This scene played out over and over. Sometimes the candidate would even be looking over the interviewer’s shoulder without noticing the poster proudly displayed behind the Microsoft hiring manager. Yes, after 25 years, we were still getting those questions.

That was two years ago. Since then, we have changed the perception of Microsoft Hardware. We have changed the brand Hardware@Microsoft. Hardware@Microsoft has become a profession. The average “person on the street” may not know anything about Hardware@Microsoft. But a target audience of engineers who work in hardware will know about the importance of hardware in terms of Microsoft’s business vision.

ERE acknowledged our work with a “Most Strategic Use of Technology Award” and industry thought leaders like Dr. John Sullivan called our work “pioneering.” (In fairness, this award was shared by a talented group of colleagues who created View My World and incidentally just launched a new careers site.) While being recognized by one’s industry is flattering, the real success of our work was in solving a business need in our division.

The story of making Hardware@Microsoft a profession was an answer to a critical business issue.

As our division is the manufacturing part of Microsoft, we had a billion-dollar problem with respect to the quality of one of our key products. We needed to recruit world-class hardware and “reliability engineering” talent to solve some immediate issues and make certain this did not happen in the future.

The first thing we tried to understand was our target audience and how we could identify the individuals who we needed to attract — where they were employed; the best colleges for hardware engineers; what associations they joined; what they read … you get the picture. At a high level, the graph below illustrates the complexity of identifying hardware engineers. (It is at this point that I lament that IEEE has discontinued publishing a membership directory.)

Undaunted, we segmented hardware engineers from other types of engineers. The difference in our approach is that we use 17 to 20 different sources to identify the target audience. In this initiative we used competitive intelligence and competitive org-charting along with alumni associations, and every free and paid job board available. The filter that we apply to the talent is: would we be interested in that person over the next three to five years?

It is useful to illustrate micro-segmentation with a mini case study.

As the graphic illustrates, out of the 620,000 engineers (estimates provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), we have identified 18,900 hardware engineers. And we identified a micro-segment of 2,500+ reliability engineers from the various aggregated sources.

We had eight openings in reliability engineering and needed to fill those roles with the best of the best. We employed a strategy that we call a TalentStream (a continuous flow of prospects) to make certain we met our business challenge. We targeted this group with four emails over six months. By the fourth email, nearly 40% of the target audience looked at our jobs. This rate was two and one-half times greater than the audience response to one email. By the final email we had three and one-half times more prospects than we had from the first email. The end result was we filled eight positions with candidates from eight different sources of hire. Thirty-eight percent of the hires came from referrals, so the viral aspect of the campaign was evident.

Now we have 2,500 reliability engineers and no openings. These prospects are passive and represent some of the best organizations in consumer electronics. We were faced with the challenge that every recruiter faces. How do you keep talent in orbit when there are not any positions? We choose to create community with these reliability engineers.

We created a LinkedIn Group that is for technical professionals only. Reliability Engineering on a Global Scale is a group (sans recruiters) designed to allow this premier group of professionals communicate and network with one another. Initially, 10% of the target group accepted our invitation. Since that time the membership in the group is increasing at about 5% per month. We do not brand this group with Hardware@Microsoft (although it is obvious Microsoft Hardware is involved). The two reliability engineering roles that our division had this year were filled quickly with high-quality individuals from the efforts described above.

We have just created a hardware@microsoft Facebook page and a hardwarejobs Twitter page. We will invite members of the original 2,500+ reliability engineers to become a “fan” of this Facebook community and also offer them the opportunity to “follow” us on Twitter. One of the discoveries that we learned during this talent community pilot was that we need to take a “community of communities” approach because, not all people will join the same groups. That caused us to rethink our original “uber talent community approach” as it turns out only a percentage of a targeted group will join.

The social networking laws that explain involvement (or lack thereof) by potential members of community caused us to rethink our strategy. Some important thinking on people and community was developed by Jakob Nielsen, who suggested that only 1% of a community were heavy contributors. Nielsen advocated that another 9% were intermittent contributors, while the other 90% were just lurkers. Jake McKee, a thought leader on community, build on Nielsen’s “Participation Inequality” theorem and carried it into the 21st century as the 90:9:1 as a way to describe people’s behaviors in a single online community. More recently the Groundswell folks at Forrester use Social Technographics to explain behaviors of population over multiple online communities. What Forrester Research discovered is that Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content, 21% of online U.S. consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

So what do these studies have to do with talent communities for recruiting? What it means is that if you expect to get a large group of people to join another community that we have formed, even if we are Microsoft, it is just not going to happen. We need to connect with the micro-segmented target audience on the leading communities (Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter) as well as our proprietary community that is part of our vendor partner, Jobs2Web. So, if we think about our micro-segment of reliability engineers, in order to fully engage the 2,500+ target audience, we may have to form communities on 5 to 10 different social networking and/or community sites.

Micro-segmentation and community go hand in hand. I noted in a previous article that sourcing is marketing. And if we look through our marketing lens we see in this “new world of social media, networking and Web 2.0, much of segmentation occurs naturally” as communities are formed. Micro-segmentation has been built into the DNA of our approach to developing talent communities. And it is the backbone of our Web 2.0 recruitment marketing engine provided by Jobs2Web.

A purpose of this article is a preview of a presentation for the Fall 2009 ERE Event, where our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “micro-segmentation,” this strategy is a cornerstone of our community development workstream.

After evaluating hundreds of applications, here is part two of the list of best practices in recruiting that I recommend you emulate.

(This article was updated May 4, 2009; it originally said that GE Healthcare “abandoned its outsourcing model,” but this was incorrect. It did not.)

(Click here to read part one.)

Category V: Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young

In a conservative industry and in a segment of recruiting that offers little innovation, Ernst & Young has led the way for several years in a row. It has been ranked #1 on the BusinessWeek “Best Places to Launch a Career” list and has an astonishing 90% conversion rate for interns.

Some best practices include:

• Executive involvement. It convinced over 1,500 client-serving partners to take time away from their busy schedules to service selected schools, just as it services clients. Even Board members visit a select number of assigned schools each year. Each business unit has specific goals and is held accountable for successful college recruiting.
• A pipeline approach. It provides leadership development programs for freshmen and sophomore students, both to increase the supply talent later on and enable early identification of potential candidates.
• Resources. Ernst & Young maintained a staff of 75 dedicated college recruiters, and holds an annual 1,800 person, 4-day leadership conference to develop its interns.
• Competition. Sponsors “Your World, Your Vision,” a student competition where students design an initiative that benefits their local community. Winning schools were awarded funding to make their initiative a reality.
• Technology. Uses nearly every technology approach to recruiting and employer branding, including the use of a dedicated Facebook page to service students and to build its brand.

Notable college recruiting features at other companies:

• Qualcomm. Funds labs and faculty research projects on targeted campuses. Also has an on-campus ambassador program.
• Genentech. Uses a Customer Relationship Management system to capture information on targeted candidates early in their campus career in order to enable relationship-building throughout their college lifecycle.
• Microsoft. Uses a five-year quality-of-hire study to make the business case and to prove the positive ROI of college recruiting. This research justified maintaining budget allocation levels, regardless of the state of the economy.
• Aricent. Focuses efforts on specific student streams (versus on entire campuses). In addition, hiring managers and the employment brand manager conduct postmortems in order to troubleshoot failures.
• MillerCoors. Uses real-world management projects sponsored by individual managers as the primary focus for its summer internship programs (i.e., project-based consulting).

Category VI: The Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo

As we all know, Yahoo has been undergoing turmoil in recent years, so it’s particularly amazing that despite the turmoil, coupled with the economic downturn, its HR team put together an amazing Web 2.0 rebuilding effort. The result of this transformation? A career site that went from being ranked as one of the worst sites (on the prestigious CareerXroads ranking) to one of the best sites, all in a short period. The redesign tripled the amount of content consumed by its visitors, which led to increased conversion rates.

The website has some notable features, including:

• Technology everywhere. Not all career websites at technology firms use the wide range of technologies available from the Yahoo site. It offers numerous interesting videos, including “a day in Yahoo life” and “the spirit of Yahoo.” It also provides access to what your employees are saying on Twitter, a company blog, and employee profiles. It also enables visitors to other websites like Twitter and Facebook to post Yahoo’s jobs that might be of interest to their network.
• Awards. Visiting this site makes the viewer immediately aware that Yahoo is an award-winning company. The site highlights Yahoo’s outstanding record of appearing on Fortune’s Best Place to Work List.
• Integrating products. Many career websites seem to operate independently of the firm they represent. Yahoo has made a concerted effort to integrate its wide range of products into the career site and vice versa. This includes providing numerous pictures highlighting the Yahoo experience on its photo and video sharing website, Flickr, and the opportunity to join “Yahoo! Groups” related to recruiting. Other integrated features include maps, my Yahoo personalization, and Del.icio.us. (social bookmarking).
• A combined approach. In addition to its use of the Web, Yahoo also uses other effective recruiting media, including radio and billboards, to push traffic to the new site.

Notable features on other corporate careers websites:

• Microsoft. An award-winner in several other categories, it developed several websites that enable the company to microbrand to smaller, more defined candidate populations. Sites include view, the genius lounge, and youatmicrosoft.com.
• DaVita. Provides a narrated video tour of a DaVita facility.
• IBM. Has extensive ecofriendly messaging, extremely interactive use of multimedia, and very simple navigation. The site is one of the few that can realistically be classified as “global.” It contains “day in the life” videos, Digg, live chat, business-unit specific information, and flash video.

In the remaining two categories, the winners are next-practice innovators; someday, everyone will seek to emulate these practices.

Category VII: Most Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft

Each year, technology becomes a more impactful part of recruiting. No one seems to realize that fact more than the talent management team at Microsoft. Its website, and the numerous innovative things they’re doing with technology, can only be classified as amazing (especially the talent community work pioneered by Marvin Smith).

To the uninitiated, the power of these tools might take some time to appreciate, but I assure you, they are on the leading edge, even ahead of famous competitors like Google:

• Micro-segmentation of talent communities. This represents the future of recruiting, and no one else even comes close to what Microsoft is currently doing, no less what it is planning. Micro-segmentation is a powerful concept borrowed from advertising and marketing. Micro-segmentation means that instead of treating every potential customer or candidate exactly the same, you tailor messaging and the candidate experience to meet the unique needs of a more defined market segment. Firms currently make elementary attempts to segment in college recruiting, but this new approach breaks candidates into smaller segments known as “talent communities.” Microsoft defines talent communities as “targeted, qualified, active & passive prospects that Microsoft… staffing can develop into a self-sustaining source of engaged talent that will be harvested for years to come.” The information needed to make a job decision for an electrical engineer would be different from a software engineer; both would differ significantly from the needs and interests of a sales professional. Delivering messaging unique to the population you are going after and tailoring the experience they get is microbranding. While some companies may segment by function or region, Microsoft’s new approach enables segmentation on steroids, producing hundreds of segments that could be as narrowly defined as a job family or as wide as a certain diversity classification in a certain demographic region. The talent communities are enabled by software that includes CRM, content management, talent profiling, and job-matching components. The concept and its execution were so compelling that the initial pilot program for a Microsoft hardware engineering unit was paid for by hiring managers.
• Knowledge sharing. The Microsoft talent community approach is broader than just filling jobs. It includes finding ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they don’t take your job. It moves away from the more traditional transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting with networking and knowledge sharing components. The design is based on the Chinese principle of Guanxi, which is a connectivity or relationship-building concept. Over time, it is assumed that the talent communities will become working professionals “virtual 3rd place” to hang out. Over time, they will become self-maintaining. Despite this multi-purpose, employment opportunities are always only one click away thanks to widgets running on both their LinkedIn and Facebook pages.
• Real messages. One of the most common errors in recruiting is “perfect messaging.” Most websites and employer branding messages are so “flawless” and generic that they are simply dismissed by candidates as propaganda. Microsoft is one of the leaders in providing “real messages,” or messages that agree that everything isn’t perfect and counter why that is a bad thing. Such messaging is considered significantly more credible.
• Shareability. Most of the website content blocks are shareable, meaning that visitors can share content they find of value with a broader audience through the use of popular social networking tools like Facebook and Digg.
• Compelling website. The award-winning View concept www.viewmyworld.com is not one website, but rather a network of sites that enable unique messaging to micro-candidate segments. The average visit on the website is 26 minutes, an astonishing amount of time. Its messages and videos are some of the most exciting and compelling online. They make it easy to “feel the passion” and the excitement of those working at Microsoft. Diverse candidates can also explore their likely experience via www.YouAtMicrosoft.com.
• Many options. All sites leverage the latest in social networking, RSS feeds, Multi-media (video) and employee blogs (Microsoft was one of the first innovators in recruiting blogs). Even Microsoft’s talent communities will include both virtual and live events.
• Connected. The sites contain links to non-Microsoft-owned pages that talk about Microsoft. (Microsoft censors this content, so it is perceived as being much more credible.)
• Quality-of-hire metrics. Microsoft is beginning to use quality-of-hire metrics to assess the effectiveness of its recruiting programs.

Notable features at other companies using technology:

• Dun & Bradstreet. Uses workflow modeling software to identify delays in recruiting cycle/process.
• Firstsource Solutions. Uses short message service (SMS) to support candidates throughout the hiring process.
• Fluor. Uses live webcasts featuring executives to attract talent. They also offer in another feature that is becoming more common, live chat sessions with recruiters.
• Foster’s Group. Made its process paperless. Candidates get offer electronically via a secured website. Candidates are informed of their status following each stage of the process via SMS text messaging.

Category VIII. Recruiting Department of the Year — DaVita

This final category covers overall excellence by the recruiting department. After judging its application, I can only classify it as a “WOW.” Not only were DaVita’s actions amazing, when you consider that it is a leading kidney dialysis provider and part of the ultraconservative healthcare industry, you can’t help but be blown away. The DaVita story is one that truly demonstrates what focusing on talent can do for an organization.

Just nine years ago, DaVita was on the verge of bankruptcy. At that time, its CEO focused on refining the talent in the organization, not just at the leadership level but throughout the enterprise. Despite tough times and hardship, it took aggressive actions that characterize a true “war for talent,” and turned the organization into a wildly successful enterprise. The work of Tony Blake and his team can only be classified as spectacular.

Highlights of DaVita’s accomplishments:

• Business case. The biggest difference between well-supported and underfunded recruiting functions is the ability to quantify in dollars the business impact of talent management. For example, DaVita demonstrated that by cutting vacancy time down from 63 to 45 days, it could save the organization over $5 million in contract labor and overtime costs. It also reduced costs by cutting external recruiting fees by 41%, saving another $3 million. It’s hard not to be a hero when you can demonstrate that you saved the firm over $8 million. Last year alone it filled over 3,200 nursing positions.
• Boldness. Few recruiters can be accurately classified as competitive and bold, but the DaVita team is an exception. The team labels its competitor-recruiting approach as a “targeted strike.” Last year, it executed a targeted strike on a competitor that resulted in 113 experienced clinical hires, $2.8M savings in training costs, and took 7% of its competitor’s workforce. Whether you agree with the approach or not, you have to give them credit for aggressiveness, and accept that its patients will always have access to the best care because little will stand in the way of acquiring top talent.
• Position prioritization. Another difference between great and good recruiting functions is having a formal process for identifying which jobs should get a disproportionate amount of recruiting resources. It realizes that not all jobs have an equal business impact, so it doesn’t recruit the same way with the same amount and quality of recruiting resources.
• Recruiter development. Of the 40 teammates in clinical recruiting roles, eight of them were promoted last year — demonstrating that it is constantly increasing bench strength and growing its our own recruiting talent. In addition, it keeps its requisition loads low. Field recruiters only carry about 25 openings at a time, on average, down from 60 in 2006.
• Vacancy rate. Its excellent recruiting strategy and approach has resulted in an amazingly low 3.8% vacancy rate among the nursing staff.
• Secret shoppers. It is one of only two firms that I have found with the courage to use secret shoppers to go through its recruiting process in order to find errors. The team secret shops its own process twice a year, evaluating the process at competitors at the same time.
• Satisfaction. Few have the courage to measure it, but DaVita measures hiring manager and new-hire satisfaction every quarter. Departmental satisfaction ratings by managers improved from the bottom five to the Top 25 (among 70 departments) within two years.
• Employer referrals. It operates an excellent employee referral program, which demonstrated that referrals have a 200% lower turnover rate than other new hires. It also donates a portion of the referral bonus to a local charity, which increases the number of motivators available to encourage employees to make referrals.
• Awards. DaVita won a Taleo innovation award for its automated survey process.
• Military recruiting. A dedicated military recruiter hired 27 diverse, retired leaders from the armed forces to assume director and manager positions within DaVita.
• Recruiter assessment. The formal process for assessing recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as dismal. In direct contrast, DaVita takes an aggressive approach in assessing and improving its recruiters. It uses a monthly scorecard that actually force-ranks recruiters, a one-in-a-million approach.
• A pipeline approach. It uses a continuous recruiting pipeline approach called “relentless recruiting.” It’s much superior to the “reactive” approach used by most firms.
• Boomerangs. DaVita targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their careers.

Notable features at other companies:

• GE Healthcare. Uses Six Sigma methodology to “model” its recruiting processes and identify breaking points; leveraged technology to automate sourcing (i.e., stored boolean strings); and conducts weekly process audits.
• Microsoft. In addition to the other things highlighted already, it is developing a sophisticated workforce-planning model.
• Seagate Technology. The company significantly shortened onboarding from three days to 2.5 hours. In addition, the team now measures quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted in this article have clearly pushed the envelope in recruiting and talent management. Despite tough economic times, they have focused on the “big 6″ elements of strategic recruiting (technology-centered, a dollar-focused business case, an emphasis on referrals, prioritized recruiting, a focus on employer branding, and a continuous pipeline approach).

If you’re still focusing on transactions and cutting costs, you are way behind the curve. It is highly unlikely you will be adequately prepared to “explode out of the box” when the current economic downturn subsides.

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

The applications this year were so powerful that choosing a winner in several categories was a challenge. This article will primarily highlight the practices of those organizations that won, but I simply can’t resist sharing some of the practices of other companies.

Category I: Most Innovative Employee Referral Program — Accenture

While employee referral programs have always been a top source for high-quality hires, during economic downturns, they can be adapted to become the most effective low-cost/high-quality source. Accenture’s latest employee referral program is unique because it began life as a pilot program in The Netherlands. Based on the program’s results, it now serves as a model for future rollouts around the globe. The new program radically simplifies the program’s terms and conditions and dedicates resources to marketing the program internally on a regular basis.

Since inception, just a year ago, the program has grown the percentage of hires attributed to employee referral from 14% to 32%. Employee awareness of the referral program has jumped from 20% to 99%, an astounding feat (do a quick survey in your organization — you might be surprised how few people know the details of your program and how to make a referral). The quality of referrals also improved significantly, reducing the number of referrals required to generate a hire from seven to five.

Consider some of their program’s highlights:

• Charity component. The critical component in any referral program is getting your employees to make high-quality referrals, not for the direct monetary benefit, but for the opportunity to provide their teammates with the very best coworkers. By allowing the employee to allocate a portion of the referral bonus to charity (i.e., KidsRights and local elementary schools), you have added another altruistic reason for making successful referrals.
• Focused referrals. Its referral application form makes it difficult for employees to make referrals of people they don’t really know. The process requires the individual to explain how they know the individual, that the individual’s skills are exceptional, and that the individual will “fit” within the organization. These types of features can help to limit the number of “casual” referrals that can clog the system.
• Exciting rewards. Employees receive a small reward for a successful referral and €500 is donated to charity. They also offer an opportunity for employees who make successful referrals to participate in a drawing for exciting world trips. In addition, employees also receive €100 whenever one of their referred candidates is invited in for an interview. Obviously, any candidate invited for an interview is of sufficient quality to merit at least some reward and recognition.
• Employee scorecard. Employees have their own individual online website that allows them to track the progress of their referred candidates throughout the hiring process (this increases employee involvement and transparency). It also covers the number of referrals and their accumulated bonuses both for themselves and for charity. The scorecard also lists the employee’s personal referral success rate. By allowing the employee to see how well they’re doing in their referrals, relative to others, you can motivate lower-performing employees to increase their referral effectiveness.
• Referrals are flagged. Employee referrals are flagged by the application process so that they can be prioritized and fast-tracked during the hiring process. Under their enhanced program, every referral is acted upon.
• Everyone is eligible. It’s fairly common for referral programs to exclude hiring managers and HR professionals, but this can be a mistake because among all employees, these are some of the most well-connected. Accenture’s program now covers all positions and its expanded eligibility now allows everyone, including managers, HR professionals, and recruiters to participate. Other firms that have adopted this practice simply encourage individuals to donate 100% of their bonus to charity when they see a potential conflict of interest.
• Referral cards. Referral cards can have a major impact on referral program success. Most referral cards are “paper” and are handed out individually. Accenture has taken the practice one step further, allowing employees to send electronic referral cards to people in their network. The e-cards contain a code that allows them to get credit if the individual submits an application.
• Courage. Even though it’s an intangible factor, it’s critical to referral program success. It’s easy for executives to discourage talk about hiring and winning awards during tough economic times, but the managers at Accenture had the courage to continue the development of this important program and to also follow through on the awards process. I salute them for their courage.

Other outstanding referral features from other companies:

• Acumen Solutions. Rather than the traditional passive approach, targeted referral percentage goals are set for each department in order to increase healthy internal competition. They provide a toolkit to educate their employees how to more effectively network. They celebrate referral successes publicly at all major company events.
• Microsoft. Microsoft raises the bar on employee referral related branding with their “Spreadthelove” website. This site allows Microsoft employees to “write up” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and “spread the love” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals. Microsoft has increased its process effectiveness by ensuring that every referral is contacted first by an employment specialist, which then introduces them to a recruiter that will manage their experience moving forward.
• Tata Consultancy. Adapted a marketing/CRM model for its referral program (i.e., the company offers a 24×7 referral help desk with a toll-free number). Another component allows newly hired candidates who have not yet joined the firm to refer their former colleagues (in order to capitalize on their “top of mind” knowledge of their networks in their previous organization). They also instituted a “Rapid Hire” process where resumes were collected at referral desks that provide “on the spot” screening followed by preliminary evaluation and instant feedback. They also offer early bird & spot prizes as well as contests between business units to foster a competitive mindset around referrals. The metrics demonstrated (as many other firms have) that referral turnover rates during the first year are significantly lower than traditional experienced hires (2.9% for referral hires versus 8%).
• CACI International. It sends targeted messages to employees for open “hot jobs” and has scaled its incentives and process referrals on a daily basis.

Category II: Best employer brand — Ernst & Young

Coupled with an effective employee referral program, a strong employer branding program can be the second component providing firms with a distinct competitive advantage in recruiting. An employer branding program is an image-building program that emphasizes the “viral” spreading of stories and information about the elements that make your organization a “well-managed” firm.

Some of the key components of the Ernst & Young effort include:

• A targeted branding effort. The most effective organizations try to segment the brand to meet the targeted population. Because Ernst & Young hires a large number of college grads, it has developed an effective employer branding segment that has resulted in them being listed by BusinessWeek as the number one “best place to launch a career” beating out Google and other well-known college recruiting powerhouses.
• Brand pillars. They have four key brand pillars including Learning and development, Workplace flexibility, Inclusive community, and Opportunity. Brand messaging is embedded in every candidate facing communication.
• Web 2.0 channels. Even though they operate in a conservative industry, Ernst & Young has chosen to use the latest technology to engage their primarily Gen Y audience. They use modern electronic tools like video, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They offer “live” question-and-answer exchanges via Facebook where real questions are submitted and then answered online and shared with all. In the experienced hire category, Ernst & Young has been ranked on the Fortune 100 Best Place To Work List for 10 years in a row.

Other notable features of other companies:

• Microsoft. Adopted a micro-segmenting or micro-targeting approach to employee brand messaging. They used extensive market research to identify the appropriate brand messaging by segment and then the optimal brand messaging channels. Both View and “youatMicrosoft.com” enables a targeted storytelling approach to branding that can be targeted at specific population segments, large and small.
• Johnsonville Sausage. Surveyed employees to identify weaknesses in brand messaging, then created task forces to address the gap between the targeted employee experience and the actual employee experience so employees could become true brand ambassadors.

Category III: Best Retention Program/Practices — American Cancer Society

Retention is always a hot issue, but will become “red hot” when an economic turnaround begins and employees begin to think of “getting even” as a result of their treatment during budget cutbacks and layoffs. Most companies don’t even have a director of retention, nor do they offer formal companywide retention efforts, so invariably, there is a lot that can be learned from best practice organizations.

Some of the key features of the American Cancer Society’s retention program that you should consider adopting include:

• Significant results. The most important feature of any retention program is the results that it produces. As a not-for-profit organization, the American Cancer Society is limited in its ability to offer significant pay and benefits to retain workers. However, even under those constraints, this program produced breathtaking results, namely a 2% turnover rate among program participants compared to the organization’s 37% overall turnover rate.
• Business case. Even though they are not-for-profit, they use metrics to make the “business case,” demonstrating the dramatic impact that employee turnover has on organizational objectives. In particular, they showed a direct connection between high staff turnover and the ability to recruit volunteers in local communities. In addition, they put a dollar cost on employee turnover ($11 million per year) so that managers could better see the impact of losing talent.
• Program elements. The program is called the talent opportunity program. It is a three year, three phase development plan for developing early career professionals. It offers a 5-point support system (online community, a local buddy, a local mentor, a local manager, and a career coach). The program has an electronic component that meets virtually via web 2.0 tools including Facebook and Blogger (used to facilitate a weekly book club).

Category IV: Best Diversity Program — Microsoft

Microsoft has adopted a long-term perspective for diversity recruiting. Rather than just meeting recruiting targets and offering scholarships, they have attempted to actually increase the supply of qualified diverse candidates with technical skills.

Some of the best practices include:

• A pipeline approach. The recruiting begins early (high school) and contains elements that continually identify and build relationships with potential recruits. They sponsor DigiGirlz, a technology camp for young women in high school and they hosted an annual minority student day to get students excited about careers at Microsoft.
• Targeted website. They launched an extremely powerful and targeted website, www.youatmicrosoft.com, a micro-branded website offering diverse candidates an inside look at Microsoft from a several different diversity perspectives. This site spotlights the authentic, personal stories of diverse individuals at Microsoft who have forged successful careers in technology.
• Dedicated diversity recruiting team. Their team has full life-cycle recruiting responsibilities with a special emphasis on executive recruitment.
• Identified challenges. They convened a panel of engineering and diversity experts to help identify the problems and challenges involved in building a multicultural workforce.

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR.

It should be obvious from both the attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the “war for talent” is still going strong.

The rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing. The one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more “business-like.”

Stay tuned for part two of this article, which will cover the four remaining awards:

Category V: the best college recruiting program – Ernst & Young
Category VI: the best corporate “careers” website – Yahoo!
Category VII: the best strategic use of technology – Microsoft
Category VIII: the recruiting department of the year — DaVita

About two-thirds of companies use “time to fill” as a metric, a measurement that Stephen Lowisz, for one, pooh-poohs.

Tony Blake, of last night’s recruiting-department-of-the-year award-winner DaVita, says the “infamous time-to-fill metric is somewhat of a necessary evil in recruiting.”

But, Blake said today at ERE’s Spring conference, a better metric is “time to find.” This is the time beginning when a job request comes in, ending in the time the recruiter sends the candidate to the hiring manager.

“If it took five weeks to fill the job,” Blake says, “but if they sent the job to the hiring manager after seven days, the time-to-find is seven days. The great sourcers on our team are literally sending great candidates in the first 10-14 days of the process.”

By lowering registered nurse time-to-fill 15.1%, DaVita saved $5.5M in potential overtime and contract nursing costs, while filling over 3,300 registered nurse positions.

Congrats to this year’s winners:

• Best College Recruiting Program – Ernst & Young
• Best Corporate Careers Website – Yahoo
• Best Diversity Program – Microsoft
• Best Employee Referral Program – Accenture
• Best Employer Brand – Ernst & Young
• Best Retention Program/Practices – American Cancer Society
• Best Strategic Use of Technology – Microsoft
• Recruiting Department/Function of the Year – DaVita

Of course, none of this could have been accomplished without the incredibly hard work of our esteemed judging panel who graciously volunteered hours of their time to go through the entries.

If you want to learn more about what they did, tune in this afternoon to the live stream from ERE Expo at 11:15 a.m. PDT to watch the special panel session where many of the winners and finalists (including Valerie Kennerson, pictured, from the American Cancer Society) plan on sharing information about their winning strategies and tactics.

The New York City school system, a 2009 ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards finalist, is doing something about it. The department of education, which has to hire 4,000-7,000 teachers every year, or about 7% of its workforce, wasn’t happy with the quality of the teachers it was recruiting. It redid its brand to try to attract passive candidates who are high achieving, intellectually curious, and highly motivated.

It came up with an “I Teach NYC, Because it Teaches Me” motto to use on its website and elsewhere. The “elsewhere” includes a Twitter profile, a wiki for teachers and applicants, and a Facebook fan page launched June 2008. That Facebook page exceeded 3,000 page views per week during the peak time at the end of August 2008.

With the Ad Council, it also made videos — like the one I embedded below that made me wish my math and music classes in school were a lot more fun.

After about months of the branding initiative, it’s a tad too early to judge the quality of hire being generated. What we do know is that about half of the school system’s Facebook fans are over 25. These are folks who have work experience, and are exactly who the system’s trying to attract.

We judges worked down to the wire to make decisions on this year’s awards, which in some categories were closer than a Minnesota Senate election.

I’m excited to see some new names and faces this year, like the American Cancer Society and the New York City Department of Education (expect something from me about the latter organization soon). They’ll join some familiar names, including 2008 double-honoree Ernst & Young, who are finalists for the 2009 ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. They’ll all be honored in San Diego in conjuction with the ERE Expo, where the winners will be named.

I like that more non-U.S. companies seem to apply each year. And some are finalists this year, including Warehouse Stationery from New Zealand, as well as India’s Tata, and others.

Many of the companies — even though they’re on a list of finalists for a recruiting award — are slowing their hiring or laying people off — but many, like Microsoft, are hiring, too. Not surprisingly, doing-more-with-less was a common theme of many applications, as was the use of social media, and the need for employer brands that stand out in the crowded media market.

It was great working with the judges, who asked good questions, and volunteered a lot of their time.

You’ll hear more about the winners and finalists on ERE.net. Some of the winners and finalists will be on a panel at the Spring Expo (as will some of last year’s, like David York from KPMG, Indrajit Sen from Aricent, and Greg Spangle from Aimco). And I’m working on some in-depth articles about the honorees that’ll go in the Journal (ERE’s print publication geared toward recruiting leaders).

This year’s finalists for each category, in alphabetical order in each category:

College Recruiting

• Ernst & Young
• The Principal Financial Group

Diversity

• KPMG
• Microsoft

Career Sites

• IBM
• Yahoo

Technology

• Microsoft
• Wipro

Employee Referrals

• Accenture
• Tata Consultancy Services

Branding

• Ernst & Young
• NYC Department of Education

Retention

• American Cancer Society
• Warehouse Stationery

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

• DaVita
• Firstsource
• Microsoft

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practices at the best firms. Fortunately, it’s a little easier to learn about the emerging benchmark best practices as a result of ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards, which honor the most strategic and innovative global recruiting practices developed throughout the year.

The awards banquet, which usually kicks off the Spring Expo, was an excellent start to the event that has become the pinnacle meeting point for the best and brightest in the profession. This year, more than 1,100 recruiting professionals and vendors descended upon San Diego, California to learn about organizations that are breaking new ground by becoming more businesslike and analytical.

This year’s Expo added even more opportunities to learn from those organizations honored, as the agenda included a new panel discussion featuring selected honorees discussing their organizations’ award-winnings efforts. In addition, previous award winners, such as Michael McNeal, Dan Hilbert, Michael Homula, and Expo chair Trudy Knoepke-Campbell (all of whom have since become icons in the recruiting profession), were on-hand to chat with attendees.

As someone who tracks HR best practices (as well as serves as a judge in the awards process), I am privileged to be able to share my assessment of their innovative approaches and groundbreaking results.

Best Diversity Program: Sodexo

A leading provider of food and facilities management services, Sodexo has worked hard over the past few years to excel in all areas of recruiting and talent management, and its work with regards to attracting, developing, and retaining diverse talent is the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Whatever you are doing to promote diversity pales in comparison to the Sodexo approach, which combines extensive metrics with significant rewards for managers and executives in order to produce results.

Some highlights that led Sodexo to win the diversity award this year include:

• Sodexo developed the Diversity Index Scorecard.
  • The scorecard contains both quantitative and qualitative measures (qualitative measures look at behaviors that lead to building diversity, while quantitative measures focus on enumerating talent acquisition, development, and retention activities that drive diversity, including promotions).
  • Ninety-one percent of candidate slates included interviews with diverse individuals.
  • The scorecard tied 10-15% of the manager bonus to diversity scorecard outcomes, and it embedded diversity in the performance appraisal, which determines merit increases.
  • The scorecard tied 25% of the executive bonus to diversity scorecard outcomes.
• It set diversity and inclusion as one of the company’s six strategic goals.
• Sodexo coordinated diversity initiatives across hiring, development, promotion, and retention.
• It created a recruiter incentive system that provides rewards for diversity results.
• Sodexo established a separate diversity sourcing strategy.

The results include a 38% increase in qualified ethnically/racially diverse candidates and a 32% increase in qualified female candidates.

Best Retention Program: AIMCO

The work done by the recruiting team at AIMCO can only be described as breathtaking. Its “dollarization” of HR results, forward-looking predictive metrics, and general businesslike approach make even the iconic Google look like a has-been. I have researched AIMCO’s approach to HR, and I find it to be the one that everyone should emulate.

Some elements of its approach to retention that demonstrate its advanced thinking are:

• The company implemented a “chargeback” model, in which internal HR services must be competitive and effective in order to be utilized by managers.
• It established an extensive analytical framework to identify and predict turnover trends.
• AIMCO correlated turnover to Controllable Operating Net Income (CNOI) in order to demonstrate to managers that managing turnover is a significant contributor to meeting budget goals. Related findings include:
  • Properties could expect to gain an average of over $16,000 in CNOI improvement per retained employee.
  • Properties with less than 25% annualized turnover could expect 60% higher CNOI performance versus those with greater turnover.
  • Salary waste alone can account for up to 3% of a property’s annual CNOI.
  • On average, for every Community Manager who exits the company, eight additional employees will leave that property before it normalizes its operations.
  • Every 1% increase in retention is equivalent to over $403,000 in recruiting and training costs, salary waste, and operational performance.
• It launched EE surveys at all stages of the employee lifecycle in order to collect information on turnover drivers and to drive predictive modeling efforts.
• For some jobs, it has reduced the time-to-fill by 10 days down to an amazing 20-day period by anticipating future needs and starting the recruitment process before an actual requisition is issued.
• AIMCO created an online card game for employees that assesses what is important to them individually and determines whether or not those preferences are strengths or weaknesses of their current jobs. A report is provided at the end of the game that provides each employee with an individualized action plan to drive engagement, productivity, and retention. (This innovative approach for identifying what motivates each individual employee in order to improve his or her productivity and retention is the best that I’ve seen anywhere in the world.)
• It developed a retention toolkit for managers.
• The company integrated retention-goal planning into each manager’s performance goals.
• AIMCO measures turnover eight different ways, including:
  • Pre-productive turnover (its concept of demonstrating salary waste when losing an employee is an excellent example of dollarization). Working with the COO, it helps determine the point in an employee’s career when he or she begins to make a positive ROI. Individuals who leave before that point cost the firm and cause salary waste.
  • Short-term turnover probability (predicting who’s at risk and where turnover is likely to occur is something that few firms have even attempted).

Most Innovative Employee Referral Program: AmTrust Bank

Clearly AmTrust Bank has demonstrated that a relatively small financial institution headquartered in Ohio can do some world-class work. Up to 78% of its hires come from employee referrals, which has allowed the bank to both reduce agency fees from 21% of budgeted recruiting expense down to about 3% and to avoid spending money on newspaper ads. The bank has found that these referral hires have no negative impact on diversity while excelling in on-the-job performance and retention.

Some compelling program features and results include:

• AmTrust Bank created the LINX referral program in 2006, which deputizes all employees to play key roles in recruiting.
• Its service level agreements guarantee response to all referrals within three business days. (I have found that responsiveness is the number one factor in successful employer referral programs.)
• It correlated turnover by department to staffing concentration by source. When ERP was revealed to produce lower turnover, it focused the sourcing strategy on referrals, which not only saved money, but drove company-wide turnover down by 18%. (It’s also important to correlate hiring sources with on-the-job performance in order to make your workforce more productive.)
• The company created an Employee Referral Advocate position solely dedicated to managing the program, which serves as the central point of contact for all employees and referrals.
• Referrals and referring employees are updated with quality feedback following each stage of the process. (Individual feedback to individual employees who make weak referrals is far superior to implementing onerous program rules.)
• Every company employee is provided with employer referral cards. But its program has an innovative element that randomly stops employees and asks them to produce a referral card. If they do, they are given a $50 reward for carrying them around.
• Leveraged monthly prize contests drive program participation.
• Total recruiting program savings total more than $500,000.
• AmTrust Bank established referral relationships with local diversity organizations to drive uptick in bilingual candidates.
• Program introduction is embedded in new-hire orientation.
• Referral bonuses are paid within 30 days of a candidate starting. The standard bonus is $500, although some hot jobs can receive up to $2,000.

Recruiting Department of the Year: Intuit

Once again, Michael McNeal has put together an outstanding team that continues to innovate, especially in the areas of workforce planning and statistical modeling.

Highlights of his team’s recent efforts include:

• It created an analyst position to develop predictive models that have been up to 98% accurate.
• The company centralized the sourcing function with its business unit, which aligned recruiters and program management teams with employment branding, employee referral, diversity, early-career talent pool, internal and external networking, candidate experience, and Internet sourcing.
• The separate Talent Acquisition Logistics team owns the post-hire, pre-start timeline to ensure new hires transition from candidates to employees smoothly. (Its broad view of the candidate experience lifecycle is the model to follow.)
• It established a talent acquisition planning model in which unit-aligned recruiters help managers determine what type of talent will best meet their operational needs. During this process, managers have access to workforce information regarding compensation, talent pools, diversity, alumni rehiring, referrals, and internal mobility.
• Talent Acquisition (TA) created a customized database that they call the “Bat Computer.” Just as the Batmobile allows Batman to respond quickly and save the day, the TA “Bat Computer” has drastically increased their productivity and efficiency. The tool takes information from their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), budget forecasts and actuals, hiring forecast and trend data, and other information to address business goals. This tool allows them to monitor TA performance, recruiter productivity, and candidate generation strategy performance, and highlight best practices immediately.

The results are reflected in its recent employee survey, which shows that overall employee satisfaction at Intuit is 4% higher than Sirota’s best-in-class rankings. For the seventh consecutive year, Intuit has ranked on Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” in the U.S. Since 2005, its revenue per employee has increased. It is also spending less money to fill vacancies from voluntary and involuntary attrition.

Best College Recruiting Program: Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young (E&Y) once again demonstrates its leadership within its industry by updating one of the largest college recruiting programs (over 5,000 hires per year). By treating campuses like business clients, it has produced significant results.

Highlights of recent innovations include:

• Its program now touches over 300 business-school campuses in North America.
• It leverages former interns in their senior year as campus ambassadors. (This is a best practice that everyone should copy.)
• Ernst & Young used an online video development contest to get current students to write and produce videos starring themselves and talking about what was important to them in a career in professional services. The winning video team won a trip with E&Y’s CEO.
• The company leverages a campus-centric team approach to ensure strong relationship standards are fostered and maintained. Each campus team is comprised of:
  • A campus coordinating partner, campus recruiter, campus champion (senior manager), and a diversity champion.
  • Each team is also supported by additional professionals representing lines of service, geographies, etc.
  • On average, large schools have teams ranging between 15-20 core members.
• E&Y chairman, executive board, and all vice chairs lead campus recruiting efforts by attending faculty conferences and speaking to student groups on site.
• Each business unit has five strategic goals related to campus recruiting in their balanced scorecards; many business units have now added campus recruiting goals into managers’ personal development plans.
• It established a recruiting strategy that embeds brand building into all student touchpoints throughout the academic lifecycle.
• E&Y is the most thorough corporate user of Facebook to enable delivery of targeted messaging to students and student groups using a channel/forum that students prefer. Its policy requires that all posts made by students on Facebook are responded to within 5 business days.
• It holds numerous conferences aimed at attracting diverse college students.
• Intern to full-time hire conversion rate is more than 90%.
• E&Y ranked as the #3 most desirable employer among business students according to Universum and #3 on Business Week’s “Best Places to Launch a Career” list. It has also been named to Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For” list 10 years in a row.
• It reengineered its campus careers website to support a segmented-by-invitation application model (students who receive an invitation to apply are redirected to a customized online application). Highlights of its careers site include:
  • It has vanity URLs for each major campus.
  • There is a “Picture Yourself” tool that lets students see where in E&Y their majors and personal interests could take them, complete with real video interviews of people in those roles.
  • The “E&Y 360″ lets students see day-in-the-life scenarios of actual employees.
  • The website was rated #8 on Universum’s “Most Impressive Overall” ranking of employment websites among undergraduate students.
  • Its careers site now accounts for 60% of all EY.com traffic.

Best Employer Brand: Ernst & Young

E&Y also won the award for the best employer brand, demonstrating once again that organizations with a strong heritage and conservative business standards can excel at innovation when the business demands it.

Highlights of its approach to employment branding include:

• Its brand is based on three pillars: inclusiveness, flexibility, and continuous learning/development.
• There are monthly e-mail opt-in news blasts.
• Its extensive Facebook profile, group, and messaging allow students to dialogue with one another and current E&Y employees about careers in professional services.
• The Facebook profile is refreshed weekly with new content.
• There is extensive leveraging of the business press and PR to position E&Y as a progressive employer capable of launching a phenomenal career.
• It built a culture campaign featuring stories of E&Y employees that replaced stale corporate policies. The stories were chosen to emphasize the “people first” culture elements once defined by policies.
• E&Y participates in corporate recognition contests like Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” ranking, in which E&Y is the only “Big Four” company and one of a tiny handful of companies overall to be ranked consecutively for 10 years.
• Notice its recruiting stats regarding boomerangs: 24% of all managers and senior managers; 40% return within one year and 29% within 1-3 years. Plus 27% of professional hires come from employee referrals.
• Its world-class alumni program features a dedicated website, monthly newsletter, and a series of national, regional, and local events.

Most Effective Use of Staffing Metrics: Wipro

Around the globe, Wipro is cementing its position as one of the largest and most successful IT service and business process outsourcing companies. Once again this year, Wipro demonstrated that when it comes to building world-class business processes, its own HR organization is not exempt. This past year, the Bangalore, India-headquartered company:

• Leveraged risk auditors to associate the benefit/risk of recruiting performance to its bottom line. (Risk analysis is absent from most recruiting departments’ analytics.)
• Leveraged in-house quality analysts proficient in Six Sigma, LEAN, and TRIZ to continuously monitor and establish business performance-oriented metrics.
• Implemented a performance-management model that evaluates staffing function performance both pre- and post-hire.
• Segmented staffing metrics to focus on actives, passives, seniors, and alumni.
• Migrated all HR/recruiting data to an enterprise data warehouse, enabling extensive data modeling (predictive, associative, sequential, etc.).
• Created visual dashboards for all key stakeholders, including third-party vendors.

Best Corporate Careers Site: KPMG

KPMG is another firm that is innovating in a traditionally conservative industry. This year, it focused on revamping its corporate careers site to allow anyone to explore how its education and personal interests relate to opportunities at KPMG.

Some highlights of its new approach include:

• Employee Career Architecture allows visitors to explore career options with an interactive “build your own career path” mapping tool. (Interactivity and personalization are critical factors in careers website development.)
• A “matching majors” function allows college students to see what careers at KPMG leverage their majors and vice versa in order to explore what types of courses are required to pursue a career path that interests them at the company.
• A quick poll with live results features a periodic question about candidate-job expectations. Visitors who participate can see the results immediately.
• Its Career Journey video series profiles real KPMG employees ranging in roles from interns to partners.
• Weekly Web design and content refresh meetings ensure that the site content is always fresh.

Most Strategic Use of Recruiting Technology: TruGreen

The design of this company’s process demonstrates deep insight into the future of recruiting, in which statistics and modeling will help firms predict business problems and opportunities utilizing people-related data. When it comes to organizations demonstrating that HR can not only partner but contribute directly to the business, this national landscaping arm of Service Master leads the way.

Groundbreaking efforts taken this past year include:

• It architected a Recruiting Decision Support System to enable the recruiting function to answer several key business strategy questions related to talent, such as: Does the talent actually exist in all markets? Within the allocated compensation levels, can the talent be acquired? Will recruiting resources be required to support regional operations?
• The system enables TruGreen to proactively and scientifically assess the probability, risks, and strategic impact that hiring will have on planned capital expansion and growth.
• The system leverages millions of records of procured data on occupations, skills, competencies, wages, and demographics to predict using a single numerical, indexed value for the availability/scarcity of talent pools to meet growth predictions in 229 defined expansion markets.
• The predictive model is used to drive all elements of a geographically-segmented recruiting strategy.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I would like to thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR. It should be obvious from both the record attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the war for talent is still going strong.

Everyone should also take note that the rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing and that the one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more businesslike. More and more recruiting functions are leveraging statistical modeling and heuristics to anticipate and manage future events. This trend means that more and more decisions in recruiting will be made based on data and facts, rather than on intuition and tradition. If you’re behind in developing advanced metrics, you will soon be non-competitive.

Last week I attended the biannual ERE Expo recruiting conference, the premier event for identifying best practices in recruiting and talent management. Attending it provided many examples of practices others would want to emulate. It also reminded me of several best practices that occur throughout the recruiting profession.

Unfortunately, not all companies are allowed to talk in public about their best practices, and almost all are reluctant to brag about them in the media. Fortunately, one of the things I specialize in is tracking best practices and what I call “next” practices. Below you’ll find some of my favorite best practices that you might want to consider emulating.

12 Best Practices I Would Emulate

1. Valero’s business-case model. Using basic statistical regression models, the recruiting function identified the gaps between what the business would need to continue operations and what talent they could bring in via their current model. They then converted that gap into a dollar impact and used that result to sell the executive team and the board of directors on the need to invest heavily in recruiting. Valero’s investment in recruiting and talent management has doubled not once but twice as a result of this business-impact business case. The case had such a large impact that the chief executive officer publicly announced that talent management was the firm’s number one business (not just HR) problem. Another firm that has made a similar excellent business case includes recruiting powerhouse Google.
2. MGM Grand’s employment branding. With the CEO’s full involvement and buy-in, this organization has quietly become world class with regards to employment branding. Their approach is comprehensive and has included quantifying the organization’s promotion rates, publicly thanking those who have excelled and been promoted via newspaper ads, and publicizing internal contests for chefs and bartenders to extend visibility of performance beyond job titles and send a message that opportunities are open to all within the organization. In addition to winning numerous awards for being a top place to work, the Director of Branding has developed a “compelling stories” inventory for use in spreading differentiated stories about the excellent management practices. She convinced the executive team to become more visible both inside and outside the organization by speaking at conferences and universities and having everyone on the executive team write a blog to keep employees informed and enable them to tell their story in a genuine way.
3. The U.S. Army’s use of video games for recruiting. Although many of their recruiting practices are dated, there’s no one that even comes close to them in recruiting using video games. The strategy is great because many of the individuals they seek to recruit are avid gamers. By providing an exciting job preview or simulation, they are informing and exciting potential recruits. They are not only the best, but they are also the only large organization that has used simulations to both recruit and to train employees. They even added a little tongue-in-cheek by incorporating a “virtual recruiting station” within the game. Truly visionary.
4. Google’s employment branding. Recently, a major survey by BusinessWeek noted that Google was the number two choice among college students as a place to begin their career. This is an amazing accomplishment for any firm and unprecedented for a firm less than five years old. All of the brand recognition around Google has been developed without employing any of the formal advertising approaches that many other firms rely upon. While Google does have some outrageous benefits and management practices, what truly establishes their great brand is their ability to get their management practices talked about in such a wide range of media outlets.
5. Booz Allen’s boomerang recruiting effort. One of the highest-quality sources of hires are boomerangs, or employees who have left your firm and then return. Booz Allen, which is also world class in employment branding and the rapid internal redeployment of current employees, has implemented a special team known as “the comeback kids” to recruit this type of top talent. Incidentally, Deloitte has also produced world-class results, recruiting as many as one-third of all new hires from boomerangs. That is an amazing statistic.
6. Allianz Life’s service-level agreement. I’ve seen dozens of recruiting service-level agreements, but there isn’t one that comes close to the comprehensive agreement developed by Allianz (printed in the September Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership). It covers in detail not just what recruiting will do, but also what managers are expected to do.
7. Starbucks’ workforce planning. Most recruiting managers are deathly afraid of metrics and statistics. However, Starbucks’ Jason Warner has demonstrated through his convergent analysis that recruiting organizations can prepare for the future by identifying statistical correlations between external environmental factors like unemployment rates and the turnover rates of an organization’s managers and employees. It’s a simple but compelling concept. Doesn’t it make sense that as fewer people are unemployed, others realize that there is less competition and begin a job search?
8. Bank of America’s retreat from outsourcing. Even though every consulting firm on the planet seems to be pushing recruitment outsourcing, Bank of America has chosen to pull back after realizing that outsourcing can negatively affect the quality of applicants and hires, which in turn impacts organizational performance. As an early adopter, they gave outsourced models time to adapt and refined established processes. Ultimately, though, they decided that driving efficiency was not the answer and concluded: “It’s the quality, stupid.” It takes great vision to measure the effectiveness of outsourcing, and even greater courage to drop it when you find it’s not as fast, cost effective, or focused on quality as you might have hoped.
9. Dell’s measurement dashboard and superior measure of quality of hire. Less than one in four organizations I encounter use a quality-of-hire measure that is not, for lack of a better characterization, laughable. While Dell is known for employing world-class supply chain analytics, they have recently demonstrated that their great metrics extend throughout the business and into recruiting. By looking at the number of new hires that become top performers within 12 to 18 months, they are hitting the nail right on the head. Great recruiting is not about hiring a large number people or hiring them cheaply; it’s about hiring individuals who become top performers and who stay with the organization.
10. JP Morgan and the Athlete’s Alliance for hiring athletes because of their discipline. To say that most college recruiting programs are uppity would be an understatement. They look only at top schools and demand outrageous grade point averages. In addition, they shun athletes and cheerleaders as “dumb jocks.” But it turns out that athletic competition builds discipline and the willingness to work hard to succeed. These two organizations have realized that individuals with these traits and a history of winning can carry those behaviors in the business world. Bravo to these companies for bypassing the school name, major, and GPA and instead looking directly at skills, abilities, and a track record of producing under intense competition. Also worth mentioning is Catholic Healthcare West, which has successfully recruited cardiac nurses at craft events by asking their current nurses where they hang out. Cisco started this approach by recruiting at wine festivals in the late ’90s.
11. Valero’s college recruiting. The recruiting team at Valero has turned college recruiting into a true competitive advantage. They start their recruiting a month before any planned activities from their competitors, court potential recruits by transporting them in style to corporate headquarters during the academic year, and use grad assistants to identify top talent without having to visit campuses. The numerous practices they combine to create their approach deliver unprecedented success. A close second to Valero’s effort is Google’s brilliant program for recruiting current students to distribute pizza during final exams and using cookies to identify and change their homepage to recruit individuals at target schools.
12. World-class corporate recruiting websites. Unfortunately, the ERE event reminded me that these websites are all bad, most to the point of embarrassment. When will companies realize that whatever employment branding or advertising you do is instantly lost when 70% of your applicants judge the credibility of what you said based on what they find on your website? Without exception, candidates find dated material, dinosaur technology, and copy that’s about as exciting as reading an accounting textbook. When will corporate websites customize the information based on the person visiting and include exciting profiles, interesting job descriptions, “wow” graphics, and specific information that addresses each of the criteria that top applicants use to select an employer?

Final Thoughts

It’s time to realize that a recruiting function can become excellent merely by identifying, copying, and then improving upon what other firms have already proven to be effective. There’s no shame in copying from the best.

I hope my listing these best practices will spur you to copy a few and maybe develop some new ones on your own. The real key is to be continually learning, identifying what works elsewhere, and then adopting it to fit your culture and situation. Lose your fear, because copying from these world-class organizations is an expected practice at industry giants like GE. Most industry heroes I know view copying as the sincerest form of flattery. Don’t be embarrassed: copying should be part of the foundation of what you do.

You may not have realized it, but a growing number of functional excellence awards programs are promoted, sponsored, and, in some cases, even organized by corporations. From math challenges to contests aimed at identifying the best customer service associate in a local geography, these events are quickly becoming a powerful tool used by organizations to build a who’s who database of talent. Even events that are not corporate affiliated are hunting grounds for good recruiters. Why are contents growing in popularity? Well, isn’t it obvious? If you wanted the fastest runner, what better way to find him or her than to wait at the finish line of a foot race? If you wanted someone that could dunk a basketball, the winner of a slam-dunk contest would be an obvious choice. Want the best golfer? Look for the one with the brand new tacky green jacket (at the Masters).

Finding the best in business is just as easy. If you want to identify the very best, it should be obvious that you should target any process that sorts through hundreds of professionals and then identifies the very best. Now is the time to begin looking at the winners of professional awards and contests as recruiting targets. Better yet, maybe you should consider sponsoring your own contest as a sourcing channel. The very best are not hard to find; their names have just been called as award winners.

Recruiting at Contests? I’ve Never Heard of That!

Now, maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ve never heard of that before,” or “My company would never do that.” But, before you start thinking negatively, realize that the practice is actually quite common. Notable firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Intel, UBS, Bloomberg, Motorola, and even the National Security Agency have used contests as recruiting mechanisms. If you haven’t used them, you’re missing out on one of the most cost-effective mechanisms for identifying the very best. If you haven’t seen it, it might be because most awards and contest recruiting is stealthy.

The Benefits of Recruiting Contest and Award Winners

There are numerous reasons why you should recruit contest and award winners. Some of the primary reasons include:

• It’s easy. Finding the winners is incredibly easy because the names of the winners and the finalists are almost always published.
• Selection is based on results. Contests focus on results rather than the more prominent screening criteria of education or experience. As a result, when you recruit an award winner, you’re getting someone that has actually produced superior results.
• They’re a great source of ideas. If you run the contest, even if you don’t end up hiring one of the winners, you do get to capture all of the answers and ideas that were generated. Many times, the business value of these ideas far outweighs the cost of the contest.
• It’s also a learning tool. After identifying award and contest winners, the conversations with them can be great learning mechanisms, whether you hire them or not.
• Referrals are another output. Obviously, you can’t hire every award winner, but you can certainly build a relationship with them and use them as a referral source. They might refer mentees, people they know, or even members of their own team that need new experiences or who are in dead-end positions.
• It’s cheap. If the contest is run by someone else, there’s no cost in capturing the names of the winners. If you run the contest, most entries can be done online, so there’s no paper and the administration is easier. For software contests, the entries can even be assessed automatically using software.
• It’s low-volume and high-quality. Most recruiting sources get you high-volume and low-quality candidates and, as a result, sorting is a nightmare. However, when you’re recruiting award winners and contest champions, there are no “turkeys” to screen out. All of them are winners, and often even non-winner participants are also top performers (in the Academy Awards, even the losers for Best Picture are probably outstanding).
• They’re less biased. Because most contests are anonymous and are based on real problems, the process is generally less biased than most face-to-face selection processes.
• It’s global. Because contests can be web-based, it’s possible to get global award winners and thus global recruiting targets without having to get on an airplane.

Still Not a Believer? Would You Believe That a Contest Can Find Gold Underground?

How about a contest to find gold underground that was won by someone a continent away that never set foot in the mine? In this example, a contest was held to find a business solution. Rob McEwen, a former banker with Merrill Lynch, followed the dreams of his father who had a passion for gold. Rob became a majority shareholder in Goldcorp, Inc., which owned an underperforming mine in the Red Lake gold district of Ontario, Canada. The mine had extremely high operating costs, labor issues, and was producing less than one-third the gold that other neighboring mines were producing. Rob looked at the output from a neighboring mine and decided he needed another way to find it. This industry had historically relied on hiring large teams of geologists who would conduct site studies, take core samples, and predict where the gold was, but this approach was not proving successful. Desperate, with resources being depleted, Rob’s investment wasn’t looking like a good one. While attending a conference on open source technologies at MIT, Rob was struck by the effectiveness of the open-source model. He soon realized that what he needed was a new way to get hundreds of scientists and geologists whom he could not afford to put on the payroll to help him find his mine’s gold.

With this in mind, he made a risky move. At an industry conference, he unveiled the “Goldcorp Challenge,” in which he challenged the best around the world to find his gold remotely. Rob made all of his company’s past geological data available to anyone who wanted it via the Internet, with the premise that whoever could provide the most viable solution to help him find his gold would win the $105,000 top prize. More than 1,400 parties in 50 countries registered and downloaded the data. To everyone’s surprise, a team of geologists and geoscientists in Western Australia, thousands of miles away in another hemisphere, used the data to produce a 3-D map of the mine, pinpointing where gold would be found. They won the contest based on a judging panel of five industry experts. Once implemented, the open source solution proved to be phenomenally successful, increasing output from the mine by an amazing 10-fold. The lesson to be learned is that contests can harness the talent of hundreds of off-the-payroll volunteers from around the world producing a ROI that’s nothing short of amazing.

Contests Also Prove Effective for Internal Sourcing

While most contests used for recruiting purposes focus on finding talent outside the organization, some companies have found them to be profoundly effective at identifying hidden talent already in the organization. MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, for instance, has used contests to identify star chefs, bartenders, and entertainers. During a black-box competition, the hotel’s version of Iron Chef (in which culinary employees from different venues compete against one another), the hotel found an unlikely replacement for an executive chef in a four-star restaurant. A 23-year-old sous-chef from one of the hotel’s more budget-oriented eateries rose to the top, besting professionals handpicked by the world’s most elite chefs. Under the direction of this new chef, sales in the four-star eatery have gone up more than 400%. No career planning process in existence would have predicted the move, and most organizations would have implemented processes and policies that would have prevented it. But, this approach allows the talent to shine, regardless of where it may come from.

The challenge is not only a great development tool, but it also serves as a morale booster for the rest of the hotel staff; if you can produce results, you can move from a support position on the buffet line to an executive chef of a four-star restaurant in little more than a single pay period!

Other Examples

Some additional examples might further convince you that it’s time for you to catch up and take advantage of this approach.

• Top Coder. Clearly a best practice leader when it comes to running challenges in the software industry. It holds worldwide electronic code writing contests to identify the very best in software engineering for forward-thinking firms like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Not only do top contestants get job offers, but Top Coder figured out how to leverage the contests to produce code that they could, in turn, sell to organizations. Codewalkers provides similar contests in the web application and development area. WizardHunt offers “contestware” for firms.
• Matching problems with problem-solvers. One company, InnoCentive, was recently highlighted in Bill Taylor’s leading-edge “Mavericks” column in The New York Times. InnoCentive’s leading-edge site allows companies to post their latest problems online and provides problem solvers an opportunity to submit solutions. The winning solution gets a monetary prize and the company gets outstanding answers and the names of some outstanding problem-solvers. If you can propose a catalyst system for an improved synthesis of a monoresorcinyl-triazine, your solution could be worth $50,000.
• Professional associations. Nearly every professional association holds both national and local awards and contests. For example, the IEEE holds an annual Robotics Challenge, a prime recruiting event for electrical and mechanical engineers.
• Department of Defense. Even the government has gotten into the contest game, offering prizes for university teams that develop driverless cross-country vehicles. Hanging around the pits at these events will produce candidates who are several levels above those who can be found at most college career centers.
• Quicken loans. This forward-thinking firm has contest plans for the best customer service person and the best salesperson.
• The best wait person. One major hotel chain held a “find the best waitress/waiter contest,” challenging its employees to identify the very best in their city. In essence, this created the world’s first employee referral contest.
• Student challenges. Colleges have been holding “drop the egg from the roof” and “Concrete Canoe” contests for years, and the winners are highly sought after. Similarly, winners of debate contests are sought out as potential salespeople, and photography and film contests make it easy to identify the best students in media.
• Scholarship contests. There is no better way to get detailed information about the best college students than offering a scholarship and then utilizing the application data to identify potential college interns or hires.
• The best nurse. The New York Times recently ran a full-page ad asking individuals around the United States to submit the names and stories of wonderful nurses. Think of the learning, referral, and recruiting value if you could develop a contest or process that captured the names and stories of the best nurses in your region.
• NFL-type draft. National Oilwell Varco holds an internal NFL-style draft for its college hires after they complete their initial rotations. A brilliant approach because competition raises management’s attention, and it also brings out the best in almost all situations.
• The best in HR. Even SHRM holds Jeopardy-type contests among its university chapters. Anyone who wins an Optimas or ERE Recruiting Excellence award is certainly also at the top in his or her field.
• The best salesperson. If you spend a lot of time at the bars of hotels that cater to a lot of company events, just look for those with brand-new Hawaiian shirts or leis around their necks. Invariably, they just won the best salesperson award and thus, a free trip to Hawaii.
• Others. Interactive Brokers Group has an electronic trading Olympiad, the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which helps identify the best at building barriers to hackers. In addition, Legoland California has a contest to find the best model builder, and L’Oreal has its e-Strat challenge.

As you may have concluded from all of the examples provided, contests are anywhere and everywhere these days. While top candidates will walk away from recruiting processes that feature in-depth online assessment, they love opportunities to showcase what they can do, and contests and challenges provide that opportunity. Hopefully, your creative juices are flowing and your competitive spirit is engaged, and a concept for contest or challenge is brewing in your mind. If you’re ready, stay tuned; next week, we will discuss the major action steps required to take advantage of contest recruiting.

Whether you’re a recruiter for a large or a small organization, it’s critical to keep up with the latest best practices, approaches and strategies. Through the ER Excellence Awards, ER Expos, and other niche events, ERE staffers and columnists help identify and share the leading-edge best practices in recruiting. Last week, more than 700 recruiting professionals descended upon sunny San Diego for ERE’s West Coast expo, an event that has become the pinnacle meeting point for the best and brightest of the profession. The event kicked off with several pre-conference workshops and the ERE awards dinner and ceremony, which showcased a number of organizations breaking new ground and radically redefining what strategic staffing means. As the conference chairman and a judge in the awards review process, I am privileged to be able to share with you some of the very best practices worthy of emulating. In keeping with the structure of the awards, the best practices are presented below, categorized by the award which recognizes them.

Recruiting Leader of the Year, Best Use of Metrics, and Best Recruiting Process: Dan Hilbert, Valero Energy

What Dan Hilbert and his team at Valero Energy have accomplished will forever change the strategic options that recruiting directors must consider. They have developed what may be the world’s most strategic staffing approach, one that emphasizes using metrics to refine “talent pipelines” to produce a talent supply chain. Leveraging technology, advanced analytics, and process design/integration, Valero has built a talent supply chain that is virtually automated and proactive. It is clearly the most business-like recruiting approach anywhere and Hilbert is a courageous leader to even attempt it. Best practices include:

• Predictive labor needs system. Algorithms analyze historical data that is combined with data on planned capital projects to predict future talent needs as far as three years’ out.
• Automated sourcing. Labor needs are automatically communicated to defined sources (both internal and external) based on each individual source’s efficiency (cost, time) and effectiveness (quality of hire, reliability).
• Candidate mining. Rather than have recruiters crawling through job boards and posting job advertisements, web spiders are programmed to crawl, retrieve, and upload candidates into the applicant tracking system based on both current and projected needs. Advertisements are automatically broadcast as part of the automated sourcing approach.
• Multi-dimensional performance monitoring. The system relies on metrics at four defined levels to monitor system health and performance, as well as to diagnose problems or issues that arise. Levels include forecasts, macro-level (sourcing channel effectiveness, costs, etc.), micro-level (efficiency, cost, speed, quality, retention, customer service, and dependability per transaction), and human capital metrics (impacts of staffing best practices on the bottom line).
• Integrated processes to create a talent supply chain.
• Predictive modeling functionality enables the effective use of both short/long term sources.
• University recruiting that leverages teaching assistants as talent scouts on targeted campuses, allowing Valero to secure interns and new grads prior to on-campus career events.

More details on Valero’s approach can be found in the five-part case study published via this column in 2005.

Most Innovative Employee Referral Program: Quicken Loans

Quicken Loans might just have the best and most aggressive recruiting team in the world (honest). Michael Homula, clearly the most sales- and marketing-focused recruiter on the planet, has helped Quicken Loans to create an employee referral program that turns every employee into a “talent scout.” If recruiting has a Tiger Woods, he would be it! The referral program relies on frequent refreshing, creative approaches, and extensive promotion to drive high-volume participation. The program is so effective that 61 percent of hires come from the ERP each month. Best practices:

• All referrals are contacted by a live program coordinator within 48 hours of submission.
• Referring team members are kept in the loop through a web portal that allows them to track the status of referrals online and by emails that update them when:
  • The referral has been initially contacted.
  • An interview is scheduled.
  • A post-interview decision has been reached. To move forward, the system advises recruiters and managers of the next steps.
  • A hire is actually completed.
• Utilizes highly branded contests (example ó a contest for finding the best salesperson in the Detroit area), in addition to bonuses to drive participation. Such contests offer unique and highly valued prizes.
• Surveys are periodically conducted internally to measure:
  • Employee satisfaction with the program.
  • Ease of process.
  • Referral “experience.”
  • Employee motivation and their willingness to refer.
• Focus groups are held periodically to generate new ideas for contests and promotions and to gather feedback on the current process.
• They provide training to employees on how to better make referrals.
• In addition to process metrics, Quicken Loans tracks retention by source, quality of hire, and cost per hire.
• Bonuses are grossed up to cover taxes.
• A proactive referral process approaches key individuals directly for high-quality referrals.
• Extensive e-mail marketing is delivered to the target employee population to:
  • Educate them on current hiring needs.
  • Drive referral for specific types of jobs.

Best Corporate Careers Website: Deloitte

Deloitte has long been a leader in both recruiting and retention, and now it has broken new ground by building a global careers website designed from the ground up to focus on the candidate experience. Unlike most corporate sites, which are dull and serve as nothing more than “front-ends” to applicant tracking systems, the Deloitte solution uses cutting-edge marketing approaches and the latest technology to serve candidates consistently around the world. Quick facts:

• The site is a living example of “a global strategy executed locally.”
• It leverages both localization and personalization engines to dynamically deliver content relevant to the site visitor.
• It is a single site supporting more than 80 country-specific recruiting strategies.
• Deloitte delivers a consistent brand message around the world in 10 languages.

Best practices:

• Target audience research. Deloitte conducted extensive usability research with two external candidate groups — students and experienced professionals ó to help create the original design specifications. Ongoing surveys and focus groups with candidates sourced both inside and outside the organization help to guide refinements and changes. (This research led Deloitte not to follow a trend of using extensive flash and graphic-heavy page design, as their target candidates found such elements a barrier to usability.)
• Use of localization and customization. The use of these two technologies ensures that candidates are presented with information unique to their specific needs. College students in France, for example, are presented with different information than college students in Australia and both are presented with different information than professional hires. Extensive research is conducted to help determine what type of content each target demographic needs/wants.
• Employment brand measurement. The messaging of the site is adapted continuously based on input from candidate surveys and third-party market research which details how Deloitte is perceived in the talent market.
• Localized content management. Deloitte custom-built a content management tool to allow local HR professionals — who are not technical experts ó to manage local content.
• Robust analytics. Because the global site is truly one site versus a portal that forwards users on to local sites, all movement throughout the more than 7,000 web pages can be monitored and analyzed.
• Multiple presentation formats. Because the site is powered by a robust content management tool, the same type of content can be delivered in multiple ways. For instance, a day “in the life” story maybe be presented as text, short video clip, or in-depth dynamic video.
• Web-based screening. Candidates who move from the site into the recruitment management application are screened using questionnaires tailored to each position.
• Introduces an online network for interns.
• The employee referral program offers a $30 reward just for the first referral, even if the person is not hired. Deloitte includes corporate alumni in the referral program.

Best Employer Brand: PacifiCare

PacifiCare realizes the tremendous impact that a great brand can have on recruiting in a healthcare industry that has all but ignored employment branding. As a result, it has developed a formally managed employer brand that is fully integrated with the core business strategy and brand. The core business tagline is “Caring is good, doing something is better.” This is supported by an employment brand tagline of “Envision, Innovate, and Accomplish.” Quick facts:

• More than 85 percent of the candidates who received an in-person interview responded positively to the statement that PacifiCare was a “good place to work.” This score is 26 percentage points higher than the norm.
• When employees were ask to rate PacifiCare, as compared to other companies, 81 percent responded either “one of the best” or above average.

Best practices:

• Full-time HR representatives work in the branding department and they drive internal branding and employment brand integration.
• Full-time HR representatives in the talent acquisition department help to oversee all programs and messaging that affects the employment brand.
• They negotiated a partnership between the brand team, the advertising team and the talent acquisition team.
• They use external market research to gauge target candidates’ perceptions in the marketplace in order to drive adjustments in program design and messaging.
• Executives do not rely on the hard sell; they communicate honestly, disclosing that PacifiCare is sometimes “not an easy place to work.”
• The branding team participates in programs that demonstrate the brand by demonstrating results. A prime example of this approach is PacifiCare’s development of the first-ever Quality Index of Hospitals.

Best College Recruiting Program: Whirlpool

Whirlpool has redesigned its university recruiting program to ensure a consistent pipeline of mid-level management talent through the Whirlpool Leadership Development Program. Quick facts:

• Global rotation programs are developed along functional lines to ensure skill development according to the functions’ pre-defined performance criteria. More than seven separate programs exist, covering everything from brand portfolio leadership to global supply chain management.
• Each leadership-program participant receives frequent feedback, a senior-level mentor, a tiered compensation package and a defined career path.

Best practices:

• Identified employment brand obstacles that would prevent them from hiring the volume and quality of top graduates that they needed. They then developed a strategy to “call out” negative perceptions, such as those of the appliance industry itself.
• Leveraged the brand identity of Ben Stein, a known and trusted celebrity, to reach out directly to the target audience by including him in all recruitment communications.
• Designed highly visible recruiting events at target schools that leverage partnerships with local organizations, entertainment venues and elsewhere.
• Developed a web-based portal specific to campus recruitment that focuses on the candidate experience versus administrative functionality.
• Highly selective leadership development mentor program. Managers selected to participate as mentors must go through a rigorous selection process and are then monitored closely to ensure that only managers who consistently produce results remain in the program.

Most Strategic Use of Recruiting Technology: Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard has been a pioneer in the adoption of a truly global HR strategy and in using technology in order to transform HR for more than 20 years. In its latest move, HP has integrated all recruitment technologies via the @HP portal to support a global HR self-service model. The recruitment elements are just one component of the Global Human Resource Management System, which supports 147,000 employees in 178 countries. It provides content in 11 languages and provides self-service for 36 manager and employee transactions and nine additional standard HR transactions. Quick facts:

• Global staffing practices and technologies were streamlined to support a global strategy and consistent staffing methodology worldwide.
• The approach does provide some degree of flexibility to support variations in staffing approaches and perspectives across geographic regions (Americas, Asia Pacific and Japan, and EMEA).

Best practices:

• Staffing methodology across all four regions is supported by a global workforce planning and staffing leadership team.
• Specific technology plans exist to drive the use of technology in:
  • Experienced candidate recruitment
  • University recruitment
  • Intern recruitment
  • Diversity recruitment

Conclusion It’s obvious from both the tone and the attendance of the conference that the “war for talent” is back with a vengeance. Target even set up a vendor booth among the vendors just to recruit recruiters. The Godfather of recruiting, Michael McNeal (who created the recruiting machine of the 1990s at Cisco), also made a rare appearance with the goal of recruiting world-class recruiters for his emerging Intuit team. Because there were attendees from Europe, Australia, Africa, and Asia, it is clear that the need for continuous improvement in recruiting is a worldwide phenomenon. Increased turnover, the aging workforce, the acceptance of “remote work” and global competition for talent means that pressure will increase on the recruiting function to find new ways to provide their firms with a competitive advantage. Don’t be left behind, because the War for Talent II has already begun in earnest and “the smell of napalm in the morning” can’t be far away.

One of the goals of this weekly column is to celebrate the best practices of the recruiting profession. In line with that effort, I’m happy to report that the Wall Street Journal has recently run an entire story focusing exclusively on the accomplishments of one of our own, Trudy Knoepke-Campbell of HealthEast. It’s important to recognize this rare event not only because it provides an opportunity to learn from HealthEast’s best practices, but also, more importantly, because it also might be an indication that the Wall Street Journal, the benchmark business newspaper, has begun to recognize the importance of recruiting. Although the Wall Street Journal does occasional feature stories highlighting recruiting trends, it is extremely rare for them to write an entire article highlighting the recruiting best practices of a single firm. We view such recognition by the prestigious newspaper to be just another indication that recruiting is recognized by those outside the profession as something that is of increasing interest to a wider business audience, because it is a function that can have direct measurable business impacts.

From Minneapolis-St. Paul to Wall Street

On October 3, 2005, The Wall Street Journal profiled Ms. Knoepke Campbell in its Theory and Practice column, which appears in the Managing section of the paper (click here to read the column). The column is dedicated to looking at the people and ideas that are demonstrating an impact and influencing managers. Ms Knoepke-Campbell, who tends to shy away from public recognition, says, “My jaw still drops every time I think about it. I was in the Wall Street Journal.” Proud she should, be because we estimate, as external observers, that the changes that HealthEast’s team have designed could have a positive dollar impact of over $23 million.

Stepping Up in a Time When Most Are Letting Down

Twenty-three months ago, this ERE column highlighted the efforts of HealthEast’s team to embrace the new DNA of HR and implement practices senior corporate leaders would clearly view as demonstrating a positive impact on the business. That column detailed the efforts of Ms. Knoepke-Campbell’s team to devise and implement best practices in the area of recruiting and workforce planning for the HealthEast Care System, a hospital system operating four hospitals, numerous clinics, home care, and medical transportation in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota. Fast-forward nearly two years later, and you find a story worthy of the Theory and Practice column in The Wall Street Journal. The Trudy Knoepke-Campbell story is truly one about a professional stepping up to meeting the expectations and needs of the business during a time when most practitioners are letting their organizations down. Survey after survey reveals that most corporate leaders are beyond being frustrated with their HR function; they’re downright unhappy. The Watson Wyatt Human Resource Scorecard Alliance found that while 83% of senior line managers consider the major HR functions critical to the success of the business, only 34% rate the performance of their organization in those areas as being “good” or better.

Contrast that rating with this one: 93.8% — the percentage of line managers surveyed at HealthEast Care System who stated that the recent work of Ms. Knoepke-Campbell and her colleagues to implement new selection tools and improve the processes were adding significant value to the business. Behind this story, and everything that HealthEast is doing with regards to workforce planning, is a theme, one we all could learn from: Stop defending the status quo because it is how “we have always done it,” and embrace new tools and processes that more accurately fit the current business environment. As director of workforce planning, Ms. Knoepke-Campbell, is charged with developing and implementing tools that ensure the hospital system has access to the right volume of employees at the right time and in the right location. While many would accept this role as an administrative one, Ms. Knoepke-Campbell sees it as a leadership role, a job not focused on mere forecasting, but rather one focused on investigating the needs of the business and devising workforce and recruiting strategies to fit those needs.

The Background

Trudy Knoepke-Campbell joined HealthEast Care System in the fall of 1999 as their first-ever director of workforce planning after completing more than 15 interviews. Her primary motivation for taking the job was that it gave her the opportunity to once and for all prove that compensation was not always to blame for people leaving an organization. At that time, the staffing situation at HealthEast wasn’t pretty. Vacancies in several key areas were forcing the organization to contemplate cutting back on critical services, and temporary staffing service utilization was driving labor costs through the roof. The vacancy rate in radiology for nuclear medicine technicians was especially acute: 58% of the allocated positions were vacant. Using temporary staff to fill just this void was costing the hospital group an estimated $1 million a year.

Major Successes

Both the WSJ column and our ERE profile of excellence highlighted the major quantifiable accomplishments of HealthEast’s team. Some of them include:

• “Best place to work” awards. HealthEast was ranked number one within the large business category as one of the great places to work in Minnesota for 2005 by The Business Journal. HealthEast was the only healthcare organization to be recognized among the 175 companies nominated. The Minnesota Hospital Association also recognized HealthEast in 2004 as the Best Hospital Workplace.
• Reduced turnover. Once a major issue there, today HealthEast’s overall attrition rates have been reduced by approximately 40%. In the critical area of registered nurse turnover, the turnover of registered nurses has been managed to an excellent level of just 7%, roughly one-third that of the national average.
• High employee referral rates. High employee referral rates are a true sign of employee engagement and satisfaction; hires made via employee referral at HealthEast have grown to nearly 40%.
• Reduced time to fill. Improvement in the selection process and the organization’s attractiveness as an employer have helped reduce time to fill by 22%, putting staff on the floor as much as 14 days faster.
• Larger workforce planning staff. Two years ago, the workforce planning team was one person, but based on the early success of Ms. Knoepke-Campbell, today the team in this 6,400-employee organization has grown to three.
• Line manager satisfaction. Possibly the most telling success statistic outside the best-place-to-work award is a line manager satisfaction rate approaching 94%.
• Improved quality of hire. The data regarding the group’s impact on quality of hire is just starting to come in as this piece is being written, but clinical directors did state that new selection processes have dramatically improved outcomes.
• System-wide vacancy rate. In four short years, the system-wide position vacancy rate has been reduced by more than 61% and continues to hover at roughly one-fourth the national average.

Tools and Approaches Used

Following are some of the tools and approaches Ms. Knoepke-Campbell used to address the workforce issues present at HealthEast when she joined:

• Retention training. A truly groundbreaking approach that should be copied by all was the adoption of mandatory “retention training” for all levels of management. Recognizing that preventable turnover was unnecessary and extremely costly, the HRD team developed a class on employee retention based specifically on the issues encountered at HealthEast.
• Employee referral. Vacancies had proven to be expensive at HealthEast, so making the business case to up the reward for employees helping in the process from $1,000 to $5,000 was easy. While selling is still sometimes required with management, they agree with the logic!
• Employment branding. With nearly 300 million people living in the United States, getting your employment message out by yourself to the limited percentage that are relevant can prove a challenge. Recognizing that employee and potential employee perception had been ignored for too long, the group set out to address the issues driving attrition and reestablish perception around the new organization. External recognition, combined with employee experience and employee referral, played a major role in altering the existing perception and in developing awareness in new talent markets.
• Work redesign. Just because work had always been done one way, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done a different way. In response to a shortage of specialized healthcare labor, HealthEast looked at a new nursing model to redistribute work among its various positions. Job descriptions were then redesigned to communicate both requirements as well as expectations. This approach is similar to that seen at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
• The selection process. In conjunction with redesigning work, HealthEast needed to find a way to improve outcomes and increase the offer closing rate. The process was redesigned so that candidates could have all of their interviews on one day, reducing the need for numerous visits. The structure of the selection interviews were also changed to increase both the quality of information abstracted and the overall candidate experience. The new process relies more on a team approach, where interviewers partner, with one focusing on high-level conversation steering and the other on probing for relevant detail.

What’s Coming Next?

Like many healthcare organizations, HealthEast is facing some difficult challenges. The aging population, in conjunction with rapid growth in the Twin Cities area, will continue to put pressure on all of the area’s hospitals with regards to service delivery. That increase in demand for services will come as the availability of talent hits an all-time low. HealthEast is already experiencing up-ticks in vacancy rates for physical therapists, pharmacy technicians, pharmacists, and radiology technicians. All of this comes at a time when the hospital system is expanding services to meet demand, new outpatient care providers are popping up, and a major discount chain is opening pharmacies throughout the area. So to help stave off the competition for talent, HealthEast is looking into:

• System-level staffing coordination (nursing). Presently, each of the four hospitals and 11 outpatient clinics and other sites that make up the HealthEast Care System are responsible for hiring nurses. A system-level staffing coordinator could help applicants make sure they are deployed to the right place within the company, based on their skills and desires at the time, by providing information on all the sites and helping the individual navigate the system. In addition, current employees could also be assisted with finding new positions that would meet their career goals. This model would enable HealthEast to improve retention both of new and current employees.
• Further operationalizing best practices. While many of the best practices at HealthEast are already at play on an organizational level, the latest and greatest still need to be fine tuned for implementation across the system.
• Applicant tracking. HealthEast currently uses a homegrown solution for applicant tracking and candidate support that no longer meets its needs. The company is already in the final stages of selecting new technology that most likely will require process redesign, further enabling the adoption of best practices.

Conclusion

Recruiting has never been a profession that sought out publicity. Most in the field have preferred to let their work speak for themselves. It is however, important to realize that the world of recruiting is changing. One only need to look at Donald Trump and his television show, The Apprentice, to realize that publicity and branding efforts can have a positive impact on both the volume and the quality of applicants a company gets.

In this column I have highlighted the best practices of great recruiters like Michael Homula of FirstMerit, Dan Hilbert of Valero, and the team at HealthEast to stimulate other recruiters to be more competitive and to think outside the box. This recent recognition by the Wall Street Journal is another building block in my campaign to get more recruiting functions to brag about and publicize their best practices — not for ego purposes, because most of the people I profile have to be talked into telling their stories, but instead to increase the sharing of best practices in our profession. This HealthEast story is especially compelling because it occurs in the field of healthcare, where almost everyone complains about unsolvable problems. The time has come for great directors of recruiting to realize that publicity, PR, and employment branding are becoming essential elements of any great recruiting program. If you are one of the many recruiting functions or recruiters that has a compelling story, tool or best practice that you wish to share with others, send it to me at johns@sfsu.edu and I’ll do my part to share with others. In addition, I urge everyone to submit their application to the annual ERE Excellence awards competition so that your organization can be recognized for its excellent work.