applicant-tracking systems, recruiter training, and everything else you do. If you want to gain a competitive advantage, you must use different sources than they do. Research (i.e., use Corzen) to identify which specific sources they use for each of their key job families.

If you’re not a big-name firm, it’s critical that you don’t go “head-to-head” with them using the same source. Instead, purposely try sources that they’re not using and shift from sources the minute they adopt them. If you want a competitive advantage in assessment and candidate selling, ask new hires on the first day about noted strengths and weaknesses. Yes, it’s hard work, but you can’t meet someone on a race-course if you continually follow their exact path. This same philosophy is true in recruiting.

7. Getting through to their best people. Identify any weaknesses in their strategy by constantly probing to see when the best call screeners are “off duty” and whether the voicemail system has weaknesses that allow you to contact recruiting targets directly.

If you’re a fierce competitor, you’ll track the successes and failures of each of your recruiters and use that information to plot a strategy to get your message in front of their best people. No need to use subterfuge here, just find out what works and keep doing it until they block it.

8. Track their promotion and hiring announcements. Nothing tells you more about a competitor than whom they promote and when they pass over someone for an external hire.

As a result, it’s crucial that you track each of their promotion and outside hire announcements because both of these events means that there are people who are likely unhappy because they didn’t get promoted. Contact these individuals immediately and make a pitch to those who will improve your organization.

9. Do your research. It’s much easier today to find out what competitors are doing because of the growth of the Internet. Assign someone in your organization to study competitors’ press releases and to do periodic Google searches using the words recruiting +XYZfirm. Read recruiting roundtable, Corporate Leadership Council, Conference Board, and consulting firm studies that mention the competitors’ recruiting approaches. In addition, find out what recruiting and HR magazines and newsletters they read to ensure that you share the same information base.

10. Test their systems. Find out the weaknesses in your competitors’ hiring systems. Start with asking new hires who worked at your competitors’ companies or interviewed there about the strengths or weaknesses of the processes.

If you’re feeling bold, test their system by having a friend or one of your employees apply and then assess their response time. If the candidate gets far enough, ask their time to interview, level of applicant satisfaction, and their approach to interviewing and selling candidates.

11. Find out who helps them. Ask new hires and your own consultants who advises them on recruiting-related matters. If you know who advises them, trains them, places their ads, and who supplies them with recruiters, you’ll have a better chance to catch up or leapfrog over them.

12. Postmortem. Whenever you compete “head-to-head” with your talent competitors, it’s critical that you analyze the results in order to find out why you won or lost. Ask new hires what worked well and what didn’t work so well. Use these learnings to continually improve.

13. Forecast where they’re going. If you’re going to win this battle, it’s obvious that just knowing what they’re doing now isn’t enough. So add “next steps” to your planning arsenal to forecast what they are likely to do next. Take this projection to senior managers and show them how a little investment can not only counter moves but also beat them to the punch.

14. Make it visual. Just like in war, you need to visually plot what the enemy is doing so that everyone is constantly reminded that this is a constant battle to gain a competitive advantage. Start by posting on the wall their recruiting organizational chart with the names of the key players. When they hire a new recruiter, you need to be aware of it and when they lose a good recruiter, everyone should be aware of that also.

In addition, do a mini-profile on each to identify their strengths and weaknesses so that when one of your recruiters is competing against their recruiter, you will improve your chances of winning the competition. Next, constantly post each of the critical jobs they are recruiting for, the name of the assigned recruiter, and their primary source to attract candidates.

Develop a competitive intelligence process that allows you to notify each recruiter electronically whenever their company is in trouble, has a hiring or salary freeze, or other anomaly that tells you now is the time to step up your recruiting efforts. Place this information in such a way that it reminds everyone, every day, that you’re in an intense competitive battle where you must counter and overtake every strategic action they take.

Final Thoughts

If you came into the corporate recruiting world from third-party recruiting, you are invariably already a fierce competitor because outside of the corporate environment, everyone knows recruiting is an “us against them” battle every day.

Within the corporate environment, most seem happy to, at the very least, ignore what the competitors are doing. If you’ve fallen into that “us against the world” trap, I hope this article has helped change your perspective, because it’s really our recruiting function against the recruiting function of a few primary-talent competitors.

Once you view it as a head-to-head battle, just like sales, the adrenaline kicks in and the rest is easy. If, on the other hand, you think there is enough good talent to go around, your end is in sight.

Business is all about head-to-head competition. Firms regularly compete for a limited supply of customers by designing products to outstage the competition, pricing products to undercut the competition, distributing products as close as possible to the customer, and branding them to drive loyalty over time.

In each competitive arena, leading companies strive to develop a competitive advantage. In the marketing and sales departments of major firms, the business environment is clearly understood: it’s a fierce competition of us against them, not just today but everyday.

Employees of Coca-Cola learn to disdain PepsiCo employees and vice versa. Most “Googlers” learn to disdain Yahoo! and Microsoft not just for what they do, but how they do it. This mentality can be found in every industry, in every size company, and in every country around the globe; it’s universally accepted that business is a competitive activity.

Advertisements that position one company’s product against another’s are common. Websites that go into detail about the strengths of a product compared to its competition are also common. Throughout the business world there exists an endless supply of examples that demonstrate sales strategies that directly position one entity against another and attempt to persuade customers to switch loyalty.

As the world becomes more and more flat it is abundantly clear that nations and states and municipalities also compete against one another everyday to secure a finite supply of resources. There is, however, one hold within the business world that has yet to accept the realities of business and adopt strategies that reflect it. This holdout is the talent-acquisition function.

Almost without exception, recruiting organizations live in a “bubble” of isolation. Yes, they accept that their company competes for candidates in the labor marketplace, but 95% live in a world of their own, devoid of a competitive spirit and without a plan to make recruiting a competitive advantage for their firm.

Because recruiters don’t view what they do as a zero-sum game, they are frequently shocked when new leadership requests they do a competitive analysis of the recruiting functions at each of the major competitor firms. Once they get over the initial trepidation, most recruiters realize that in order to “beat” an enemy you have to know what they are doing and what they’re planning for the future.

Competitive-advantage recruiting is a process of gathering information about the strengths and weaknesses of the competition and leveraging that knowledge to devise strategies and action plans that enable you to leapfrog their efforts.

A Lack of Concern For the Enemy

I look at business as being very similar to baseball. When a team announces its starting pitcher, you counter with a pitcher who matches or exceeds their skills. Managers put in left-handed hitters to get an advantage over a right-handed pitcher. It’s a continuous process of understanding their approach and then countering it to gain a competitive advantage.

The typical approach of recruiting managers is quite different. They seldom know the players on the opposing team, their strategy, or approaches. If you don’t believe me, see whether you can answer these questions about your direct talent competitor’s recruiting function:

• What is the name of their recruiting strategy?
• Who is their head of recruiting?
• Who is their very best recruiter?
• What is their most effective recruiting or sourcing tool?
• What is their biggest weakness? Strength?
• Which of their key jobs do they have difficulty filling?
• What times during the year do they do little or no hiring?
• When they beat you in a “head-to-head” competition for a top candidate, what is the primary reason that they win?

In baseball for example, this would be a no-brainer. Everyone on the team would know who their counterpart was, as well as what their strengths and weaknesses were. The same should be true for recruiting, but it isn’t.

The fact is, most recruiting functions do what they do without paying much attention to their talent competitors or the labor market in general. There is little attempt to identify and counter what the competitor is doing. I call this approach “living in a bubble.” Yes, recruiting the way you have always done it is easy and quite common, but it still hurts your firm and is probably one of the prime reasons why you can’t find and land top talent.

Competitive Analysis V. Benchmarking

Many recruiting functions participate in benchmarking studies, where researchers seek out best practices from other firms. Although benchmarking is important, it’s not the same as the competitive analysis required to build a competitive advantage. This is because benchmarking finds out what the “best” firms are doing, but does not necessarily find out what your direct competitors are doing.

Because a firm might only compete in a limited geographic area or in specialized jobs, it might be more beneficial to know precisely what your direct talent competitors are doing.

Competitive analysis is a side-by-side comparison between your firm and your direct talent competition in each of the critical talent-management areas. Competitive analysis focuses on both comparing recruiting and talent-management performance results as well as identifying best practices, strategies, and weaknesses.

Best practices information might indeed help your firm improve your performance at some point, but first you must identify whether there are any performance differences between your firm and its competition.

The Art of War

The best recruiter I know has achieved his level of excellence by viewing recruiting as a competitive battle. Not only does he track what the competitors are doing but he has also held quarterly recruiting roundtables where he invites all of the best recruiters in the geographic area to share ideas and best practices.

Why does he do this? He does this because he thinks one of the best ways to beat an enemy is to know them and keep them close. By talking to them on a regular basis, he is able to judge what the best are doing and then use that information to keep one step ahead.

Learn From Other Competitors

It’s hard to learn about competition from HR people because, almost without exception, they don’t view HR as a competitive function. However, within every company there are fierce competitors that you can learn from.

The best place to start is in sales. Talk to sales managers and you’ll learn very quickly how to develop and maintain a competitive advantage. The sales departments’ approaches will invariably seem too aggressive at first, but over time, you learn that you have to be aggressive to win a “head-to-head” competition.

Other highly competitive types that you might learn from include advertising, product development, and product branding professionals. In my experience, the tools, strategies, and approaches are almost always directly transferable to the talent-management function.

The War For Talent: Counter Your Enemy’s Actions

If you’re a fierce competitor and you want to practice competitive advantage recruiting, here are some action steps you can take to identify and then counter your competitors’ recruiting actions:

1. Countercyclical hiring. The key here is to hire right before the competition begins a major hiring cycle. For example, if they do most of their recruiting on campus in February, do your recruiting in January, during the fall, or even during the summer.

If they do the bulk of their hiring right after their new budget cycle, you should begin hiring right before it or right after it. If they don’t hire during a recession or downturn, beef up your hiring to take advantage of this “off-market” time.

2. Hire when they’re not hiring. Identify when your competitor is not hiring and focus your hiring when the competition is minimal. Start by identifying from their website when they have gaps with few or no jobs listed. This might be just before their new budget cycle, during the holidays, or when they’re shut down between Christmas and New Year’s.

If they’ve just gone through a major merger or acquisition, take advantage of their inevitable confusion to ramp up your hiring before they get their act together. And of course, whenever they put on a hiring freeze, go to town.

3. Job descriptions. Most job descriptions are written in isolation and, as a result, they don’t provide competitive advantage. Most hiring managers make them up in isolation and then see them watered down by the job-analysis people in compensation.

As a result, I suggest that before you begin hiring for a position, visit your competitor’s website and see how your job description is superior or inferior. Talk to the hiring manager and show them how the content of jobs could be improved, so that when a candidate compares the two, they’ll see how your jobs are obviously more exciting and challenging. This also means doing some wordsmithing and testing so that in a side-by-side comparison, your jobs win out each time.

Next week: Part 2 in this series will introduce 14 more action steps for building a competitive advantage in recruiting.

U.S. Perceptions Exist in a Vacuum Two weeks ago, I spoke at ERE’s first European conference, to a crowd of recruiters representing some of Europe’s most recognized companies and a handful of U.S. companies with a strong global footprint. I opted to speak on what I consider the most aggressive recruiting tactic available to corporate recruiters: targeted talent poaching. Prior to arriving in Brussels, Belgium, I prepared for a negative reaction, based on previous experiences with this topic in the U.S. But to my surprise, the reaction wasn’t negative. In fact, one member of the audience spoke up and indicated that poaching had become par for the course, a comment that drew affirmation from the rest of the audience. This caught me by surprise, only because over the years I have worked with a number of European firms, and when compared to firms headquartered elsewhere, their hesitation to adopt aggressive approaches was by far the most resolute I’ve experienced anywhere in the world.

Reflecting on that experience, I realized that it wasn’t out of line with other global experiences I’ve had this year. Throughout 2005, I touched down in eleven countries, mostly in Southeast Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. The perceptions around poaching encountered in Europe could be seen in Australia and New Zealand, where the shortage of skilled talent has threatened the survival of dominant industries. One banking organization was so aggressive that it approached the spouses of targeted candidates while their respective partners were at work to recruit the spouse as a decision influencer. It seems as though the dominant position the U.S. has enjoyed for years in the political/economic landscape has perhaps made our recruiting organizations complacent. As migration to the global economy causes rapid wage inflation in underdeveloped nations such as India, China, and Eastern Europe alongside steady wage deflation in hyper-developed nations like the U.S. and Great Britain, it is clear that such complacency may tip the scales in favor of the developing nations as the war for talent escalates.

A Primer on Poaching

Poaching talent is the practice of proactively targeting and hiring top talent away from a competitor or top firm, with the specific intention of:

• Securing skills or capabilities faster than if you were to attempt to develop talent internally through training and development efforts
• Securing expanded capacity (i.e. more bodies) that will require less ramp up time
• Mitigating high-level talent losses due to attrition
• Damaging your competitors’ ability to achieve their strategic objectives

The approach is not new and has been deployed around the world for ages, particularly in sports. Take a World Cup soccer (football) team for example. Can you think of a single team that is made up entirely of players from the country that team represents? The truth is that when winning matters, the best teams seek out the best talent wherever it resides, be it their backyard or a tiny undeveloped country nestled between two warring nations.

An Unstoppable Global Trend

The migration to a truly global economy is impacting every nation large and small in both positive and negative ways. One of the most apparent impacts is that it has increased demand for labor in nations that once supplied a surplus to developing nations, causing dramatic increases in local wages, in turn making it more difficult to recruit talent abroad. In addition, the rampant growth of offshore outsourcing has imbued developing nations with disposable income, making possible their investment into higher value work. Combined, these two external forces are complicating the pillage model that for so many years have filled hospitals with nurses and hardware/software firms with engineers. It has also turned the tables, such that developing nations must now devise ways to steal talent back from hyper-developed nations, i.e. poach! Aggressive firms in such nations are following the leaders, they are:

• Putting work where the talent resides
• Subcontracting outsource contracts for low value activities to other developing nations
• Opening offices in locations that compete directly with their clients
• Offering very lucrative compensation packages for key players who return or are willing to relocate to a developing nation

In short, the war for talent is no longer a local war, but rather a global one that will drive the evolution and practice of talent poaching.

Three Dominant Poaching Strategies

Poaching activities largely fall into one of three categories:

1. Direct sourcing. Firms use new data-mining techniques and tools, combined with age-old recruiter phone techniques, to mine the organizational structure, employee identities, and employee performance indicators of talent and product competitors. This competitive intelligence is later used to determine whom specifically should be targeted for poaching. All work is carried out internally.
2. Third-party poaching. This strategy relies on using a vendor or series of vendors to identify everything from which firms to target to what individuals to go after based on your strategic objectives. (It is also by far the most common way organizations that find poaching unethical actually practice it themselves. In their minds, poaching is perceived as unethical only if you do it yourself.)
3. Attract them with “honey.” The third strategy is likely the one that few organizations would associate with poaching, what we call the “attract them with honey” strategy. This approach utilizes six different channels to drive candidates to your organization from other specific organizations, much like product firms steer you to their products in grocery stores.

All three strategies have the same impact in the long run, but offer firms a varied level of “ethical exposure,” timeline, and cost. The three strategies outlined above are rank ordered in terms of their time to productivity and cost, from least expensive with quickest impact to most expensive with slowest impact. Because the ethical concerns over poaching are so great in the United States, the remainder of this article will focus on the channels that power the “attract them with honey” strategy.

The “Honey” Strategy: Six Primary Channels

The “honey” strategy is powered by a number of channels that drive candidates into your recruiting process. While the list of actual channels is long, most of them fall into six categories:

1. Employment branding
2. Employee referrals
3. Event recruiting
4. Magnet hiring
5. Boomerang hiring
6. Internet

Each of these channels is outlined below.

The Employment Branding Channel

Many firms that have made an attempt to manage their employer brand do so with no particular goals other than to develop either “Best Place to Work” or “Employer of Choice” status (note that both of those terms are registered trademarks!). Such efforts are, for lack of a better word, lame. Employment branding is not an art, but rather a science. It focuses on identifying which employer attributes and characteristics are needed to recruit a highly defined target audience, aligning organizational structure and management practices with those attributes where possible, and communicating both directly and indirectly with the target audience to position the organization as a leading firm providing those attributes. Employer branding relies on:

• External recognition as a leader in providing specific employer attributes, such as a value on diversity, innovation, or talent development
• Consistent messaging that continuously communicates who and what the firm is and what value it provides to prospective employees
• A story inventory that provides specific examples of how management programs and practices deliver value to employees
• A specific and differentiated theme (slogan) that competitors cannot easily mimic or assert
• Recognition for functional excellence
• Lots of lots of press coverage in very specific publications that reach into the targeted audience

The Employee Referral Channel

Just as most firms approach employment branding with no specific goal or outcome in mind, they often develop employee referral programs that meander and produce mediocre results at best. A targeted employee referral program, on the other hand, utilizes the employee population to do all of the competitive intelligence mining that enables targeted poaching, with an added benefit: It gets employees to utilize their personal networks to initiate the recruiting process. A targeted poaching effort that utilizes the employee referral channel relies on:

• Active referrals: An approach that goes to employees with a specific set of questions that prime them to remember who they know in specific roles, organizations, etc.
• Top performer referral prioritization: An approach that acts on all referrals coming in from proven top performers before acting on those from other employees
• Reference referrals: An approach that contacts references of past hires that proved to be top performers and asks who else they know
• Stakeholder referrals: An approach that leverages non employees who have a vested interest in the success of the company to generate referrals, such as consultants, suppliers, stock holders, etc.

The Events Channel

Nearly every organization that recruits will attend at least one event a year, be it a recruiting event, an industry trade show, or a vendor exposition. But few select events to participate in based on their probability of attracting employees from specific competitors. Utilizing events as a poaching channel relies on:

• Identifying and participating in specific industry trade shows or association events that have a proven attraction to employees of targeted competitors
• Hosting onsite seminars and certification courses that are attractive to the competition
• Participating in non-industry/non-professional events that attract a target audience, such as a beer and wine or arts festival.

The Magnet Hire Channel

The magnet hire channel is quite possibly the easiest one to understand. It simply relies on polling top performers to identify the most respected or most visible professional who they would be interested in working with, and then working to hire that person in hopes that they would attract others to your organization.

The Boomerang Channel

At some point in time, nearly every employee decides to make a change and severs an employment relationship. The boomerang channel is used in poaching by identifying former employees that are currently employed by a competitor and developing specific strategies to lure them back — which brings the added benefit of lots of competitive intelligence about organizational structure and management practices, but not trade secrets or product information!

The Internet Channel

The final major channel that is used to power the “honey” approach to poaching is the Internet channel. Unlike job posting and data mining, these approaches use the Internet to develop resources that employees of competing organizations are drawn to. Examples include:

• Hosted information resource sites. These sites provide valuable information that is useful to the target audience in their current role. For instance, a hospital organization might launch an e-newsletter for nurses that provides summaries of the latest breakthrough and techniques.
• Moderated professional forums. These tools enable professionals from a multitude of organizations to share information and discuss issues in a safe environment, free from advertisers and spammers.

Conclusion

The battle lines in the war for talent are expanding, and those with the most to lose need to understand that aggressive tools and approaches will be used by the competition. There is no place for complacency on the battlefield, which causes unnecessary death. Developing firms in developing countries are desperate for talent, and they have no reservations about poaching your best people. The evolution of poaching has begun, and there is no turning back. While the honey strategy will work in the short term, it is expensive and takes time. Eventually recruiters will have to learn to accept the role they play in their organizations’ future and get past what concerns they may have with direct poaching.

Poaching From Other Firms

The very best recruiters are employed at other firms where they keep their skills up-to-date. Those most relevant to your needs are most likely sitting behind a desk at one of your talent competitors. If you want great recruiters you need to become comfortable with hiring them away from other firms. If your recruiters are resistant to poach recruiters from other firms, fire them on the spot!

1. Ask candidate finalists you lose who the winning recruiter was. When you lose a candidate for a hard-to-hire position to a competitor, call them up and ask them the name of the winning recruiter. Do the same when you hire a recruiter from a competing firm (ask them on the first day who their former firm’s top recruiter was).
2. Poach from award-winning firms. If you are not sure which firm has the best recruiters I suggest you begin by looking at firms that win awards for great recruiting. Be aware that great recruiting firms also treat recruiters well, so it will be difficult to pull them away. Start with the ERE’s ER Excellence Awards and assume that any firm that even applies has great recruiters. The IQPC RASBIC Awards have lower standards, but the winners are still top firms. In particular, focus on recruiters that are assigned to the “hard to fill” or executive-level positions. Be careful of assuming that firms that are listed on best-place-to-work lists have great recruiters. Because their brand strength is so strong, they might not actually need great recruiters. If all else fails, you can close your eyes and throw a dart and hit a great recruiter at powerhouse recruiting departments like FirstMerit, Valero, Wachovia, Intuit, Booz Allen, Pepsi, GE, and Southwest Airlines. Also consider recruiters who used to work during the late ’90s at powerhouse recruiting firms that have since become weenies, like Cisco, Trilogy, Ariba, Merrill Lynch, TI, Corning, and Intel.
3. Target firms that are in trouble. Nothing makes a recruiter feel more useless than a hiring freeze. Use your contacts and competitive intelligence to identify which firms are currently under a hiring freeze and target their recruiters. Also look at firms that have announced layoffs, mergers, product failures, stock price crashes, or major leadership changes. Recruiters, like sales professionals, like to be able to sell a good story and a good opportunity ó and firms in a state of turmoil make that more difficult.
4. Recruit them from executive search firms. Executive search professionals generally have the aggressiveness and the results orientation you need. Unfortunately, the best are generally well paid, so it takes a good package to convince them to go the corporate route. Unless you’re lucky enough to find someone that is tired of the travel and grind, poaching executive search types is easier during an economic downturn, when third-party search work is harder to come by. Don’t be subtle here, ask your managers who the best recruiters are at the search firms you have utilized for your own hires, and then target them. Also be sure to consider those who “fail” at executive search, because even executive search firms’ failures are superior to most corporate recruiters in aggressiveness.
5. Use benchmarking as a recruiting process. Encourage your recruiters to constantly call other recruiters to benchmark best practices. Don’t just ask about the practices, ask about who designed them and who excels at using them. Utilize that information to develop a who’s who list. Realize that by sharing your best practices with recruiters and other firms, you are likely to pique their interest in joining your firm.
6. Just buy recruiter names from names researchers. If you want to know the names of recruiters that work at specific firms you can buy them from name generation or unbundled search firms. If you’re good at selling a candidate but not as good at finding their name, this is definitely the way to go. (Zimmerman and RW Sterns are examples of firms that do this work.)
7. Buy mailing lists from recruiters associations. Many local recruiting associations will sell you their mailing list of members, which tells you which firm they work at. If that doesn’t work, attending their events will certainly expose you to the best recruiters in the area.
8. Inquire about a position opening. One of the easiest and most effective ways to find the names of recruiters that can recruit for your particular job openings is to check your competitors’ websites to see who is hiring for these same positions. Simply have one of your employees in that position call the firm and ask which recruiter is handling that position. Then have your recruiter call them and try to convince them that you have a better opportunity.
9. Target military recruiters. Selling a military career is hardly ever easy, so it makes sense to target successful military recruiters that do it every day. If you have “ethical issues,” recruit them as they retire. Otherwise, just walk into any recruiting station and go at it. Military recruiters have incredible discipline and their lack of fear alone makes them a worthy hire.
10. Recruit them from outsource firms. There are many outsource firms like Hewitt and PWC that do a great deal of HR work. Because turnover rates among outsourcing firms are rather high, they generally have a team of great recruiters trying to draw people into this relatively dull and generic work. This means that their best recruiters are good at selling a generalized product, so they will probably excel in your environment.
11. Check out the FAQs. Ask a question on a competitor’s job site and recruit away the recruiter if they answer the question well.

Target Alumni from Public Recruiter Training Firms

Unfortunately, most recruiters learn the trade by trial and error, but there are a small percentage of sourcers and recruiters who were trained by the best in the business. If you can hire one of them, the rest is easy. Target current students, ask for alumni lists, or just post that you’re looking for someone who went through their training on discussion boards that are frequented by recruiters. The two trainers I would look into:

1. James Duran. The “godfather of recruiting,” James Duran is simply the best trainer of sourcers on the planet — even Google utilizes him. Although I have no relationship with him, I routinely commend his work.
2. AIRS. They are by far the largest recruiter training organization and they have literally thousands of alumni. Although they have focused on Internet recruiting, they have recently expanded into other areas, including referrals, recruiting strategy, and employment branding.

Build a Brand

There is no better long-term way to attract recruits — or recruiters — than by building your external image as a great place to work. Incidentally, it also turns out that some of the approaches you take to building your employment brand can also be used to attract great recruiters. Some of those approaches include:

1. Write articles. Just by writing articles about the great recruiting approaches and tools that your firm utilizes, you will attract a significant number of inquiries from recruiters who want to get better.
2. Give speeches. Making presentations about excellence in recruiting is an excellent way to attract recruiters. Simply collect business cards from those with the best questions and comments after your presentation and utilize them to develop a who’s who list.
3. Get on the best-place-to-work list. Because recruiting with a great brand is so easy, getting your firm on a best-place-to-work list will cause recruiters, as well as thousands of other applicants, to approach your firm.

Internet Sources

It’s always smart to utilize the Internet to find recruiters because the very best recruiters utilize it to learn and to continually improve. Be aware, however, that the very best recruiters do not utilize the Internet directly to find their own next job. They generally rely on referrals or networking for that.

1. ERE’s Job Board. The very best of all niche recruiting job boards. It is a benchmark that recruiting leaders utilize to determine the overall strength of recruiting. Post tough recruiting jobs on it and you are sure to get responses from very good recruiters.
2. List servers and chat rooms. Many of the best recruiters can be found providing answers on the various recruiting chat rooms on the web. Ask your recruiters that participate in these forums to identify the groups with the best answers and participants. Start with ERE’s discussion groups (especially “ASK Maureen”), but also look at Yahoo! groups and industry specific groups. Consider posting one of your own toughest recruiting problems on the list and target those that respond with an excellent solution.
3. Appear on answer sites. The best professionals of any kind don’t frequent job sites, but they do frequent sites that provide them with information on how to do their current job better. I call these sites “answer guy” sites. Ask your own best recruiters which sites they utilize for learning and gathering additional information. Then try to have articles about your best practices appear on these sites, or post a link on them to your own jobs site. The best learning sites include ERE, DrJohnSullivan.com, Duran HCP, Interbiznet, and Global Learning Resources.
4. Do a Google search. Type in the line

   "technical recruiter" +Microsoft +engineering

   and see if you don’t get the names of technical recruiters that recruit engineers at Microsoft. You can also type in the name of a particular recruiter and get their “Google score.” There are few more reliable predictors of excellence in recruiting than an individual recruiter’s “Google score.” If you’re looking for employed people who are not currently in job seeking mode, this is the approach to utilize. ZoomInfo is also an excellent service that helps you find people without resumes. Boolean searches on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN can also be utilized to identify individual recruiters and their personal websites.

5. Use business card exchange services. Jigsaw.com is a business-card collection service which allows you to buy, sell, or trade business cards in order to acquire the names of targeted individuals. Since all recruiters are constantly spreading their business cards, it makes since that these type of databases would be full of recruiters.
6. Use your corporate jobs site. Keep a recruiter job open on your website and convince the best applicants to sign up to your “push” job announcement service. Then when you have an urgent need, push out jobs to these individuals.
7. Social networks. Because recruiters build relationships, they routinely participate in online social networks. I personally participate in the ERE and LinkedIn networks. Although some strive to “pad” their number of contacts, generally speaking the best recruiters have an above-average number of links. Referral networks like Jobster can also help you identify recruiters.
8. Blogs written by recruiters. Some of the best recruiters write blogs about recruiting. Rather than trying to hire away these powerhouse recruiters, use the blogs to identify best practice firms and bright recruiters that post comments. Some blogs are sponsored by ERE, while others are company sponsored or are independent.
9. Job boards. Most great recruiters don’t utilize large job boards, so be careful of the recruiter that you find when you post an opening on these large job boards. Niche boards designed specifically for recruiters are fine.
10. Search articles. Search the Internet for articles written by recruiters or about recruiting. Use the authors as a referral sources and capture the name of any individuals they mention.
11. Hiring announcements. Check your competitor’s website for announcements about recent new hires. Call and congratulate them and ask them which recruiter was primarily responsible for their placement. If a key recruiter is turned down for a promotion, it is also important to target them while they are still unhappy.
12. Mine job boards. Many recruiters will post specific jobs to local job boards manually, so that responses do not go directly to their ATS. Mine all local boards, harvesting the name and contact information for recruiters if provided.
13. Post to professional/technical forums. Many recruiters mine blog postings and newsgroups for potential candidates. Identify which forums are most likely to be monitored and have a member of your professional/technical functions develop a world-class response to questions published online. Have them use your email address or an email alias created for this purpose. Sit back and wait for the recruiters to contact you!
14. Create a dummy resume. Work with the type of folks you need a recruiter to be able to recruit to develop the perfect resume. Throw your contact information on it and publish it somewhere. Resume boards may present legal issues, but personal websites would not. Again, sit back and wait for the best recruiters to contact you.

These ideas should help you get started at finding more great recruiters to work at your firm. I’ll continue with more ideas for acquiring talented recruiters next week, in Part 3 of this series.