As fun as it is to judge, it was taken seriously. Some applicants used every hour of their midnight, January 6 deadline (we know — we were on the phone answering their questions) and judges used every minute of theirs (we know for the same reason). Judges wrote lengthy explanations of their choices, and some created algorithms to rank each applicant, and sent us the spreadsheets they created as living proof.

Anyhow, it sounds trite, but great work’s being done, in many cases under challenging circumstances. Some of the companies that didn’t win were so good that we hope they apply again, or share their stories on ERE.net webinars or at future conferences. As for next spring’s conference in San Diego, that’s where the winners will be announced, and that’s where they’ll take questions from you as to how they succeeded, overcame hurdles, and what’s in store next. Without further ado, here are the finalists in alphabetical order within the categories:

Best College Recruiting Program

If you’re looking for good economic/job market news, there’s this: Ernst & Young’s campus hiring is back to pre-recession levels. Already no stranger to these awards, its 200-plus-member campus recruiting team has stepped it up yet another notch. For instance, the firm:

• Launched a new campus recruiting advertising campaign in September 2011, using the tagline “See More” to encourage students to visit the career website for further information. It advertised on wsj.com, businessweek.com, Pandora, CollegeRecruiter.com, Yahoo.com, and Experience.com.
• Teamed with Millennial Media to deliver ads on smart phones to students at select schools.
• Now has more than 78,500 fans on the Ernst & Young Careers page on Facebook.
• Is on the new site CampusLive, which uses scavenger hunts, team events, prize offerings, and more.
• Is using Flexspace, a virtual reality tool, where students can see what it’s like to have a job at Ernst & Young and a life outside of work.
• Held its first Emerging Leaders Summit with about 250 students. This two-and-a-half day pre-internship program is filled with workshops on subjects like ethics in business.
• Added a Global Student Exchange Program for interns to work abroad for four weeks, in Australia, Canada, China, and the UK.

The other finalist is the U.S. Navy, and it’s actually doing the kind of “go beyond the campus career center” campus recruiting we all talk about so much. In 2011, it implemented two new recruiting strategies that significantly improved the NUPOC program. NUPOC — the Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program — involves recruiting college students and graduates with science and engineering backgrounds for five-year positions to work on nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers, become instructors at the Navy Nuclear Power School, or engineers at Naval Reactors Headquarters.

With the first program, the Navy funded trips for 121 educators to experience a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or submarine, visit a submarine learning facility, and interact with sailors. The goal is for faculty to then tell their students, and other professors, about these opportunities.

Also, the Navy Recruiting Command partnered with a group called the University Engineering Alliance — formerly the Big 12 Engineering Consortium — allowing the Navy to provide keynote speakers for engineering summits, nuclear experts for classroom presentations, and otherwise work with faculty to present material in classrooms.

In the end, 242 students were hired through NUPOC program last year, and the accepted applicant’s average GPA was up 5% to 3.43.

Best Corporate Careers Website

You may not have heard of RMS, but one judge says that its website is “hands down, one of the best sites I’ve seen. Graphically and emotionally intelligent, not too heavy on graphic elements. Tells the story. Interaction. Heads and shoulders above all of the other sites.”

The organization has more than 950 people and is in the field of catastrophe risk modeling. It overhauled the career site to make it clearer to people what the company does. Equally important, it wants others to self-select out if they don’t fit.

Its Live Chat allows people to interact in real-time with someone on the talent acquisition team. It released the new site on May 8, 2011. In the 12 months prior, it averaged 12 hires per month. For the six months after, it averaged 20 hires per month.

This category has, appropriately, shifted over the years; for instance, this year’s applicants, in many cases talked about their mobile initiatives. UnitedHealth Group, one of this year’s finalists, is no exception.

It built its mobile site with similar goals as others like Matt Jeffery talked about: engage candidates, don’t just let them search. Using GPS technology, the site can find candidates local events (and directions to those events) or jobs near where they live. Candidates get Twitter feeds during career fairs and recruiting events.

In year one of the mobile site, UnitedHealth had 213,000 unique mobile visitors on the site. The healthcare company also says that “read rates” are much higher for mobile phone users than for candidates it sends emails to.

Back to engagement: it measures that a number of ways, including pages per visit and whether people return — and about 35% of all traffic (whether mobile or to the normal corporate careers site) comes from return visitors.

It has been particularly happy about using smart phone recruiting to find people globally, such as in India and the Philippines. By using mobile technology to simplify (and personalize) its workflow surrounding recruiting events, the company has saved more than 200 recruiter hours, and more than tripled the hiring rate of new candidates from these events.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture again is a finalist, after winning last year. One of its recruiting leaders spoke at last fall’s Expo (see video below). Since winning last year, it focused on:

1. Strengthening its global employee referral platform, which has an interface with Taleo, and allows employees to search for open jobs, share them through social media, track the status of their referrals, and more.
2. Increasing the number of quality referrals, through LinkedIn’s Referral Engine.
3. Creating an “employee referral concierge service for senior executives” — including a dedicated team that looks after senior exec referrals and provides extra service.
4. Creating a dedicated global team to pull daily “pipeline reports” and monitor referrals. Local recruitment leads receive weekly updates about the referral candidates in their pipeline.
5. Improving the referral experience; for example, employees receive a thank-you email from senior leaders for their referral contribution to Accenture.

It received more than 200,000 referrals in 2011 and hired just under 20,000 people through the program. Said one judge: “Its referral mobile app shows that it is two steps ahead of its competitors when it comes to technology.”

Improving Enterprises is what we March Madness fans would call this year’s “Cinderella Story” in the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. Even after its recent growth, it has only 148 employees.

Briefly, the way its referral program works is this: if employees refer someone, they get a point. Points add up and are paid on a quarterly basis. Points are considered when the software-developer distributes its profit share. Top performers are recognized at Town Hall meetings.

It has a ‘Two by Tuesday” program designed, the company says, to mitigate “extremes in the ebbs and flows of recruiting.” On Tuesday, it spreads the word of the most important company openings. People have a week to submit referrals. There’s a race to be the one who refers the most, with daily updates provided.

The company might get 100 referrals in five days, with two or more hires made.

There’s a lot more: open houses, pizza parties, several mini-conferences on the weekends, Monday Night Football and Movie Nights, all aimed at having referred candidates show up.

It also works a lot on having a really good workplace, and has won a number of awards for that. In 2011, it hired 54 top-level technology consultants from referrals, with a team of three technology recruiters. Around 90% of hires come from referrals and the related marketing programs mentioned above. Interestingly — very interestingly — it believes that people who were referred, but who didn’t join the company, have resulted in more than $3 million in additional revenue in the last two years. This calculation includes such things as whether the candidate ended up referring business to Improved Experience even though they weren’t hired.

Best Employer Brand

“This year marked the most dramatic employer brand shift our company has ever seen.”

Hotels planned for Russia

That’s what Marriott says about its global brand launch, done mainly by a team of three for under $200,000. It’s aligned with the company’s consumer brand, which is about “opening doors to a world of opportunity.” The “Find Your World” employment value proposition is similar.

In fact, though developed for job candidates, the tagline is being used by Marriott’s consumer marketing a bit, too.

The brand was launched with a video contest among employees, which attracted 200 submissions in 11 languages. And, it’s localized. So the China careers blog, for example, communicates the message in a different way than in other countries.

As you may have read, Marriott launched a Facebook game, now being played in 128 countries, to showcase work at the company and the “find your world” message.

Sodexo is moving from more of a foodservice company to a solutions/partner sort of company. A great example is its energy management services business, which involves energy audits and consulting for clients. It’s new for Sodexo, and competitive.

Sodexo quickly launched an enhanced employer brand aimed to be compatible with the new, consultative/solutions consumer brand. In the 2011 fiscal year, it hired about 50 specialized and tough-to-recruit professionals within a few months. Doing that involved positioning itself as an expert in the energy field, which involved such things as guest blog posts on websites for the energy industry and having people speak at industry conferences.

Hiring manager satisfaction at Sodexo went up from 4.49 on a 5-point scale in 2009 to 4.56 in 2011 (recently rising to 4.63). Its quality of hire increased from 4.37 on a 5-point scale in 2008 to 4.53 in 2011 (recently hitting 4.56).

For years a leader in social media recruiting, it is relying less on job boards and paid ads, which has saved it money. Traffic to its career site is up nearly 325% since 2008. Employment engagement is up and company finances are strong.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Broward Health, a healthcare system based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, faces what many medical facilities have been contending with: a shortage of nurses and allied health professionals. It’s putting part-timers, working as few as 21 hours a week, on its health plan and paying 65% of their premiums.

In a nutshell, its other retention programs include:

• A competitive and comprehensive total rewards program.
• Identity theft protection.
• Employee discounts for massage therapy.
• Up to 10% provided to employees with five or more years of service who have reached the maximum of their salary range.
• Overtime pay and bonuses for eligible RNs, allied health and other clinical positions to work additional shifts.
• Continuing education courses regarding leadership and staff development; E-learning courses for clinical, computer applications, compliance, safety education and mandatory licensure.

Its 2011 turnover rate was 9.2%.

The Support Equipment & Aircraft Launch & Recovery Equipment Department — part of the Research & Engineering department of the Naval Air Systems Command — began hiring again after many years of limited entry-level engineer and scientist hiring. There were what it calls “delays, confusion, and lost opportunities in the hiring process, and success was dependent upon an individual supervisor’s knowledge of the hiring process and determination.”

A Workforce Development Team was established to overhaul the antiquated recruiting process. Now, candidates at career fairs are screened based on qualification requirements — GPA, communication, prior technical experience, professionalism, career compatibility — and interviewed. The new workforce team notifies candidates of continued interest, and schedules an on-site visit within two weeks. It keeps in touch with them throughout the process, offering a personal touch onsite and even after the decline of an offer, trying to see what went wrong.

The 10-member team’s focus is expanding into mentoring, internships, and more, helping to hire 50-100 engineers and scientists annually. It’s prescreening more than 2,000 candidates and interviewing more than 200. What it calls hiring “cycle time” – the time from the initial meeting of the candidate at the career fair to the offer of employment — is down 80%, diversity is up, and more than 400 new engineers and scientists have been hired since 2006, with a 80% acceptance rate and 95% retention rate.

Best Military Talent Program

AT&T provides localized job notifications to the Transition Family/Support Centers of all branches of the military. In 2011, it participated in more than 50 traditional and virtual military career fairs.

Its recruiters reach out to military transition offices, Army alumni programs, and elsewhere. It created a program where veterans working at AT&T provide job search assistance to veterans applying for AT&T jobs.

It’s working on a Marine Corps job-shadowing program with Camp Pendleton in southern California.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s educating hiring managers and recruiters on the value of veterans, how to make heads or tails out of military jargon on resumes, and on the myths about veterans’ ability to integrate into corporations.

AT&T has added a number of features to its http://att.jobs/military site. It worked with Direct Employers to pilot and offer a military skills translator on the site.

T-Mobile provides assistance on resume, interview, and job search skills at Army career centers, and at military events. Through the Army’s Partnership for Youth Success program it provided interviews to 42 transitioning soldiers and 10 career opportunities.

Online its T-Mobile Military Talent Network helps transitioning military receive communications from the company; the database includes more than 350 people.

The company also provides health benefits for people called to active duty beyond what’s required. It has received a number of awards, honors for helping wounded veterans, and for being a military-spouse-friendly employer.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Last year’s winner in this category, Informatica, is back, and better. It uses a cloud-based format and user-friendly dashboard for viewing such things as the time it takes to fill a job.

It’s showing the company’s leadership that the talent acquisition department is doing what it needs to do within its budget, and meeting objectives like time to fill, costs, and who’s in the pipeline.

And — since it not only has a slick system but its metrics are strong — it’s making a case as to why the internal recruiting model and not outsourcing is the way to go.

Informatica has improved the candidate experience; improved its interview scheduling; and in its words, “dedicating ourselves as an organization to stop using archaic tools.”

UPS is one of the answers to the questions: is anyone actually hiring someone from Twitter? Does recruiting by text message work?

It found job boards, print, and radio to be working so-so. So it turned to new technologies. It launched an ad program for people to respond to job openings with text messages from mobile phones. And they did by the tens of thousands.

UPS has had success with Twitter pages and a mobile-friendly career website.

Everything integrates with its applicant tracking system, and, the company notes, “with trackable URLs only  … no candidate self-selection or recruiter bias.”

UPSjobs.mobi drove more than a half-million page views in its first four months and the average time spent on the mobile site was 1 minute and 34 seconds, with 2.74 average page-views. The Facebook page attracted 18,000 fans in two years and 36,600 by the end of 2011.

What’s different about UPS is not that it uses social media but the degree to which it uses so many technologies together, and does so much tracking — like with its packages. In 2010 a minimum of 955 hires that its ATS could track were delivered by UPS through social media and mobile marketing integration. In 2011, between text messaging, QR codes, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phone recruiting, and social media networks, almost 3,000 hires were made.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Last year’s winner CACI didn’t exactly rest. It worked on improvements in areas like employee mobility, alumni hiring, and college recruiting. It also experimented with new ideas like personalized coaching for hiring managers and recruiters, implementing “just in time” coaching for managers. Says CACI: “When a candidate reaches certain hiring milestones, an automated email is sent directly to the hiring manager containing links to ATS and interviewing training modules. This has enhanced manager knowledge throughout the hiring process, decreased recruiter time to train, and increased our quality of hire.”

It hired a Personal Recruiter Coach to develop and implement individual recruiter learning plans, like improving people’s LinkedIn skills. CACI reports that “over 50% of our recruiters have seen an increase in offer acceptances and hires due to their coaching.”

CACI added QR codes to its marketing materials; mobile visitors have doubled. It has worked on search engine optimization, increased marketing to its talent community, and improved its social media recruiting. Facebook followers increased 172%, LinkedIn followers increased 813%, and Twitter followers increased 2,600%.

It implemented software that matches candidates to positions by extracting relevant data from candidate profiles, such as skill set and clearance level. It saves recruiter times and lowered days to fill. Cost per hire is down to $2,863 — 13% down — and company revenue is up 14%. Said one judge: “They were able to show more meaningful results than others, with improvements in speed, cost, and revenue.”

Informatica enhanced how managers request requisitions, how candidate feedback is given, and how employment offers are generated; “all systematically and in complete contrast to the ‘paper and pencil’ which preceded in prior years,” according to the company. It developed a recruiting dashboard for the corporation’s executives, allowing leaders among the different company divisions to see how its talent acquisition organization is doing.

Like CACI, it has done a lot of SEO work. Its “resource scorecard” was created to evaluate recruiter effectiveness against set targets.

Managers have been trained better on interview skills. Recruiter training has increased, something the company believes has helped it win three recent awards for sourcing.

It has found ways to reduce administrative work in the requisition creation process and in scheduling interviews. It revised offer letters, and started a global background check process. Results include decreased time-to-fill from 114 to 68 days; increased hiring manager satisfaction; a 100% increase in career site traffic; and reduced time to fill by 70 percent.

Said one judge: “I’m impressed by the great work done at Informatica — their significant leap into technology, their cloud application, and their talent mapping tools.”

They were named today at the ERE Expo in San Diego. They also answered questions here from the audience, a super-interesting q-and-a session available online (see 10 a.m. on the 24th).

Beyond that, you’ll hear about the winners in multiple venues, including upcoming articles on this website, at this Fall’s conference in Hollywood Florida (September 7-9; expect to see Cisco, Accenture, Deloitte, and others on the agenda), and more.

You read about the finalists. Here are the winners.

Best College Recruiting Program

Deloitte

Best Corporate Careers Website

AT&T

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture

Best Employer Brand

Adidas Group

Best Retention Program/Practices

Cisco

Best Military Talent Program

Naval Sea Systems Command

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Informatica

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI

One judge (Rob Dromgoole) wrote on Facebook:

Finished voting for Recruiting Department of 2010 and Military Recruiting Program of Year 2010 for ERE. Lots of great applications. I’m humbled by how great some programs are.

And another (Gerry Crispin) emailed to say about the “military talent” category:

EVERY ONE of the Public and Private Companies and Agency firms who submitted to this category are winners. They are ALL engaged in ensuring that an underutilized but highly prized segment of our population is getting up to bat for jobs and competing for openings.

The judges took this project seriously, some showing me the spreadsheets and algorithms they created to keep track of their entries and sending me feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

As always, you’ll hear a lot more about the finalists throughout the year. At the Spring conference in San Diego, the winners will be announced, and you’ll be able to ask them how they did it, how they overcame challenges, and so on. We’ll also talk about them more on this site, in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on the ERE.net site, and we’ll ask some to speak at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (September 7-9, 2011).

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

Best College Recruiting Program

Deloitte: Among its many efforts: enhanced faculty relationships. More than 1,500 faculty use its accounting and auditing case materials in their teaching. A great quote from a Deloitte employee sums up a lot of what Deloitte’s done:

As a recently hired Business Analyst at Deloitte Consulting, I can say with conviction that I am with the organization because of a three-year relationship I built with Deloitte prior to being hired on full-time.

Ernst & Young: EY is no stranger to these ERE Recruiting Excellence awards. The company, in its own words, “honored every single job offer we’ve made to campus recruits” despite the recession. Its “Your World Your Vision” program invited teams of students to propose how they could make a difference locally; winners were awarded $10,000 to implement the ideas. Ernst & Young Careers on Facebook has 58,781 “likes.” Its Flexspace virtual reality tool allows students to explore real-life ways that work and personal commitments can work together. An International Intern Leadership Conference it held drew 1,339 students from more than 13 countries. EY’s now offering overseas assignments for some interns over the summer. It has more than a 90% conversion rate of interns to full-time hires for the past four years.

Best Corporate Careers Website

AT&T: Some highlights cited by judges: strong use of social media; strong use of color; engaging message to candidates; job search broken down by job seekers, returning seekers, and current employees.

Nestle Purina: After a March 2010 relaunch (featuring real people and real animals), site traffic rose sharply and “stickiness” increased 95%.

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture: A finalist last year, Accenture’s program in the past was significantly different from country to country and was run decentralized. It implemented one globally consistent referral submission process; a system was developed internally that has a two-way interface with Accenture’s talent acquisition system; and it implemented one globally consistent employee referral communication campaign with one centralized global team running the program (day to day & strategy).

Aricent: It has won before, and shared a few of its secrets before, too. Its “offer to joinee” ratio is higher for referrals vs. overall. The same goes for its “selection conversion ratio” (how many people are selected out of total interviews). Its cost per hire is much lower. It has also measured quality of hire for referrals, finding that it’s higher than other hiring channels. Referred employees stay longer.

Best Employer Brand

Adidas Group: Surveys of employees and job seekers helped Adidas better understand how people perceive the company. Then it brought marketing, communications, and HR together to finalize its positioning, and its advertising execs were brought in to refine the brand (which is all about employees’ ability to shape sports and through their work, their ability to help customers achieve their sports dreams, and the connection to pro athletes). Adidas Group built a “brand bible” to educate people about the brand, and an employer branding toolkit to use in recruitment advertising.

Sodexo: It involved all levels of the company — from executive team members to interns — as brand ambassadors, communicating the brand on college campuses, professional association meetings, and through social media. Far more people are searching for Sodexo now on CareerBuilder and going to Sodexo’s career site. It has reduced paid advertising costs, such as job board spending. Last year, the company won the “department of the year” award.

Best Retention Program/Practices

Cisco: It created a new retention program to actively recruit its own employees for new positions.

PNC: The company reduced layoffs through a sort of in-house temp firm it created. An employee could take on a temp assignment within the company, perhaps in another division, possibly resulting in a permanent gig. The company saved on recruiting costs, severance costs, and saved some of its employees’ jobs. Melissa Mounce, the bank’s SVP of corporate talent acquisition, is on the agenda this coming March 25 in San Diego.

Best Military Talent Program

CACI: A contractor for the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, CACI has an internship initiative providing on-the-job experience and training for disabled veterans interested in learning new career skills; collaborates with many veterans’ organizations to provide resume writing, interview training, and mock job fairs; and partners helps teach career skills at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. CACI has 522 disabled veterans in its workforce.

June 24, 2008, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

Naval Sea Systems Command: With the unemployment rate among disabled veterans at 18%, NAVSEA has tried to address the problem with mentoring, training, and more for the wounded. In 2010, NAVSEA placed 282 disabled veterans into civilian careers and set a goal of hiring one “Wounded Warrior” per day in 2011. It has an over 90% retention rate among disabled veterans at NAVSEA, saving unemployment costs.

Most Strategic Use of Technology

Informatica: Informatica’s talent acquisition strategy emphasizes competitive intelligence mapping and how it can translate findings into actionable sourcing channels. The outcome is a solution to a common industry ailment, a way to retain the intellectual property of the organization’s recruiters, regardless of staff reorganization.

PNC: It did a lot tech-wise, from audio screening 400,000 applications in a year to centralizing its sourcing activity with SourcePoint CRM, which it uses to locate potential candidates and have the empirical data needed when talking with business managers, such as how hard a search is gong to be. Its landing pages have a “stay connected” option at the bottom to feed data into its CRM. For some jobs, it’s moving away from job boards and more toward search engine optimization and landing pages. PNC also implemented an online recruiter toolkit to standardize its processes, and is working on a hiring manager kit.

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI: It was a finalist last year, too. You read above about its military recruiting. It uses a candidate-centric recruiting team to proactively source a pipeline of candidates in major skill set areas. Recruiters tap into a pool of thousands of candidates as business needs necessitate. The referral program provides the No. 1 source of candidates, and an alumni program provides regular communication to former CACI employees to encourage them to return to CACI. CACI has also worked to facilitate the internal movement of employees to reduce hiring costs while increasing retention. The company had record 15% revenue growth in FY10.

Fluor: One of those companies and one of those award applications where you see how critical talent management is. Recruiters and human resources employees helped establish a candidate pool to support the BP oil spill clean-up effort, and helped recruit and train candidates onsite in several Eastern European countries for mobilization to a job site in Afghanistan without the cost and time involved in first sending them to the U.S. for training.

Naval ship arrives home after a medical care mission to Haiti

U.S. Navy: The Navy delivered one of its best recruiting years despite a shrinking military-eligible population, decreased propensity to serve, and significant budgetary challenges. It developed and launched a new brand. It used a cross-functional supply chain management working group comprised of recruiting, training, and fleet stakeholders to foster early communication of manpower needs, training availability, and resource constraints. And, it dramatically increased diversity market penetration though minority affinity group partnerships, focused diversity marketing and advertising, and strategic placement of diverse employees — recruiting the most diverse new employee population in the Navy’s history. All in all, it recruited the highest quality new employees in Navy’s history.

That message is judged to be authentic in large part because the message verifying the quality of your work came from a neutral third party conducting a side-by-side external competition between multiple firms. Potential applicants don’t automatically believe what they read on your corporate website, but your believability goes up significantly when your message is supported by this external award. In addition to employer brand building, winning an award also increases your function’s internal credibility and prestige among your organization’s executives. This additional credibility is especially important in areas like HR that rely on “soft metrics,” which executives frequently view with a skeptical eye. If you fear that executives are unsure about their assessment of your performance or level of innovativeness, an external award can quickly dispel any doubts that they might have about the quality of your work.

On top of the company-wide employer branding and the credibility benefits that accrue to your function, individuals can also receive a career boost from their firm winning awards. Once again, just like the Oscars, individuals who were on the team that won an award are likely to receive positive impacts for the remainder of their career. Award winners are likely to be viewed internally as more promotable and externally they will be more visible and in demand at other firms. Even if you are not seeking a new position, your increased visibility and credibility will aid you during your external benchmarking efforts and it will also provide you with both speaking and writing opportunities.

Noted Awards That you Should Apply for

There are numerous national functional awards and several “best place to work” type lists that you should apply for. An excellent example of a prestigious functional award is the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards (they accept applications up until early January). Workforce magazine also sponsors a prestigious set of HR awards known as the Optimas awards (the deadline has passed for this year). Another important recognition that you must apply for is qualifying and being included as a member of the Fortune 100 “Best Companies to Work for” annual list. This company-wide recognition brings extensive exposure to the firm. In addition to these national awards, there are numerous industry and professional association awards, local SHRM chapter awards, and regional “best place to work” lists to consider.

Additional Benefits Related to Winning External Awards

Some individuals will of course make the argument that applying for and winning awards like the ERE Excellence Awards or the Fortune “Best Place To Work” list requires too much time and too many resources. But I have found that the opposite is true and that the ROI for this activity is extremely high. I know this because of my years of experience as a judge on award panels and through my research with award winners both before and after the award process. I have found a broad array of benefits that make the application worthwhile. Some of those additional benefits include:

• Business impacts — external awards are only given to functions and programs that are well designed and innovative. As a result, the programs that you develop or upgrade in order to win these awards have a high probability of producing extraordinary business results. For example, any recruiting, retention, or diversity program that is strong enough to win awards will obviously also produce direct measurable increases in workforce productivity. Even if you fail to successfully win an award, that fact will not diminish those business impacts. Additional positive business impacts may come from the increased positive media exposure that your firm will get. This increased exposure may indirectly help to support your product brand. And it may directly increase product sales, if your current and potential customers equate a quality product with a quality place to work (as they often do).
• Recruiting — winning awards may result in you getting higher quality recruits and higher offer acceptance rates. You can identify the impact of these awards by asking your new hires to specifically list the factors that affected their decision to apply for your job and to accept your offer. From the survey done during onboarding, you will frequently find external awards and recognition are a major factor influencing their decisions. In addition, because college students are highly brand-conscious, this external recognition will also aid in attracting and hiring the best from college campuses.
• Retention –- your employees will have increased reasons to take pride in their firm when they see that this external recognition further supports their already existing positive view. This recognition and the resulting better understanding of what makes your firm great may make your employees think twice about leaving. In addition, their increased pride may also result in an increased level of employee referrals.
• Increased media exposure — the fact that your firm has won awards is almost always picked up in the national press and it is also spread widely on the Internet. Local media are also especially willing to spread the merits of local employers.
• Increased management cooperation — when your firm’s managers become aware that your program has won awards, they may actually decrease their resistance and become more responsive to its program staff.
• Decreasing the impact of corporate negatives — winning external awards provides you with authentic credibility. This credibility may help your firm to successfully counterbalance any negative comments that can be found about your firm on the Internet.
• A competitive advantage — because winning an award means that you are way ahead of other firms, these award-winning programs are likely to give you a noticeable competitive advantage over your talent competitors.
• A stronger corporate culture — winning awards will reinforce a corporate culture that emphasizes excellence. The example that you set may spur others to improve to the point where they can also win awards.

Action Steps to get You Started

I have completed over 10 years of research on what it takes to win these major awards. And from that experience, I have learned that there are certain critical success factors that dramatically improve your chances of winning the first time out. My top 10 “must-take” actions are listed below:

1. Put together a list team of volunteers that includes several members with a strong marketing background.
2. Study the available application categories and the application process for several possible awards that you are considering.
3. Benchmark several previous winners, read their applications, and make a list of dos and don’ts covering the factors that separate winners from losers.
4. Self-assess your own people management programs and processes, in order to identify the ones that have a realistic chance of helping you win an award.
5. Put together a “story inventory” that includes a summary of each of the effective stories that could be used to successfully illustrate your best programs.
6. When writing up the application for awards, follow their assessment guidelines precisely. Also include key stories, key quotes, highlight your innovations, and include quantified results that prove that your program works. Where possible, provide information on industry averages in order to show how superior your results really were.
7. Have a marketing or communications professional polish your application, so that it reads like an integrated compelling story. Also include web links to compelling videos, photos, and support information to supplement your application.
8. Have a neutral party pre-assess your application, use your already prepared dos and don’ts checklist.
9. After you win, work with PR to maximize your press, social network, and Internet coverage. Be sure to include the award in your own resume and social network profiles. Next year, aim higher and try to also win some more prestigious awards.
10. If you lose, do a failure analysis to identify what went wrong and which areas need significant improvement.

Final Thoughts

If your first reaction to the proposal of applying for awards is negative (“that’s bragging”) or even neutral (“our work should speak for itself”), you need to realize that the world of HR has changed dramatically over the last few years. Almost all firms have become significantly more aggressive and proactive in spreading their employer brand. Boasting and even bragging about a firm’s best people management programs has become commonplace following the lead set by aggressive firms like Google, SAS, and Zappos. The award application process may initially seem daunting but if you approach it scientifically, the learning curve is short. The final thing to remember is that the application process itself forces you to closely examine and compare the effectiveness and rate of innovation in your programs. Moreover, that benefit alone might be enough to justify the award application effort.

Notably absent from this year’s awards: a major focus on diversity. For the first time since the awards program’s inception, not enough applications were received in the category to enable adequate comparison. Did diversity drop in importance, or have diversity recruiting efforts become so embedded that organizations no longer evaluate them on a standalone basis?

In this final installment, I’ll look at the practices of two organizations that pulled their practices together to make the case as to why they should be considered the Function of the Year.

Winning this award is the highest achievement that a recruiting function can achieve outside public recognition by its own executive team as being a core contributor to organizational success. Over the years the winners of this award have demonstrated excellence in developing a strong business case in dollars, building an impactful employer brand, leveraging metrics extensively, innovating in critical areas, applying the CRM model to applicant/candidate management, supporting robust workforce planning, and using new technology to enable new practices.

Winner — Sodexo USA

If one were to look at the recruiting practices of the U.S. region of this integrated global food and facilities management services provider with over 110,000 employees, you wouldn’t guess that its function was only a few years old. Like many organizations, Sodexo experimented with outsourcing the full scope of its recruiting activities in 2004, opting to pull the function back in house in early 2005 following a disastrous experience with Spherion. In four years, the recruiting function at Sodexo has not only architected and implemented a recruiting function from scratch; it has done so while coping with 300% organizational growth. While many would have struggled just to keep pace and tackle the enormous change management required to bring a function back in house and consistently innovate, Sodexo has gone 10 steps further, establishing themselves as a benchmark leader in many aspects of talent management. Some of the key accomplishments that established Sodexo as the Function of the Year include:

• Strategic leadership — its HR and recruiting leadership team have been on the leading edge of innovation in talent management for several years now. It has repeatedly convinced senior executives to support and fund an ever evolving array of initiatives by making a compelling business case routed in business impact.
• Employer branding — its recently implemented employer branding effort has dramatically increased the visibility of this previously “invisible” firm (with a hard-to-pronounce and spell name, it was recently changed from Sodexho to Sodexo to make it easier). Its leadership team has made a concerted effort to win awards and to be significantly more visible in the media. Its refurbished its referral program to help use employees to spread the word about this well-managed firm.
• High-volume capability — it has developed the capability to “scale up” its recruiting effort in order to meet its nearly 60% annual growth rate. The process allows it to recruit for 5,000+ management and executive roles annually.
• An investment in training — it hired a full-time recruiting trainer to identify functional training needs, develop curricula, seek out industry/professional training opportunities, and to track progress. Its recruiters are required to obtain AIRS CIR/CDR certifications. It regularly shares best practices during weekly department calls. It also regularly engages top specialists including Shally Steckerl, Lou Adler, and myself to provide technical and strategic guidance.
• A remote work organization — it organized its recruiting function to support remote work. The Sodexo recruiting team is comprised of 80 professionals, each of whom work from home offices distributed across 38 states.
• CRM — it uses CRM technology to support candidate relationship management in addition to the traditional ATS technology to support administrative workflow.
• Social media excellence — Sodexo’s social media initiative is on the leading edge of best practices. It has been widely recognized as a model for emulation by leading industry, HR, and recruiting professionals. Its web presence effectively communicates Sodexo’s company, culture, and opportunities across a Careers blog, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, You Tube Channel, Twitter, and Flickr. It also provides multiple venues for talent to interact with recruiters, employees, and one another through social media sites and technically focused microsites. Its associated sites and social networks contribute an additional 127,000 page views and over 5 million media impressions annually. The Society for New Communications Research recently recognized Sodexo with the Excellence Award for its pioneering work with Microblogging.
• Web excellence — it has developed online talent communities to better target and support candidate populations. It has re-launched the Sodexo USA Careers website as the hub of a vast array of online properties that displays the many faces of Sodexo, including the company, employees, values, culture, and career opportunities.
• Employee referral — it revamped its employee referral program to focus on referee and referral service, resulting in a 36.2% increase in referral activity, and a whopping increase of 50% in the percentage of total external hires attributed to the ERP.
• Analytics — it uses extensive metrics to measure and report on individual and team performance, including metrics that cover customer satisfaction and hiring cycle time.
• Diversity report card — it has a strong emphasis on diversity. It uses a diversity scorecard and it measures and reports the diversity of the candidate slate for each position.
• Alumni/boomerang effort — it has launched a major boomerang program known as the “Alumni Reconnexions Program” resulting in 123 rehires in 2009.
• Military recruiting — it developed a highly successful military focused recruitment initiative that increased military management hires by 28%.
• Results produced — it has consistently produced significant results, including a 211% increase in career site traffic, a 56% increase in candidates per requisition, and a $300,000 reduction in advertising costs.

Finalist — CACI International Inc.

The average American may never have heard of CACI International (which will speak at ERE’s Fall conference in Hollywood, Florida), but it has played a vital role in keeping America and our allies safe for nearly 50 years by supporting the Department of Defense and intelligence communities’ IT needs. Employing more than 12,700 employees, CACI International is ranked by Fortune magazine as one of the most admired companies in the information technology industry. Despite focusing on recruits that require high-level security clearance and a lack of visibility, CACI has developed workforce planning practices that are superior to many well-known Fortune 100 companies. It strategy is powerful because it focuses on improving organizational performance by identifying new sources of human capital, implementing innovative technological approaches, and by measuring operational performance. Some of its key accomplishments include:

• Predictive Modeling — CACI leads the way in adapting proven “business solutions” and tools to recruiting problems. Only a handful of recruiting departments use this forward-looking planning tool. Effective predictive modeling allows both recruiting and hiring managers to proactively prepare for future staffing issues and opportunities that occur within the scope of its business development strategic plan.
• Monetizing recruiting — in addition to the traditional metrics like recruiter workload, workforce movement, and days-to-fill, it also calculates lost revenue. Demonstrating revenue gains and losses in dollars as a result of talent management decisions is a critical factor in getting managers to pay attention to talent management issues. It has calculated that its recruiting success enabled CACI to generate an additional $12.2 million in revenue in 2009.
• Advanced trending — rather than relying exclusively on historical metrics, it also uses “real-time hiring metrics” to identify trends in order to improve operational excellence. These real-time metrics are evaluated to facilitate more effective decision-making.
• Rewarding managers for great hiring — CACI is one of only a handful of firms that have had the foresight and courage to offer incentive bonuses to effective hiring managers. $500,000 in bonus compensation has been allocated to motivate managers to make hiring a top priority.
• Agility to scale up — it has developed a process for identifying potential recruiting problems including “aging requisitions” and “hard-to-fill” jobs. This process alerts recruiters and triggers the use of supplemental RPO vendors and third-party recruiters to augment recruiting capability.
• A revitalized referral program — it successfully used an aggressive employee referral marketing campaign that, combined with cash incentives, quarterly sweepstakes, and team-building bonuses successfully drove increases in referral submittals by 78% while decreasing referral costs per hire by 61%. Overall 31% of all hires came from referrals. The referral program also has an alumni component which allows alumni to make referrals. This program encourages CACI alumni to network within their current network because they receive a bonus when they successfully refer candidates back to CACI. Its alumni program increased their rehires by 20% last year.
• Facilitated internal movement — CACI has developed an employee mobility program to supplement its external recruiting effort. By proactively seeking out internal candidates and filling jobs internally, it increases retention rates while simultaneously reducing hiring costs (external hires are as much a 60% more costly than internal transfers). This automated tool makes it easier for managers to identify potential fills for project needs and aids employees by helping them to proactively manage their careers. Last year its proactive internal mobility program filled 701 positions from internal sources.
• Search engine optimization — by using an effective search engine optimizationprocess on Google, Yahoo, and Bing it has successfully increased the visibility of CACI jobs, attracting 15,600 new applicants from these sources in this year alone.
• Social networks — it has implemented a successful social media strategy which includes visibility on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Altogether, this effort attracted an additional 519 new applicants in an eight-month period.
• Military hiring — in addition to its traditional military hiring program, it has a specialized effort for recruiting disabled veterans. CACI is listed among the Top 100 Most Military-Friendly Employers, and Civilianjobs.com listed it as one of The 2009 Most Valuable Employers for Military.
• Speed of hire — its effort to streamline the hiring process resulted in reducing days to fill from 31 to 26 days. Overall it successfully recruited and filled 3542 positions last year.
• Cost per hire — its hiring process also produced an average cost-per-hire of $3,401, which is extremely low in its industry where recruits often must have unique skill sets and security clearances.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted in each of the four parts of this article have clearly “pushed the envelope” in recruiting and talent management. Despite tough economic times, they have implemented new approaches and technologies. There’s a lot that can be learned from these firms, but perhaps the most important lesson is that you need to keep learning and benchmarking. If you’re still focusing on transactions and cutting costs, realize that you are way behind the curve and it is highly unlikely that you will be adequately prepared to explode out of the blocks when the economic upturn begins. My congratulations to all of the winners, finalists, and applicants. Each of you demonstrated your professionalism by both successfully implementing your innovations and by sharing them with others. It was a pleasure both reading and sharing a few of your best practices.

This installment will cover the college recruiting, retention, and strategic use of technology categories.

While many with the economy in mind might think that not much happened in these areas this past year, the truth is that a good number of award applicants worked hard to innovate in each of these categories.

Excellence in College Recruiting

This award goes to the recruiting department that has best demonstrated its excellence in all aspects of college recruiting. Worldwide there has been a reduction in the volume of college recruiting taking place, but fortunately there has been no letup in innovation in the tools and strategies used. As a turnaround begins, updated college recruiting plans and strategies must already be operational.

Winner — Ernst & Young

As one of the “big four,” Ernst & Young’s thirst for new talent to fill the ranks of its professional service workforce is unending. Despite noticeable economic impacts on their business, Ernst & Young invested as usual, hiring 2,700 new graduates from over 300 of the best colleges and universities in North America. Over the years Ernst & Young have pioneered new approaches, been early adopters of technology, and demonstrated unwavering commitment to seeking out the best and brightest. Some of its key college recruiting accomplishments include:

• “Best Place to work” rankings — Ernst & Young has successfully developed one of the strongest college recruiting employer brands in any industry. For the second year in a row, business and accounting students ranked Ernst & Young as Universum’s #1 IDEAL Employer of US undergraduates. Across all majors, E&Y is the highest-ranked accounting firm, coming in at #6 overall. Diverse students studying accounting rated them as the #1 Ideal Employer for the second year in a row on Universum’s Undergraduate Survey.
• A CRM model — Ernst and Young manages its priority campuses in the same way that the firm manages its client relationships, with highly organized student-focused teams whose goal is to build strong relationships with students, faculty, and the administration. Each priority campus team is led by a Campus Coordinating Partner, supported by a range of additional client-serving professionals representing various service lines, geographic locations, and ranks within the firm. (Currently over 1,500 client-serving professionals and 75 dedicated recruiters work on campus teams.)
• Executive involvement — each corporate board member, including the Chairman and CEO Jim Turley are expected to make regular campus visits.
• Contests — this year it launched its “Your World Your Vision” contest, which invited teams of students to propose how they could make a difference at a local level through community responsibility. Winning teams were awarded $10,000 to implement their concept.
• Simulation — it launched a new virtual reality simulation called “Flexspace” that allows students to explore how work and personal commitments can both coexist in the Ernst & Young culture.
• Facebook — it launched its Connect2U, a Facebook application that connects students to campus events and recruiters. (Each year E&Y has invested in improving its presence on Facebook and in innovating how the channel can be used to better attract and support potential applicants).
• Intern conference — once again, E&Y was the only ‘Big Four’ organization to hold an International Intern Leadership Conference. It was attended by 1,700 students from over 20 countries.
• Intern Leadership Program — this pre-internship experience brought freshman and sophomores into E&Y offices during the summer to learn more about the benefits of a career in accounting. The success of these programs has led to over 90% conversion rate of interns to full-time hires for the past three years.
• Inclusiveness program — the Inclusiveness Recruiting team spent time with university officials at nine priority schools to brainstorm how E&Y can help schools increase diversity across their student population. In addition, in 2009 it created the Ernst & Young Faculty Inclusiveness Awards to help students recognize faculty members who advance inclusiveness on their campuses.

Finalist — Rosetta

This 700-employee privately held interactive marketing and advertising firm is a global leader when it comes to designing award winning, innovative solutions for their clients, so it should come as no surprise that their dedication to excellence carries over into their recruiting effort. Rosetta puts a heavy emphasis on college recruiting, as 44% of all hires at Rosetta are sourced from college campuses. Their college recruiting program is led by two dedicated recruiters and supported by approximately 125 alumni team members. Some of its key accomplishments in college recruiting include:

• Awards — its award-winning internship program was the winner of the NEOSA’s Best Internship Program Award. The program gives interns the opportunity to spend approximately 70% of their time on client engagements and 30% on structured training, internal initiatives, social events, and community involvement.
• A comprehensive effort — its college recruiting team further contributes to the success of college hires by leading training, performance management, cultural engagement, and coaching on how to manage millennials.
• A dedicated campus team — each of their 19 targeted campuses has a dedicated team with a college recruiting team leader, an executive sponsor, and a team captain.
• Campus selection — the campuses to be targeted are selected based on a formula which includes academic rankings, alumni relationships, historic performance, majors offered, and enrollment statistics. Rosetta creates a unique campus strategy for each targeted school.
• Assessment — its college interview process evaluates candidate skill sets and competency alignment using the same process that the firm uses in performance management.
• Social media — Rosetta creates interactive information sessions and social media promotions via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Excellence in Retention

Many organizations don’t think about retention programs in a formal way, but more often than not they do engage in practices that drive retention. This award goes to the function that has best demonstrated its excellence in programs and practices that support employee retention as part of the recruiting function. Despite a turbulent economy, organizations should develop ways to retain talent they have invested heavily in or that provide industry-leading performance in specialized areas. When the economic recovery picks up, many organizations will find themselves fighting attrition issues and will not be prepared.

Winner — PNC Bank

PNC Bank has been on an aggressive growth curve for more than 20 years, most recently acquiring National City. In response to changing economic conditions, it repositioned its recruiters into an expanded role to help with retention and internal mobility. Some of its key accomplishments in employee retention include:

• An expanded strategy — PNC expanded the scope of its traditional recruiting program to focus on ongoing strategic talent management, i.e. proactive redeployment. As part of that new strategy, it launched an internal campaign to educate employees about the features and capabilities of the program. It later followed up with information on their successes and how future program enhancements would benefit everyone.
• Recruiters as internal placement specialists — because of a 20% downtrend in requisitions attributed to the economy and consolidation in the banking industry, its recruiting function developed a retention role for its recruiters. It redeployed recruiters as internal placement specialists charged with helping to redeploy surplus employees, ensuring that the firm didn’t lose good talent. It managed to successfully redeploy 501 people whose roles were being eliminated due in part to consolidation. It also managed to successfully redeploy an additional 50 people into temporary assignments. It further expanded the program at year’s end to include placement opportunities with vendors and strategic partners.
• Results — its retention effort saved the organization approximately $9 million in severance, recruiting, and outplacement costs.

Finalist — Paychex

Nearly everyone has heard of this New York-based payroll and HR service provider with more than 100 offices throughout the U.S. To help stave off attrition and retain client serving professionals, Paychex reengineered its new-hire engagement processes to better support rising performers. Some of its key accomplishments in employee retention include:

• Recruiter involvement in onboarding — it launched its “Stay Connected” program, which is an extended six-month onboarding program. In this program, the recruiter serves as an extension of their immediate supervisor and is charged with influencing the development of new hires. The recruiter reaches out to the new hire through calls, emails, and engaging activities at targeted points in their tenure.
• Recruiter involvement in development — Paychex also created its “REACH Program” (Reinforcing Employees to Achieve Career Heights) to speed up the development of recent hires. The recruiter helps to encourage consistent communication between the employee and their management team by using the recruiting team to touch base at six, nine, 12, and 18 months. During the REACH calls, the developmental discussion topics that are provided in the REACH guide are reviewed and discussed.

The Most Strategic Use of Technology

Technology has become pervasive in recruiting, and progressive organizations are finding a near endless range of possibilities when it comes to applying technology to enable innovative practices. Because it can be difficult comparing the merits of one approach to another when they are focused on radically different things, this year’s judges ERE opted to highlight the practices of three organizations this year, including a winner and two finalists.

Winner — KeyBank

KeyBank, a major U.S. bank with a growing footprint, headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, now has over 1,000 full-service branches and 15,000+ employees. This past year it employed technology to improve quality of hire and retention by developing a virtual job tryout for high volume client facing roles. The virtual job tryout allows candidates to learn about the organization, job role, and to experience the job through interactive scenario simulations. A majority of those who have completed the VJT indicated that based on that experience, they would gladly tell their friends about opportunities with Key Bank. As a result of this realistic job preview and assessment process, it realized a multi-million dollar cost savings in teller turnover in year one, simply by making better hiring decisions, reducing training costs, and increasing quality of hire. The bank also statistically linked performance on the VJT with critical outcomes including service delivery, referral generation, transaction efficiency, and cash drawer accuracy. (More info will be in the Journal.)

Finalist — AT&T

AT&T is a telecommunications giant headquartered in Dallas, Texas, employing nearly 300,000 employees. With a staggering array of vacancies in field roles to fill each year, this year AT&T turned its attention to supporting potential applicants who don’t sit behind a desk all day and might not have access to the Internet at home. AT&T developed an overall mobile platform recruiting strategy empowered with a series of tools to facilitate mobile recruiting efforts. This new strategy and structure allows it to create mobile web pages and SMS (text messaging) campaigns to support recruitment events. It also developed a first of its kind iPhone application that links job seekers to career opportunities, events, multimedia, and mobile opt-in programs for alerts related to job categories of choice. This iPhone application has been downloaded 29,000+ times and has consistently ranked in the Top 40 most popular free business applications on iTunes.

Finalist — Tata

You may never have heard of Tata, but chances are someday you will have a direct connection to this Mumbai, India-headquarted global conglomerate. The group has more than 357,000 employees worldwide and is ranked 13th among the ’25 Most Innovative Companies according to BusinessWeek. The Reputation Institute also recently rated Tata 11th on its list of world’s most reputable companies. Some of the key elements related to its use of technology include:

• Real-time workforce planning — it created a robust workforce deployment and recruitment planning capability by architecting a custom workforce planning tool. This software collates the overall requirements for experienced professionals across TCS globally. The tool displays the real-time status of requirements across geographies, customers, and proficiency levels.
• College portal — it created an Academic Interface Portal, which is a website that caters to the diverse needs of university students and professors. This portal facilitates real-world learning; it educates students about areas in which they need to develop; and it facilitates interaction between the company and faculty and students.
• Online on-boarding — it developed an online onboarding and integration tool called “My Integration” which provides a milestone-based guide. It offers both document libraries and discussion boards. The tool also provides the capability of surveying and reporting the satisfaction levels with all talent management systems.

Advancing an organization’s capability during times of economic turmoil is a characteristic of highly successful organizations. While many believe that corporate treasure chests grow during times of economic growth, the truth is that the seeds that make such dramatic growth possible are planted when most are struggling to survive. All of the organizations highlighted via the awards should be commended for their efforts. If you have questions for those mentioned, post them here and engage the ERE community to fuel your innovation efforts.

Up next, in the final installment of this series, I’ll cover the practices of the two organizations highlighted by the Function of the Year Award.

Best Practices in Employer Branding

Most activities in a modern-day recruiting function are operational or tactical in nature, meaning that they are focused on filling talent needs in the near term. One of the major exceptions to that rule is employer branding, a strategic practice that involves managing the perception of the organization among targeted talent populations to attract top talent and foster engagement of existing top talent. Branding works by understanding what attributes top talent truly desire in an employer and communicating  stories and information that virally spreads, demonstrating how the organization realistically delivers those attributes.

Firms that engage employment branding well create a velvet rope behind which top talent lines up for an opportunity to be considered for employment/affiliation with the organization. The very best firms approach employer branding as a science, using extensive metrics to understand candidate perception and to target brand management efforts to reposition the organization according to what is required to attract top talent versus how those in HR or leadership desire the organization to be portrayed. The efforts are always focused on key attributes — aka brand pillars — and rely on portraying the organization in the best “true” light, meaning that all branding points can be backed up with examples of programs that deliver the brand systematically.

Both of the organizations highlighted this year do a great job at looking at employer branding as much more than advertising and recruiting collateral development.

Award Winner — Ernst & Young

As a global leader in accounting and advisory services, Ernst & Young has a long history of excelling in many aspects of talent management. Its efforts with regard to employer branding are no exception. E&Y’s brand focuses on telling a robust story about how it helps professionals “Achieve Potential — Make a Difference.”It has been early adopters of using emerging communication and engagement platforms and continues to experiment as new ways of sharing its story emerge. Some key elements of its program include:

• A focus on brand pillars –Ernst & Young’s brand focuses on establishing an industry-leading perception around four brand pillars that all relate to the opportunity for an individual applicant or employee to achieve their maximum potential. Its brand pillars include: opportunity, learning & development, an inclusive and flexible environment, and making a difference in the community. Brand messaging on these pillars is embedded in every candidate-facing communication. The identification of brand pillars is a foundational activity too many organizations execute half-heartedly, relying on generic attributes their organization isn’t engineered to deliver. Establishing a great employer brand requires the organization to focus on key factors that not only influence a potential applicant to deem the organization highly desirable, but also factors that the organization can realistically provide.
• Best-Place-to-Work awards — Ernst & Young consistently ranks in numerous Best Place to Work award rankings including: Universum’s #1 IDEAL Employer of U.S. undergraduates by business and accounting students; #3 on BusinessWeek’s Best Places to Launch a Career; Top 3 in BusinessWeek’s Top Places to Intern; Top 10 in Working Mother Magazine’s Best Companies for Working Moms; and Top 3 in DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity. Ernst & Young is the only big four professional services firm to be ranked on Fortune Magazine’s prestigious “Best Companies to Work For” list for 11 years in a row. For many well-branded organizations, such awards are as much about auditing and refining their story as they are about garnering publicity. Applying for consideration and completing the application process forces organizations to ask questions about how they deliver on their brand promise that might otherwise not get asked.
• Touch point mapping — Using a customer service type model, Ernst & Young identifies or “maps” every critical interaction point with potential applicants and candidates to determine what activities and communications are needed to communicate the brand.
• Using social media — Even though it operates in a conservative industry, Ernst & Young has chosen to use the latest communication platforms to engage its large multi-generational audience. It uses video, micro-blogging, blogging, and Facebook to ensure that it communicates using channels the talent desires to use versus what might be easiest to support. With more than 35,000 Facebook fans in 2009, E&Y launched Connect2U, a Facebook application that includes an interactive events calendar and empowers students to connect directly with recruiters and vital career information.
• Personalized channels — Advanced employer brand messaging customizes the message so that it best fits the targeted audience. By moving beyond traditional advertising channels, E&Y reaches out to students (a significant portion of its target population) in ways that are uniquely meaningful to students. This mass-personalized messaging approach includes the development of a Pandora Streaming Radio Channel that plays songs selected by the 2009 Sumer Intern Class. In addition, it also provides personalized channels for potential experienced hires. For example, it launched the EY Experience, an innovative online tool to communicate E&Y’s culture and opportunities to potential candidates long out of college. This tool delivers dynamic, personalized content to experienced professionals based on users’ responses to profile questions.
• An exciting corporate careers page — Its innovative Flexspace provides a virtual reality tour of employees’ workspaces in order to communicate how work and personal responsibilities can work together. A supplementary printed brochure helps point students towards that online tool.
• Include an internal brand message — Its branding efforts focus not just on external populations, but also on existing employees as well. Reminding current employees about their “brand experience” can increase employee referrals, as well as help spread a credible message via social networks. Its internal branding efforts help employees understand how their work, energy, and enthusiasm contributes to the success they have with clients, the environment in which they work, and how together they can make a difference in the world.

Finalist — UnitedHealth Group

UnitedHealth Group is known to many in the United States, as it is one of the largest health insurers and health system operators. Thanks to its employer brand management efforts that focus on telling the story of there being “Something Greater at Work Here,” UnitedHealth is also well regarded as an employer. Some key employer branding program elements include:

• Identifying brand pillars — UHG conducted a series of focus groups and one-on-one interviews with employees, recruiters, and senior leadership to discover the most salient employer brand attributes among 75,000 employees dispersed across a multitude of individually branded facilities. This information, when categorized, help senior leadership better understand which brand pillars represent their strengths.
• Corporate careers website — It launched a new career site dedicated to painting a clear picture of the culture, diversity, career progression, and corporate social responsibility efforts of the company. It also embedded brand positioning statements in all print collateral including business development tools.
• Internal brand messaging — UnitedHealth launched a brand campaign around “There’s Something Greater at Work Here.” They used a variety of media including Town Hall meetings, teaser emails, infomercials, and the company intranet to articulate the new brand positioning internally.
• Results — The branding effort demonstrated significant measurable results including a 46% increase in the number of candidates who were knowledgeable about UnitedHealth Group’s mission and values, and a 36% increase in the number of candidates who perceived UnitedHealth Group as an employer of choice.

Best Corporate Careers Website

Most corporate careers sites are boring, serving up little more than generic content that can be found on nearly every other talent competitor’s site and offering no interaction of value except for an incredibly painful online application. Great corporate career sites break the mold and focus on both engaging and servicing prospective talent. The very best take advantage of streaming video, social media, mobile accessibility, online assessment, metrics for continuous improvement, compelling and fun features, and personalized messaging based on the interests of the visiting candidate.

Winner – DaVita

DaVita is the largest provider of outpatient and inpatient dialysis treatment to patients suffering from end-stage renal disease or chronic kidney failure. Recruiting medical specialists to staff more than 1,400 outpatient facilities and 700+ inpatient facilities is no easy task, and DaVita has rose to the challenge with a level of strategic aggressiveness few can match. Key highlights of its ongoing best-in-class career website include:

• Extensive benchmarking — The benchmarking team audited half of the Fortune 500 career portals in order to learn best practices. It identified 12 features that DaVita should implement in 2009, including making application navigation buttons more intuitive, rewording headers to provide clearer directions, and simplifying its “source of hire” tracking.
• Use of video — Because pictures are more powerful than words as selling tools, DaVita started the DaVita YouTube.com channel, with 30+ videos. It later expanded its own portals video offering to highlight its seven most popular positions.
• Use of social media — DaVita created branded social media networks and integrated pointers to them throughout the site. There are prominent links on every page to allow candidates to interact using their chosen platform(s). It uses crosslinks, contests, and job updates to drive candidates to their careers portal from these networks.
• Mobile Accessible — It came to the realization that all firms eventually will come to: accessing to the Internet via a mobile device is quickly becoming ubiquitous for professionals. Recognizing the incredible growth rate of smart phone usage among its target population, it retooled its site to be mobile friendly. Smart phone browsers are automatically directed to pages with easier navigation, quick access to company news, and options to subscribe to mobile updates.
• Fun features — It added some features to its site including printable coloring book pages to help teammates and patients explain dialysis to children, while at the same time hopefully planting seeds for future healthcare careers.
• Online assessment — Improvements in technology now make it increasingly possible to conduct some candidate assessments online. As a result, DaVita integrated its standard DDI assessments into its online application process.
• Used metrics and analytics — It used Google Analytics to extensively monitor visitor trends. However, it didn’t just use metrics to report trends; instead, it used the analytics to adjust how DaVita organizes and presents information, so that it actually garners more attention.
• Ease of navigation — It added rotating branding messages to each page’s navigation bar. This helped to strengthen the DaVita brand image by highlighting its employer-of-choice awards and other recognition. As part of this effort it created a corporate awards page.
• Realistic job previews — it “screens-in” higher quality candidates by presenting realistic job previews. It also upgraded its Community & Culture page to better show the DaVita VILLAGE (worksite).
• Investment and results — It did the work to modernize the career site internally, spending just $60,000 for upgrades and ongoing maintenance. Results included significant growth in hiring while reducing job board expenses by 85%. Part of this budget is now used for targeted search engine marketing.

Finalist — Intuit

This well-known financial software provider, under the leadership of Michael McNeal, has been a long-time innovator in all aspects of recruitment. This year Intuit trashed the traditional career site architecture, opting instead to create a rich user experience that demonstrates to prospective talent that Intuit does a lot more than make tax software. While not accessible to mobile browsers (mobile visitors are served up more traditional content), the site provide an interesting experience worth checking out. Key features include:

• Interactive — The new site, launched in mid-2009, is built entirely in Flash. The highly interactive portal opens with Melanie, a real Intuit receptionist who welcomes and instructs visitors to explore three interactive “rooms” labeled Innovate, Connect, and Grow. In the innovate room visitors can discover several ways that Intuit employees let their creativity run wild, such as Idea Jams, Design for Delight methodology, and “follow me homes.” The connect room lets visitors connect with social networks, and the grow room tells them about growth and learning opportunities at Intuit.
• Product integration — Intuit is currently developing an additional interactive channel called “Main Street” that will let visitors explore the multitude of products and services that can help Intuit customers manage their financial lives.
• Use of analytics — It implemented Google Analytics to enable robust tracking and better reporting capabilities.
• ROI — the cost to rebuild the site was steep, $250,000, but the results are promising. Over the last half of 2009 it averaged 26,000 unique visitors per month and over 10,000 applicants selected the website as its source of hire.

In recent years prospective top talent has got much better at filtering out attempts to market to them, and much better at engaging in efforts to communicate with them. As social networking continues to evolve and more recruiting organizations master the art of servicing talent in interactive and innovative ways the importance of the employment branding will skyrocket. If you think your organization is among the best, put your assumptions to the test and apply for consideration next year!

In the next installment of this series, I’ll take a look at college recruiting, retention, and the use of technology.

In my experience, there’s no better way to identify the best firms and their best practices in talent management than to examine the accomplishments of the finalists and winners in ere.net’s annual recruiting excellence awards competition. Like in past years, this year’s participants have done some amazing things that are certainly worth emulating.

Each year, applications for consideration in one or more of the awards program’s eight categories come in from all over the globe. There is a good mix of large, medium, and smaller organizations, and a wide cross section of industries represented. As one of the judges who has evaluated entries since the award program’s inception, I like to conduct a deep analysis into what challenges participants are addressing, and what innovations they are developing in response.

This four-part series will highlight some of the amazing practices that earned organizations a spot as a finalist. While not all of the practices described may be ideal for your organization, in general they are practices that the judging panel finds indicative of world-class recruiting in progressive talent management organizations.

As with all ere.net posts, you are encouraged to share your thoughts on the practices described, ask follow up questions, and suggest additional practices that elevate the game following each installment.

Best Practices in Employee Referral Programs

I have long argued that employee referral programs should be the foundation of all external recruiting efforts, and across the board most award nominees demonstrate why. A well-designed program does much more than distribute sourcing responsibility across an organization’s workforce; it enables organizations to hire better quality talent, faster, and cheaper than other recruiting sources. Practices that differentiate the best programs from average programs include extreme responsiveness, proactively seeking out referrals, frequent program updates, use of robust metrics, and a focus on prioritization of key jobs.

Award Winner — Aricent

Aricent, an 8,000-employee, privately held Silicon Valley-based communications product and service provider operates in 19 countries worldwide. It has developed a world-class employee referral program to fuel growth and drive organizational capability. Outstanding practices include:

• Responsiveness — Its dedicated team of five guarantees action on all referrals submitted within 72 hours of submission (it actually targets providing personalized feedback to referrers within the same time frame). Its referral help-desk also contributes to responsiveness by promising a response to all inquires within eight hours. The helpdesk is so well regarded that it achieved an astonishing 97.9% satisfaction rate among surveyed employees. This is truly a first-class approach. The No. 1 success factor in any referral program is its ability to maintain a high level of responsiveness. Almost all employee referral programs start out like gangbusters but quickly wane as employees realize that their referrals are not getting quick and responsive treatment.
• Service level agreement — Aricent developed a service level agreement that clearly spells out what referrers and hiring managers can expect from the ERP program staff and vice versa. Its SLA has produced the highest satisfaction rating of any program I have ever come across.
• Proactive referrals — Aricent used a proactive referral approach that took program representatives to employee workstations, meetings, social gatherings, etc., to educate about program specifics and to solicit on-the-spot referrals. It also publishes and distribute a referral program calendar in advance so that employees are aware of projected needs and events. In addition, at some of these referral events it provides on-the-spot rewards to solicit referral activity. This proactive approach might seem time-consuming, but it is one of the most effective ways to get referrals from ultra-busy professionals when you need them versus when other voluntarily opt to submit them. Traditional referral programs rely almost entirely on the employee making the initiative to refer in response to posters, e-mails, etc., which does little to ensure that the program produces needed results.
• Prioritization of jobs — The iRefer program is targeted to produce hires in hard-to-fill roles that require niche skills (50% of such roles were filled by ERP hires in 2009). By establishing hiring percentage targets for critical groups, Aricent made participation in the program by managers a priority as well, driving the program to produce 44% of all external hires, an increase of 9% over 2008. Anyone who gathers data on referral program effectiveness finds out pretty quickly that referrals work better on certain jobs than on others. And because there are always limited resources, prioritize jobs and business units in advance so that the program focuses on mission-critical, revenue generating jobs, and “hard-to-fill” positions.
• Referrals are pre-assessed — Tackling the subject of “junk referrals,” Aricent implemented a referral screening methodology that requires the referring employee to submit an assessment of the applicant being referred. By requiring employees to assess the technical skill and culture fit of the referral, the program forces the employee “to be accountable” for the quality of their referral, improving candidate quality and saving both manager and recruiter time.
• Goals for all managers — Aricent required all managers to refer at least one corporate alumni per year who they had convinced to return. It also involved hiring managers as iRefer ambassadors, which encourage their teams to refer profiles and to maximize their contribution during exclusive hiring events. Establishing referral targets or goals for each manager is a powerful method to drive participation.
• Boomerangs — It specifically targets former employees in order to get them to return later in their career. Sixty-six percent of all on alumni rehires came through the referral program in 2009. (Having a corporate alumni program and targeting former employees in order to get them to “boomerang” is especially important for organizations that may have been forced to lay off a large number of employees during the most recent downturn.)
• Use technology — Aricent developed a microsite on the firm’s intranet which it uses to publish a list of employees who have successfully referred. It uses management software to generate a daily status report on every ongoing referral, and it tags each and every profile against one or more domains or skills, so that whenever a new position opens up, it can more quickly and accurately identify potential candidates in the referral database. To ensure easy access to the micro-site, it places iRefer kiosks at events and “short list” individuals on the spot.
• A dedicated referral team — Perhaps its most important accomplishment is the leadership of the talent acquisition team’s ability to make a convincing business case to senior executives to fund a dedicated team of five to manage the employee referral channel.
• Bonuses — The Aricent program varies the bonus with the targeted position and offers “top-ups” as motivational bonuses on each of its unique campaigns.
• Robust ERP analytics — Aricent gathers and reports metrics in all of the important areas, including new-hire job performance, new hire retention, boomerang rehires, offer acceptance ratio, and referrals as a percentage of all hires. Analytics are the key to continuous improvement and for achieving a competitive advantage in any talent management program.
• Significant results were produced — Great features mean little if they don’t produce results, and the Aricent program has no trouble demonstrating impact. Some highlights include: ERP hires have measurably better on-the-job performance than hires from other sources, and referral hires have measurably better retention rates after one year. These are the two most important metrics in any referral program because they demonstrate to skeptical senior managers that the program is producing higher-quality hires. Also: resume-to-hire ratio of 3:1 compared to 5:1 of other sources; it increased the employee participation rate from 35%in 2008 to 66% in 2009; iRefer reached 45% of total hiring; ERP candidates accept offers at a significantly higher rate; and ERP hires cost approximately 20% less than hires produced via other sources.

Finalist — Accenture (Past ERE Award Winner)

This global consulting firm is well-known for excellent management practices, and its referral program is no exception. The current program began life as a pilot program in the Netherlands and received top honors in last year’s award program. Features that caught the judges’ attention last year (written up in the May 2009 Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership) were senior executive involvement throughout the program, electronic referral cards, a charity component that motivates employees by providing a small donation to charity, and a reward for referrals that successfully make it to the interview stage. This year the program went global and was refined to better meet the changing economic and recruiting climate. Major program improvements include:

• Prioritized positions — Accenture focused its program design changes on features that would improve the quality of hire, including moving away from open referrals to position-based referrals, where only high-priority positions are targeted. In an economic downturn, a firm’s leadership should clearly explain why it’s critical to continue providing referrals for some jobs, while the rest of your organization is in slow-growth mode.
• Authentic communications — Accenture realized that the wording and phrasing used in requisitions and position descriptions is much more formal than the language used in normal day-to-day conversation. As a result, it changed expectations to be more consistent with how friends/colleagues would discuss the role/organization. They then used senior leaders in their communication campaigns to be referral “champions” and to explain the importance to the business of the positions being recruited for.
• Increasing employee feedback — Accenture provides referring employees with more status information by allowing them to sign up to online feedback channels that let them monitor the status of referrals via emails, RSS feeds, and text messages. It also provided referring employees with access to their referral history, detailing status of past referrals, rewards earned, a targeted listing of key positions in their group that are soliciting referrals, and current ERP campaign messages.
• Tailoring the website experience — It learned by listening to feedback that past referrers do not need as much program information and support as “first-time” referrers. Using that learning, Accenture retooled the referral website to tailor the visitors’ experience based on the visitors’ past referral activity. Past referrers can jump straight to submitting a referral, while new referees are still provided with a high level of guidance and information.
• Results produced — Accenture started the year with a great performing program, but program retooling has made it even better. Key performance gains include: reducing the resume to hire ratio from 5:1 to 4:1; increasing the percentage of hires attributed to ERP to 34%; and estimated recruiting cost savings of over $700,000.

Both Aricent and Accenture have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to servicing employees submitting referrals and are reaping the rewards of paying attention. Got questions for either of them, comments, concerns? Share them here and elevate the conversation!

Stay tuned: in part 2 of this series, I will cover the employer branding program and corporate career website award categories.

But would you get the company’s logo tattooed on your arm?

Michael Long did. And he only officially become an employee at tech hosting company Rackspace this month.

Here he is, though, at last week’s South By Southwest getting his tat as bemused onlookers take pictures.

The tagline on the video sums things up pretty neatly: “Fanatical! has now been defined.” That’s a double entendre, describing Long’s personal commitment and Rackspace’s corporate culture. Everywhere on the company website you find references to Fanatical Support, a mission as much as a slogan that Rackspace takes so seriously it’s registered it as a trademark.

I tried to get a hold of Long and his boss, Rackspace SVP Wayne Roberts. But no luck. I wanted to talk about the tattoo of course. But I also wanted to know how the company developed the kind of culture it did. Not everyone (hardly anyone?) will get a logo tat, but in developing the company’s new talent portal, Rackspace opened up the project to its employees. It crafted the core values statement, says Long, who was a consultant to the project.

You might know Long better as The Red Recruiter, progenitor of The Red Shoe Project. The project raises awareness, particularly in the recruiting community, for a San Francisco non-profit, My New Red Shoes, which provides indigent kids with new school clothes.

Since last September, Long has been consulting with Rackspace to develop its new recruiting site. (It was an ERE awards finalist three years ago for the best site.) He became so taken with the company, that when he was asked to take charge of its social recruiting and branding efforts, he said yes. Racker Talent launched earlier this month, and, as Long says in a blog posting, it’s a talent portal, not merely a career site.

“We wanted to create something that would allow future Rackers to peer through the window and gain an understanding around what the culture at Rackspace really meant,” he blogged. “The hope being that once they had a chance to see it, they would be more inclined to engage in dialog about potential opportunities.”

Racker Talent is still being developed. The pictures of the people at work and play will be supplemented by videos; the blog posts will grow. But the fundamentals of an engaging site are there. When you see the pictures of CEO Lanham Napier flexing in a Rackers t-shirt (red, coincidentally … or not) at SxSW, you certainly get the impression that there’s nothing starchy about this company. You certainly get to peer through the window.

You’ll hear about the winners in multiple venues, including upcoming articles on this website, as well as at this week’s conference in San Diego, this Fall’s conference in Hollywood Florida (October 26-27-28), and in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Best College Recruiting Program

EY

Best Corporate Careers Website

DaVita

Best Employee Referral Program

Aricent

Best Employer Brand

EY

Best Retention Program/Practices

PNC Bank

Most Strategic Use of Technology

KeyBank

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Sodexo

Think again.

ERE Recruiting Excellence Award applicants found creative ways to redeploy employees, including recruiters, avoiding layoffs and saving money. Others used the recession to redo their career websites, build a new employee-pipelining tool, and change its sources of hire to upgrade the technologically savviness of its workforce.

The judges were impressed. They were diligent and inquisitive, too, so to all judges, thanks.

Here are this year’s finalists. As always, you’ll hear a lot more about them throughout the year — in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, on this site, at ERE’s Fall Conference in Florida (October 26-27-28), and in the Spring.

As for the Spring ERE Expo in San Diego, there’ll be a reception Monday night where some information on the finalists will be available. The next day, the winners will be announced in front of the whole conference audience, and you’ll be able to ask them questions.

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

Best College Recruiting Program

EY: intern leadership conference

Rosetta: more applicants, less money

Best Corporate Careers Website

DaVita: not resting after past victories

Intuit: interactive Flash presentation

Best Employee Referral Program

Accenture: higher quality, less money

Aricent: high quality of hire

Best Employer Brand

EY: embedded in all touch points

UnitedHealth Group: higher new hire satisfaction

Best Retention Program/Practices

Paychex: consistent follow-up by recruiters

PNC Bank: redeploying recruiters

Most Strategic Use of Technology

AT&T: iPhone app

KeyBank: “virtual job tryout”

Tata: online campus portal

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

CACI: hiring disabled veterans

Sodexo: social media success

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.