One of the parts I love about this movie is the scene where the squirrels can identify a good nut from a bad one. I was struck by how nice it would be if we, as HR professionals, could simply knock someone on the head and, depending on what we hear, know whether they were a good fit or not.

But alas, we don’t have that luxury; we have to ascertain whether a candidate is a good fit based on the information we have at the time. And, as most decisions go, the result is only as good as the data leading up to it.

Herein lies the foundation for the upcoming pre-conference workshop for the ERE Expo in San Diego. Recruiting Beyond the Job Description is a pre-conference workshop designed to help you take the data you have about a job, combined with the commitment you have as professionals, and build a recruitment and selection process that greatly increases the chances for a good organization and job fit.

So many of us have become complacent when it comes to recruiting and filling our vacancies. Employee “churn” has become a part of our lives and we think nothing of it when a new employee leaves before the honeymoon period is over! I have even heard some recruiters claim this churn is “job security” for them! Egads!

Recruiting Beyond the Job Description will help you understand that you don’t have to be limited by the inherent flaws of traditional job descriptions. During this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to extract “hidden data” about a job to identify what competencies you should be searching for and testing against to ensure the selected candidate is a great match.

I will walk you through a practical and effective job analysis process to identify both technical and behavioral competencies needed for success in the job. You are free to bring job descriptions you are currently working from or you can use the ones I provide. Either way, you will leave the workshop armed with knowledge and motivation to Recruit Beyond the Job Description and increase you chances of making a selection that will stick! It is certainly not as cute as trained squirrels, but I promise you the process is just as magical.

In my upcoming workshop at the spring ERE Expo, we’ll be discussing many of the common issues that are faced by those who manage and hire recruiters, and will share some of the most groundbreaking research in this arena.

For now, let’s discuss one issue in the hiring of recruiters, and one issue in the performance of recruiters and talent acquisition professionals.

Hiring Recruiters

It is safe to assume that most professionals enter the recruiting industry into highly transactional positions where performance is mostly measured by how much they “do.”

For example, how many calls they make per day, how many e-mails they can send, how many interviews they can set-up, and how many people they can get hired are core methods of measurement. This is especially prevalent in entry-level agency recruiting environments where most recruiters are brought into the industry.

Of course, recruiting is not the only profession where this is the accepted method of hiring new talent, but it is the most essential, simply because recruiting is not, in its core, about transactional items. The argument that is used to justify giving new recruiter incentives to engage in more “doing” or transactional activity is that activity is correlated with results. But the truth is that activity does not guarantee good results.

This matters because to many recruiting professionals, recruiting is about the process of recruiting and not the larger picture of acquiring talent. In entry-level and junior-level positions, this is not an issue of contention. But when recruiters become managers and directors they are unable to provide the strategic value that top organizations need.

For example, high-volume recruiters sometimes fail to understand the relative quality of talent needed by internal corporate recruiting professionals, because they have not been developed and trained into thinking about the long-term goals of the business. They may see a job description as all the necessary requirements on which to hire someone for, but focus less on soft items that are increasingly important as that candidate moves up in the organization.

I believe that this is because of how they were trained and developed — to focus more on prioritizing fast hires over quality hires (within reason of course). This is not a criticism of agency or “fast” recruiters. This is a criticism of how their managers and leaders develop them.

In an organization that has a strategic plan to move overseas, for example, it will fall upon the strategic recruiter to ask the question (for each position): “Will this person possibly go overseas when we expand there? And if so, where?” to which she/he may receive a response: “That’s a great question John/Jane. Yes, they may have to go overseas to China in about two years when we move our operations there.” To which the strategic recruiter may respond: “Excellent. I’ll try to recruit someone, based on our conversation and the job description who may also have some experience handling Chinese businesses or something related.”

The transactional recruiter, because she/he has not been developed to think strategically over the years would likely not gear his/her questions in such a way. They’d would focus more on questions that would allow her to make the most efficient hire possible. Although both recruiters will get the job done, one will bring long-term value that cannot be measured, and which she is not being assessed on.

Hiring recruiters in the right way is an issue of early training and development. Recruiting leaders and managers are entirely responsible for this phase.

We will discuss how to develop your recruiting staff (in the early phase of employment as well) to suit your overall needs, as well as when process execution is more important than strategic thinking.

Performance Management

Typically, recruiters are measured, assessed, and evaluated based on hard data (which for some organizations is still a step forward) in some of the best organizations. This is an excellent start, and any performance management system should include process-oriented data as part of an overall performance appraisal.

However, where the industry falls short is in developing enough career development as well as leadership opportunities to augment that appraisal. In fact, only a minority of recruiting professionals actually receive an opportunity to expand their academic, professional, or social knowledge either on or off the job, which in turn, never allows recruiting leaders to develop career paths, professional specialties, succession management, or leadership development opportunities for their employees.

To add, the best most organizations will do is send a small number of their internal talent staff to external training programs, without any thought or planning on how that new knowledge could be disseminated and integrated into leadership development opportunities. In short, even this potentially expensive training is done in a very tactical way and is not sustainable.

The importance of getting this right is paramount: Performance management is one of the main reasons that CEOs of major organizations throughout the entire world rarely (if ever) come from a talent acquisition background.

In addition, there is new and groundbreaking research that top performers in recruiting environments are not necessarily the most independent individual contributors, but individuals who manage internal relationships and social connections with stakeholders.

In fact, social dynamics are better predictors (statistically) of recruiter’s performance than human capital metrics and measurements.

We’ll talk about all these challenges in detail in my workshop at the spring ERE Expo.

Over 20 years I’ve learned that these assumptions in a global context rarely pay off. I often hear people say things like “Singapore is similar to Hong Kong because they are both in Asia”; or “Italy is similar to France because they are close to each other and in Europe.” Well, that is sort of like thinking the United States of America is similar to Mexico because they’re both part of the Americas. I think many of us in North America would shake our heads at this comparison, but it is not uncommon to develop plans based on what we know, and then take a few assumptions about the target location expecting to excel. Wrong! What works in our own space doesn’t necessarily translate when you cross a border, ocean, or even a region. At times, it can feel like you’ve brought your baseball bat to a cricket game — yes, the function seems the same, but without understanding the game, the home run is much more difficult to achieve.

This is why I’ve called on two of my esteemed peers, Danielle Monaghan and Roel Lambrichts, to join me at the upcoming ERE Expo Spring 2012 in San Diego for an open dialogue about creating and sustaining talent acquisition success on a global scale. Essentially, we’re inviting everyone to have coffee with us and join the discussion. I chose this type of session and dynamic presenter group because of the diverse backgrounds and global companies that have benefited from our expertise. Danielle is the HR director North Asia – Greater China, Japan, & Korea at Cisco Systems, based out of Beijing. Roel is the head of talent acquisition Europe for Coca-Cola Enterprises based out of Brussels.

You may have experienced the kinds of things we’re talking about here. If not, it’s likely you will in the future as companies continue to globalize. While “global recruiting” is a currently a buzzword in our profession, there is more to it than making some overseas calls and sifting through resumes. I know I made a lot of assumptions when I first started to recruit outside my own home region (more than 20 years ago); we all do.

I’ll never forget the “aha” moment when I realized the one-size-fits-all-model was not going to work.

I was the head of a large American organization expanding into Europe. I had to make a “quick” roundtrip flight from California to London — and this trip, I’d end up with my tail between my legs. I was going to admit failure and all I kept asking myself was, “How did I let things get this far?”

It all started because the division had needed a new head of human resources. For several months prior to my trip, despite the UK division’s pleas to follow some of the local recruiting protocol, I, as head of talent acquisition sitting in Los Angeles, insisted they do things our way. I thought I knew better. Without an in-house recruiting department, the UK managers recommended we rely on an outside, third-party agency. Nonsense, I responded. We have more than capable recruiters in the U.S.; let’s handle it for you our way. Let’s at least pay an outside agency to place an ad to generate CVs, they suggested. Why would I do that, I replied, when we can identify potential candidates and just call them directly ourselves?

They were appalled. You can’t do that, the local British team explained. “We don’t call people and directly recruit or source from other companies.” It was a territory battle and I didn’t even have the courtesy to set up conference calls on their time (Eight hours makes a big difference if there is no flexibility!).

As you may be guessing, I was not successful when I tried to do things my way and operate from the common American perspective that the world revolves around us.

It was an important lesson for me though — not only humbling, but eye-opening. I don’t think my mistakes were uncommon. Even the best talent acquisition professional falls into several traps. Think about if you have ever assumed that…

• Other places are just like where you live and regions are alike. Like my example above, we know Vancouver is not the same as Montreal, just as California is different from New York — it’s true on a global scale.
• Everyone speaks English. Think about your last vacation off the resort in Sao Paolo. Your choices were likely Portuguese or Spanish, not English.
• The same recruiting activity will work regardless of where you are. Think Internet reliability in the outskirts of Russia.
• The Internet is available to all people – think China (did you know LinkedIn is blocked there?).

And these mistakes are often innocently overlooked or not even considered. There are discussions in boardrooms all over the world about how to address global talent needs. Local recruiting and staffing processes are not consistent around the world, and there are significant differences from region to region as to how talent acquisition processes are executed.

I learned that all of the strategizing, planning, and developing programs to handle recruiting around the world often miss one important mark: although business is global, effective recruiting must always be local. You can do this in many ways and we’ll delve into several at the session. You may hear things like:

Creating a culture/country plan understanding what makes the recruiting culture unique in each country or region that you work, as well as how it might be customized.

Creating a candidate pool with awareness of how various countries use the web and technology to craft messages for candidate pools and help get the word to them.

Getting tech savvy, or more simplistic, to help you unearth specific gathering places. Some include typical social networking and media networks, but others include other unique applications.

Making people feel comfortable is a foundational activity for recruiters because it enables relationships to form. Think about how frustrated you get, sitting at home in Toronto or Chicago and calling to get an electronic gadget fixed, and you find yourself speaking to someone in India. The accent isn’t what you’re used to, and the speed, intonation, and even pronunciation is all foreign to you. Now make that feeling professional — you will likely feel skeptical, not trusting, and perhaps weary because for whatever reason there are no local representatives of the company available to speak with you.

So whether you’re working in Pan-European recruiting including the Middle East and Africa regions and you’re thinking about:

• Brand recognition outside the parent region and how you will develop your pipeline if direct applicants are low.
• Contractual obligations and work councils — for example, has your organization established the right work conditions for the French Works Council in France?
• If interview feedback is required and hiring managers are prepared; for example, in the UK, interview feedback is expected.
• Cultural gender norms carrying into the office; for example, women in Saudi Arabia cannot drive on their own, how you balance this with your desire to hire valuable female candidates.
• Language — can you support all 18 official languages in Europe? Is a multilingual recruiter enough to overcome stigma over a flawed accent?
• In the UK, age discrimination is a very sensitive issue. How will you cross-train and set standards when your recruiters in Argentina are looking at marital status, number of children, and looking at pictures on resumes, and your team here cannot learn anything personal about the candidate without being very cautious?

Or in Asia/Pacific recruiting, and you’re looking at;

• The competitive economy in the world’s second-largest economy and fifth-largest consumer market: China.
• Internet access and speed across the region and accessibility.
• The rapidly changing government policies and regulations that make China a new country every six months.
• Respect-based cultural norms and how to address people — like last/family name, followed by an “honorific” pronoun in places like Japan or Korea.

Or like many of us in one of the many diverse regions across the Americas:

• Competition is high, but many candidates may not be actively looking, and how will you find passive talent.
• Working within legal requirements, like not asking “Are you a U.S. citizen?” and instead asking, “Are you legally eligible to work in this country?”
• Compliance (like the alphabet soup of U.S. employment laws) and even the stigma of working in a neighboring county (there’s much more of a stigma with, say, an American working in Canada, then a French national working in Belgium, or a Thai national to be recruited to work in Malaysia).
• Dramatic climate changes: how can a near-Arctic organization attract those from warmer climates, and retain them?

It is likely that you will face some of the challenges we have seen. Join the conversation about the challenges and obstacles of cross-border recruiting, and the unique idiosyncrasies of cultural and legal differences within regions.

Danielle, Roel, and I are putting ourselves on the hot seat to talk about everything under the sun,  no matter what time zone you’re operating in. Let us come together as a local team in San Diego and talk about the global needs for recruiting that are inevitably local.

Feel free to leave us questions right up until March 19, 2012, and we will try to answer as many questions during our ERE Expo session.

See you in San Diego in 2012! Happy Holidays to everyone!

Taleo was thinking that a sold-out user conference next week would mean about 800 attendees. Now it’s expecting more like 1,100, up sharply over last year. It signed up 83 “business edition” customers last month, up roughly 15% over the previous month …

Work4 Labs, which sets up company pages on Facebook, is focusing on its “referral engine” product, where employees see who among their Facebook friends might make good employees at their companies. Work4 Labs did a four-company beta with the referral product. Facebook has been helpful in giving Work4 Labs access to its ads API; Work4 Labs realizes people don’t have the biographical information about their work like they might on LinkedIn, but is trying to draw conclusions about people based on things like what their interests, groups, and associations are …

InterviewStream’s Jake Burke says that the company has signed “more than 100 new clients in 2011 alone. Interest is like through the roof,” he says…

Halogen is moving into the recruiting field with a release of a recruiting module, perhaps next week. It’s also looking at international expansion and has opened a UK office…

BranchOut is launching something called “RecruiterConnect,” which is a take on LinkedIn Recruiter in a sense, in that a company will use it with a license and login. It will interface with a company’s talent acquisition system and allow you to search millions of people on BranchOut. BranchOut has also been listed as a top-50 investment-worthy company by Dow Jones, which a BranchOut rep tells me is “kinda funny” since she says the company has “pretty much all the funding we need”…

Corporate America’s nervousness about adding staff, and rebuilding slimmed-down recruiting departments, is to some extent Qualigence’s gain. Says bizdev VP Grant Hubbard: “We’re just slammed.”

Your value — what you can get done — depends on increasing your influence and strengthening your reputation. And part of that is presentation: not so much what you say but how you say it.

Presentation skills, or a person’s “presentation” is a package; a combination of tangible and intangible behaviors and skills, including:

• How you perform “on your feet”
• Appearance
• Poise
• Knowledge
• Preparation
• Value

How are you known in your organization? Are you known as someone who:

• Gets things done?
• Challenges the hiring manager to think about what is needed, what skills are required, what skills are nice to have, and what skills could be important that the hiring manager hasn’t considered?
• Presents candidates that match the considerations presented above?
• Is confident and behaves as if the hiring manager was a peer?
• Is as impressive “off-stage” as “on-stage”?
• Demonstrates emotional intelligence?

How you are known molds your influence and reputation. And how you establish and reinforce how you are known is through your presentation.

Some recruiters we’ve talked to don’t believe this is possible. They believe their job is only to find and recruit good candidates. Well, there is one thing about beliefs: what you believe is what you are. This is more than pop psychology because we have seen and worked with some very influential and highly successful recruiters.

To further explore and develop your presentation, it is beneficial to understand that it includes four skill domains:

• Business Skills
• Leadership Skills
• Interpersonal Skills
• Intrapersonal Skills

Business Skills include: general knowledge of recruiting, talent management, the industry, and the developing trends. It also includes a knowledge of how business works, both yours and others in the industry. The value is to be able to talk with the hiring manager about business trends, how recruiting fits in, how other firms are handling their recruiting challenges, and how to explain the imbalance in talent availability across different industries.

Leadership Skills include your ability to influence the hiring manager and the organization and the ability to think and present a big-picture, high-impact or more strategic approach to recruiting. Such as, why talent management is important and why such issues as the connection between onboarding and employee satisfaction with their supervisor impact retention. Also, leadership skills include how to deal with a hiring manager who has a poor retention record. Recruiters do not have positional authority, so their leadership skills are developed through and applied in their ability to influence.

Interpersonal Skills include: how you communicate with peers, candidates, vendors, hiring managers, and your boss. It also includes your relationship and social skills. Interpersonal skills are the window through which others see you.

Intrapersonal Skills are basically self-management skills. From how you direct and correct your thinking, to your day-to-day practices in accomplishing tasks to how you run your day and take care of and handle yourself in the process.

Strengthening presentation starts with awareness: being aware that presentation is important and is larger than a one-shot deal and being aware of what constitutes presentation. But change doesn’t happen with awareness alone. Change happens when awareness meets caring (enough to do something about it) and right action.

We can be aware, we can care, but perhaps we may not know what to do, or more importantly, what is preventing us from taking action in the first place. In our work, we have found there are nine common behavioral categories that impact our ability to take action:

• Fear
• Relationship-building
• Responsiveness
• Overselling
• Quitting
• Perfection
• Personal Beliefs
• Focus Management
• Impression Management

These behavior categories are distributed across the four skill domains; however, a lion’s share sits in the intrapersonal domain, which predominantly reflects our personal habits, patterns, and preferences as they converge in our work.

Take a personal inventory. Assess how you believe you are seen in the organization and consider yourself in each of the behavior categories and across the four domains. And understand that improving your presentation skills is a process, not an event. It starts with awareness and a sincere desire (and belief) that your presentation skills can be improved. The benefit will be more influence and a stronger reputation, which will enable greater results and increase your value to others, both inside and outside of your organization.

To learn more, join us at the ERE Fall Expo for our Pre-Conference Workshop, September 7 at 10 a.m.: Strengthening Your Presentation Skills to Increase Your Results.

So why do we see so many boring, long, and legalistic job ads — postings that are really just job descriptions? I suspect it boils down to a few things:

• No time
• Not enough of the right kind of information about the job
• Outside pressures (from the hiring manager, other departments, etc.)
• A less-than-clear understanding of how to create an effective job ad

In a session at ERE’s fall conference, I’ll be tackling the challenge of creating compelling, enticing, and effective job ads. I’ll be looking at some of the best examples — and examining why the bad ones are so awful. I’ll talk about how a great job ad lowers your cost per hire and drives up the quality of your candidates. And I’ll cover why the art of creating a great job ad transcends any technological changes — be they social media, job boards, or ATSs.

Most importantly, I’ll break apart the different parts of a job ad and show you how they work, how to build them, and how to improve your recruiting results as you do so.

I encourage you to join me in “Job ads That Deliver Results,” Friday, September 9, from 2 to 3 p.m.

Innovation can be iterative and incremental or transformational. Regardless, it comes with struggles and triumphs. In September I’ll share with you glimpses of innovation and its trails and tribulations throughout my 25 years in HR and staffing, spanning from new recruiting models to internal placement to marketing campaigns.

One of the capstone victories in in my career is my most recent role with Cisco. I will share a true startup story of building the Staffing Innovation Organization: a high-performing, agile team that delivered a foreign yet transformational internal recruitment and retention process in this Fortune 100 company. You may have read about Cisco Talent Connection, which received the 2011 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award for the best retention program, but that was just the summary. At the Fall ERE Expo, we’ll discuss the roadmap of introducing and championing innovation within Staffing and HR at Cisco: lessons learned, successes, and tips for driving innovation in your own organizations.

You won’t want to miss this session, just like a summer box office hit — it comes with plot twists, special effects, and a dramatic ending. Looking forward to sharing my innovation journey.

So what’s the connection to networking for talent acquisition leaders? Tricks, tips, good ideas, and best practices to constantly making improvements to the way we run the talent acquisition machine. Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, as we tend to do, we need to take the time to step out of our frenetic schedules and connect, learn, and brainstorm with our peers. The payoff benefits your team, the talent acquisition function, your organization — and your own personal development.

How can we make this happen? Here’s one great idea: attend ERE in September in Florida. Really. It’s an inexpensive way to pack in a ton of networking, learning, best practices, and discussion into two days. You deserve it — and your company deserves it.

When faced with hiring managers who are busy (and some less interested then they should be) and with the best candidates shopping options, like it or not, how you present becomes as important (we would say more important) than what you present.

While brevity and fact-based presentation are key today, if what you present is a recitation of the facts about a candidate, ranking them using some algorithm, this can be, quite frankly, boring. How do you get the hiring manager to not only want to meet with you, but also to listen to you, seek your advice, and respond? It’s in your presentation. For example, when you start working with a hiring manager and as the process continues:

• Are you fearful about bothering them in approaching them with your concerns or questions?
• How responsive are you? Are you slow because you are seeking the “perfect candidate”?
• How good are you at building relationships?
• How focused are you on the hiring managers’ issues and needs? Have you inquired as to their key priorities for the role?
• Are you interesting to talk to and meet with? Do you bring energy, knowledge, and value-add ideas to the discussions?
• Do you conduct yourself like a peer or subordinate?

These questions reflect the “intangible” elements of presentation. Many recruiters we meet believe that their value is predominantly in identifying and bringing good candidates to the table. Yes, this is certainly their role, though only a part of their potential value. And strong presentation will help you expand your value.

Start acting like a peer, bring distinctive and useful knowledge to the discussion, demonstrate beyond what is expected, look and be impressive, and you will be seen differently. Presentation is a package, and the ol’ a la carte approach will only take you so far.

The Techniques for Highly Effective Recruiters pre-conference workshop we’re giving at the Fall Expo will address these issues and more to help you increase your effectiveness and impact as a recruiter in your organization. And yes — it’s in your presentation.

Ask yourself: as a recruiter, is this really the best you can do?

I would suggest that, in fact, you can do better — and that doing better will bring you great rewards.

In the fall session of ERE’s conference, we will be tackling the challenge of creating compelling, enticing, and effective job ads. We’ll be looking at some of the best examples — and examining why the bad ones are so awful. We’ll talk about why the art of creating a great job ad transcends any technological changes, be they social media, job boards, or ATSs, and how a great job ad lowers your cost per hire and drives up the quality of your candidates.

But September is a long time from now, and I really want to get started — so I’m making an open call for the best and worst job ads you’ve seen (or even created yourself).

• Is the language impenetrable?
• Is it impossible to tell what the duties are?
• Does the company inadvertently reveal more about itself than perhaps it should have?
• Is the language so hip it’s square?
• Does it leave out critical information?
• Does it exceed the length of a typical novella?

Post your favorite ‘best’ and ‘worst’ in the comments below. Who knows? Perhaps we can line up some prizes for the best (worst?) submissions!

PS: If you have an ad that produced great results but doesn’t look like it should’ve — let us know! There is almost always some reason to the rhyme.

The company has tested out the tool and is very bullish on it. Accenture’s Sjoerd Gehring will be speaking at ERE’s big annual fall conference in Hollywood, Florida (September 7-9) on using LinkedIn as well as other tools — such as smart phones — in employee referrals.

Some of the event this week is being streamed live. Here’s some more scuttlebutt from the conference and from throughout the recruiting world today:

• Wanted Technologies, a company I talked about last fall, has launched what it calls a “hiring scale” for companies to measure the supply and demand of job candidates for a given job. In other words, how tough it’s going to be to fill a job. CEO Bruce Murray emailed me to say that this is a “new and distinct feature on top of what I showed you last fall … the Hiring Scale measures how hard it will be to source a position based on the supply of candidates and the demand from competing employers. It shows ‘red, yellow, and green’ based on the difficulty of filing the position.”

• Starbucks has purchased an ad associated with the #ereexpo hashtag on Twitter, in order for the company to recruit recruiters. What this means is that if someone’s checking out the stream of posts about the ERE Expo, they’ll see the Starbucks ad. Smart.
• Speaking of recruiting recruiters … one thing I’ve understood for a long time but not heard as explicitly as I did here last night: recruiting leaders from past ERE award-winning companies are telling me that one big result of their being finalists and winners has been multiple job offers. Expect more of that.
• New guidance on the ADA is out. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group for business, has apparently given its OK to the rules. Meanwhile, on a similar topic, a new site has launched related the hiring, mentoring, and careers of people with disabilities.
• William Tincup believes a deal will soon be announced involving a major Learning Management System vendor acquiring an applicant tracking system vendor. Tincup says that Naomi Bloom is in agreement. Speaking of Tincup, Steve Boese captured a photo of his memorable booth.
• Kenexa’s business, its reps tell me, is doing “amazing.” The company also launched a new service for companies that want to hire a lot of people quickly. Beyond.com says it’s hot too, quadrupling it sales force this year from 7 to 28 people. A mid-size applicant tracking system vendor tells me, with not much of a smile, that business is “slow.”
• I’m hearing that Cognizant is hiring in very large numbers, like tens of thousands in the coming year, the majority — but by no means all — in India.
• Keith Watts, here from the big employment law firm Ogletree Deakins, tells me that attendees’ most common areas of inquiry relate to social media and discrimination; what liability you may face, for example, when you know from Facebook what an applicant looks like.
• PepsiCo’s launching a new mobile app for jobs-seekers. Right now, it includes Twittter feeds, blog feeds, and job listings, with the latter targeted to the location of the smartphone (or iPad) user. Expect more features as the year goes on.
  PepsiCo Careers Mobile Possibilities

All told, so far at least, the atmosphere is unusually upbeat, something I was just talking to LinkUp’s Adam Luckeroth and others about. There’s little time being spent on “Are things better? Are they worse? Are we there yet?” and mainly just talk of how to hire and onboard and retain employees better, quicker, and smarter.

The moral at the bottom of the page was “Sales start before your salesman calls.” The message was straightforward: developing trust based vendor/customer relationships takes much more than a sales call, and the more you know about your customer up front the more likely you will be successful.

As requisition loads increase to frightening new levels, and because the ERE Expo in San Diego was approaching, I received dozens of inquiries from vendors eager to talk about their new product offerings. And while I love hearing about the latest and greatest tools and services, more often than not I feel a lot like the stern old man in the chair.

I know that the era of Mad Men is long gone, but I believe using some of those old-fashioned approaches to doing business could be a positive differentiator in today’s blur of virtual, real-time, mobile, digital, 3.0 engagement. Many of my colleagues have also noted the change in the way sales calls occur; today customers feel like there is much less emphasis on relationship-building. If you’re selling something, or plan to sell something, here are some tips that may give you an edge in today’s crowded marketplace.

Don’t Let Our First Contact Ever Be an Electronic Meeting Invitation

I suppose the availability of contact information makes this incredibly tempting, but nearly everyone I spoke with while researching this article agreed that it makes a really poor first impression. I receive meeting invitations almost every day from perfect strangers, and I find it frustrating to try and figure out who is sending them.

Don’t Reach Out if You Don’t Know a Single Thing About My Business

People frequently call me asking me to review their approach to social media. I find that almost none of them have ever been to my careers website, reviewed my current social media platform, or even know what product my company makes or sells. The same technology that makes it so easy for these people to find my phone number and e-mail address could also be used to learn a lot about my organization and my business needs. I always wonder why people didn’t take a few extra seconds to look at my company web page before dialing the phone.

Don’t Read Me a Script

Or at least read it with some feeling! Many salespeople hardly even bother to say “Hello” before launching into a sales pitch. It’s obvious they are reading it, and words like “exciting,” “new,” and “amazing” are pronounced with the same lack of intensity as the rest of the script. I know cold-calling is an important way of establishing new business relationships, but that first impression is so important, and I often wonder if the company’s management has ever listened in on some of these conversations.

Tell Me What You’re Selling Right Away

As I’ve said all along, I like getting calls from people who have cool new things to sell me. But sometimes I’m not the person who is in the best position to make a decision about a particular category of product. The faster I can determine what it is you’re selling, the faster I can get you to the person you should be talking to. “Why don’t we just meet for 30 minutes and I can tell you about our unique approach” is not an efficient use of anyone’s time.

I Can’t Be Bought

Many people I know began their careers in an era where gift-giving was commonplace. I remember one company in particular that would send my former boss and his family into New York City for all-expense-paid weekends when trying to get additional business. Perhaps in direct response to what many of us saw in those days, most of the people I know who now run corporate recruiting functions have a completely different mindset, and gifts of any kind or value are given away or are simply refused. Many of us saw where being up for sale inevitably leads you, and are committed to doing things differently under our watch. If you don’t know your prospect, you might be unknowingly offending someone by offering gifts.

If I Don’t Choose to Engage on the First Go-around, Don’t Demand an Explanation

I try to get back to everyone who calls me, and close the loop. Sometimes people are selling a very expensive product I just don’t need. In these cases I send a nice note thanking them, and indicating that I don’t have any interest at the moment, but if my needs change I will certainly keep them in mind. After all, if I just purchased an applicant tracking system, I don’t need another one. Surprisingly, many salespeople respond with another request for my time, and demand a detailed explanation for why I made the decision I did. I find this awkward, and many others do as well.

I Don’t Want to Steal Your Idea

I once worked with the kind of vendor I genuinely love — one that had a great idea, a small group of committed employees, and was busily trying to grow the company. I was eager to help, and had even provided some customer insights that I thought would help make the product even more attractive to buyers. Just when things were getting really exciting, I received a note asking me to sign a pile of paperwork prepared by a lawyer that basically prohibited me from ever discussing anything I ever said, heard, or thought about this product. I understood the concern: protecting intellectual property is very important to a new business. But I would have preferred establishing the rules of engagement up front. I had no intention of stealing their idea, and most customers don’t plan to take ideas and start their own competing businesses.

Don’t Have Someone Reach Out to Me on Your Behalf

I find it amazing how many e-mails I get that start off “I’d like to schedule 30 minutes of your time to meet with our VP of Business Development.” I know many people you will never, ever do business with a company that employs this practice. Funnily enough, in my personal experience, it’s RPO providers who are guilty of this most frequently. If you can’t be bothered to reach out to me yourself when you’re trying to get my business, how accessible will you be when you already have my business and I have a problem? Working in this field has provided me with some thrilling opportunities to talk with some amazing people — business leaders, noted authors, and even genuine celebrities (when I’m selecting a keynote speaker for an event). Almost without exception they have interacted with me directly, and that personal touch always makes a positive impression.

If I’ve Had a Bad Experience With your Company in the Past, Telling Me “That Guy Is Gone Now” Does Not Instantly Fix Things

After years in recruiting I’ve seen it all: companies not delivering work that was already paid for, auto-renewal clauses hidden in contracts that then are whipped out triumphantly … after they expire, confidential information making it’s way to my competitors, etc. Since people and relationships are at the core of what we all do, it really stings when people violate our trust. Business relationships can be re-built, but that takes time, and empathy, and a genuine acknowledgement that something really wrong happened and won’t happen again. Simply glossing over something that compromised my business or cost me money in the past makes it difficult for me to believe things will be different in the future.

So, vendors: requisition volumes are up, the pool of top talent is shrinking, people are retiring, millennials are shaking up the workplace, and everyone is relying upon you to bring solutions to market that will help us sort it all out. We love the things you develop, adore bringing them into our organizations, and are proud when we partner with you and deliver a victory. Hopefully these suggestions will help you avoid encountering that “Man in the Chair” on your next sales call.

(Also, this isn’t a one-way-street. Let’s hear from the vendors out there about how we can be better partners with you.)

The 217,000 private sector jobs that ADP says were added during the shortest month of the year was the largest increase reported by the company since November 2006.

Based on ADP’s payroll data and compiled by Macroeconomic Advisers, the monthly Employment Report is considered a harbinger of the official Labor Department report that will be released Friday. While the two reports use different methodology and the government report includes public sector employment, the ADP report offers economists an early look at the employment trend.

Economists had been expecting the ADP report to show an increase of 170,000 to 180,000. Estimates for the government report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics average 200,000 more jobs in February, according to a survey by Dow Jones Newswires.

The service sector accounted for 202,000 of the February growth. Small and mid-sized employers (up to 500 employees) added most of the jobs. Of the total, employers with more than 500 workers added only 13,000 to their payroll. Manufacturing added 20,000 jobs.

Overall, said ADP, “The recent pattern of rising employment gains since the middle of last year was reinforced by today’s report, as the average gain from December through February (217,000) is well above the average gain over the prior six months (63,000).”

Despite the strong ADP report, and an equally robust report Tuesday on manufacturing sector activity from the Institute for Supply Management, economists are still hesitant in their optimism. In his testimony before Congress yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said there are “grounds for optimism,” but added, “until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established.”

As if to underscore that caution, global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that planned layoffs increased in February for the second month in a row. The 50,702 job cuts announced last month was up 32 percent from January’s 38,519, and was the highest since March.

“It is too soon to say whether the increases in January and now February represent a trend. Certainly the specter of rising gas prices could impact employers’ staffing decisions over the next six months. At the very least, rising energy costs could force employers to postpone hiring plans. At worse, increased costs could kill the fragile recovery and spur another round of layoffs,” said CEO John A. Challenger.

Bernanke, too, warned that rising oil prices could impinge the recovery, though as conditions are now, any effect was likely to be temporary.

Though it’s too soon to say what impact the Mideast turmoil will have on hiring, The Conference Board reported today that online job postings were down slightly in February. The Board’s Help Wanted OnLine Data Series tracks online job postings in the U.S., reporting the total number of listings as well as new posts.

A second, similar index, compiled by Monster — the Monster Employment Index — is to be released tomorrow.

At ERE’s Expo later this month, panelists will discuss the outlook for recruiting jobs this year, and detail how to use data from the BLS, and other organizations and groups to project hiring needs and labor availability.

Let me start by saying that Vision drives who we are, what we do, and how we do it. This is a classic but important lesson in the art and science of talent acquisition.

My career has serendipitously taken turns and roads that have ultimately driven me to make Vision (capitalized throughout for emphasis) a part of my life and my work. As a left-brained engineer I am compelled by data, analysis, numbers, processes, and strategic tools to always achieve whatever my work desires. But, as someone who will always view himself as a recruiter in the core — that is, a specialist in the science and art of selling Vision, my right and more perspective-driven brain demands that I always consider the larger picture in all that I do. It’s a never-ending conflict between the two hemispheres.

This ongoing, internal conflict that I’ve lived with for my entire career has been instrumental in both my work-life and beyond. It has consistently forced me to always ask tough questions and to encourage others to do the same: Who am I? What do I want? Are human actions random or are they part of a precise series of factors predisposed to theories of the physical sciences? (Yep, I really asked myself that one time, but I couldn’t answer it! Shocking!)

One thing I now truly and deeply believe and can provide ample empirical evidence to support is that Vision can be one of the greatest drivers of work and life for any who choose to create it and adopt it.

A few weeks ago, my Egyptian friends and associates implemented a Vision that they had long possessed. That Vision has driven them to extraordinary lengths and extenuating circumstances. Their Vision spoke of human rights and dignity. It spoke of democracy and universal values that can never be denied. It spoke of a free society and the right to self-determination. And it spoke of many more things that we in America take for granted.

Centered in their Vision and hidden in the crevasses of their actions was the task of recruiting: That is, the task of acquiring those who shared or agreed with their Vision. Is too much of a stretch to define it that way?

What is recruiting, other than the passing on of a particular idea or vision of the future? “If you work with us, you will have more time to spend with your family” one might say. “If you join our organization you will make a better salary that will allow you a more comfortable life, less stress, and more resources to do the things you want to do, when you want to do them,” another would argue.

Aren’t these Visions in their own right? Recruiting, at its core, when performed strategically, is nothing more than the promotion and selling of a vision to provide value to one or more entities. That entity can be a person, a team, a whole organization or a whole country, and the value can be reciprocal.

Yet, we as recruiting leaders often do not have a vision of our own even though so much depends on our actions. So much as it is relevant to the course of our departments, our organizations, our industries, our countries and ultimately humanity itself depends on our ability to recruit the best talent.

You see, when we recruit we do not create automatic success for the organizations or groups that we recruit for. So much of the success depends on the decisions that are made by the people we help provide to our clients, employers, etc.

But, we do create the possibilities of success. Actually, we not only create them, we have a virtual monopoly on them.

Let us define a “possibility” as the potential to achieve a given goal — that is, the chance we can achieve it. Nothing revolutionary here! Let us use this definition for this example.

You are the VP of talent acquisition for a successful and fast-growing company. The CEO decides that we have to move into a new market, specifically China, as soon as possible. She asks for a meeting with you. In that meeting she asks you “How likely are we to be able to start a China branch by the next quarter (from the talent perspective)?” You, being the savvy recruiter that you are, ask, “Well, what do we need, what can we afford, and how much resources can we dedicate.” In other words you’re asking if this is a true priority. Your CEO says, “Whatever it takes.”

The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the Pharaoh Khufu

You go back to your office, perform your incredible analysis, create a plan, and you review it with your CEO. Basically, it’ll take a lot of resources, a lot of time and effort, but you’ll be able to do it in the time required. Good Job! You are #awesomeness!

At the same exact time your twin sister/brother, in the same exact position, with an almost identical company at almost the same time, and the same conversation with their CEO, responds differently to the CEO’s question. This savvy recruiter replies “Oh. We’re ready now! We’ve been recruiting individuals with Asian market experience, and some are fluent in Mandarin. Additionally, we’ve been working closely with HR to identify knowledge and training gaps in anticipation of this move.”

Yes, both scenarios depend on a lot more than just recruiting (e.g strategy, leadership and talent management), but the key point is that recruiting for the second case created possibilities that did not exist for the first case because of the Vision that existed before the decision was made. One company can move to China now and the other has to wait. Recruiting the right people for the second case allowed the company to have an extra possibility for success than the first, and when the CEO made the right decision (hence, expansion to China) the possibility was seized and became a reality. Science fiction? Not really!

In this case its very clear to me that recruiting does control the possibilities that talent could seize if they make the right decisions, and that when Vision is inserted those possibilities are maximized.

So what does this have to do with us? And what does it have to do with the world at large?

The earliest recruiters were themselves ones who provided visions to their candidates. The Pharaoh Kings were tasked with the recruitment of their subjects into their national building projects. Many of the wonders of the World were built first by building human infrastructure to sustain the development of global symbols, which are forever known throughout human history. History itself is filled with some incredible recruiters. So from Pharaohs to revolutions it doesn’t make a difference, recruiting is always central.

How can many of us, then, not see the relationship between what we do every day and its effects on the course of human socio-economic, geopolitical evolution?

It doesn’t have to be a Wonder of the World, nor does it have to be a national or global symbol, in order for us to know that we are essential in managing humanity’s path. It could be the non-profit recruiter who recruits talented volunteers and professionals to raise and create awareness for a disease that has taken the life of many. She/he is directly involved with saving lives.

It could be the military recruiter who recruits individuals who protect our nation and keep us safe, while re-habilitating many members of our society. It could be the technology recruiter who recruits engineers and scientists to create a fun product that brings joy to the lives of millions of people who would otherwise be miserable. These are all social changes in which we play a nominal role and in which we can influence so much.

But now we come full circle: How can we provide these Visions (higher salaries, protection of our nation, cool technologies, helping others) to our candidates when we ourselves do not have a Vision of our own?

Really! Why do we do the things that we do? How can we provide something that we ourselves do not possess? Vision!

The members of the recent Egyptian revolution recruited an entire society to their Vision of the future. They did it using the social media tactics that we ourselves employ in our daily lives. And their result was a tech-savvy, driven, emotionally intelligent, team-oriented, and humble sourcing sample that provided the foundation for true and lasting social change. Many of them wouldn’t know the first thing about recruiting, as we do. They simply had Vision and allowed it to be self-propagating.

Presenting gifts to the god Horus wearing the double crown (white crown of Upper Egypt, red crown of Lower Egypt).

For an organization that wishes true success built on the timeless foundation of top talent, the lessons that can be learned from this are exceptional. Though, the most important lesson is Vision and its necessity for those who wish to change the world for better, even if it’s the small changes that one might falsely think are insignificant.

I have so much more to say about this in the upcoming ERE Conference in March, where I will provide you with my Vision and ask you to provide yours.

In recent weeks the three of us have tackled a number of topics including the growing influence of social media, the future of recruitment process outsourcing, and improving functional efficiency and effectiveness. While these topics are likely to emerge during the crossfire so too are many others. The top-20-plus subjects on my mind heading into the crossfire include: 

1. The return of employer branding — employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. Real branding has been ignored throughout the downturn, but years of bad press and the increasing use of social media is forcing organizations to once again take branding seriously. We will see more organizations add roles dedicated to employer brand management and spending on employer branding will nearly double this year.
2. Growing recognition of employee referrals — referrals were downplayed by many organizations during the downturn, but as hiring has slowly picked up, so too has the recognition of ERPs as the dominant source of hire (both volume and quality). As organizations better learn to leverage social media to support employee referrals, the critical role of ERPs will continue to evolve. The average rate of external hires attributed to ERPs will exceed 40% within the next two years.
3. Increasing value of social media — there is little disagreement here on its continued growth and importance. We are still learning on a “trial-and-error” basis how to use social media in recruiting, and our metrics are horrible. However, this channel will continue to excel at prospect relationship building rather than as a job posting channel. Overall, finding candidates will become increasingly easy, so resources and the focus will shift toward building relationships and “selling” top prospects and candidates.
4. The mobile platform dominates – Kevin Wheeler and I have both outlined the tremendous value of the mobile platform for recruiting. This platform excels because prospects and candidates are willing to read and even respond at almost any time of day. The mobile phone will become the most powerful communications channel in recruiting and employer branding. Unfortunately, most recruiting managers have not required that their corporate career sites and all of their recruiting and branding related messaging be made “mobile-phone” friendly.
5. Key recruiting success measures are implemented — there is little disagreement between Kevin, Lou, and I regarding the fact that recruiting must become more businesslike and refine quality of hire measurements. You simply can’t improve your hiring process without knowing the on-the-job performance and retention rates of your new hires. Recruiting managers will also have to improve their metrics for employer branding (both positive and negative), the candidate experience, hiring manager satisfaction, and the source of hire (i.e. the “actual” sources or channels that result in hires). The most important high-impact metric area that will become prominent is placing a dollar value on key recruiting outcomes (i.e. the cost of a bad hire, a slow hire, the value of a superstar in a mission-critical position, etc.).
6. Retention issues grow dramatically — we have all written about the upcoming surge in employee turnover. Unfortunately, most organizations rarely focus on retention and are unaware of the 20 different retention strategies. Rather than continuing to use “peanut butter” strategies, the most effective organizations tailor retention efforts to high-value individuals and employees in critical jobs.
7. Prioritization becomes essential — business units always prioritize customers, products, and suppliers. Recruiting managers need to learn that same valuable lesson by prioritizing and focusing the best recruiters in the most resources on revenue-producing and mission-critical openings.
8. Contingent workers provide agility — if you forecast an “up-and-down” economy like we have suffered through during the last decade, you will quickly appreciate the value of contingent workers. I am predicting that as much as half of the work done for major corporations will be done by some type of contingent or outsourced workers. Unfortunately the current contingent model where management is split between HR and procurement must be blown up and replaced with one that puts contingent workers on a par with regular employees when it comes to onboarding, reference checking, information access, and training.
9. The return of the war for talent — Kevin Wheeler has mentioned that we need to plan for its return. I agree but in a global economy, the war for top talent in key high-demand positions never really diminishes. When the hiring boom does return, most corporate functions will be no better prepared to handle it than they were last time. The key weakness in winning this “war” will be the lack of a “boundaryless” integrated approach, where all talent related processes work closely together.
10. The candidate experience must improve — currently the metrics demonstrate that the candidate experience is universally miserable. Mobile phones and social networks now make it amazingly easy for unhappy candidates to almost instantly widely spread a message about their negative application and hiring experiences. As a result, recruiting managers will have no choice besides measuring and dramatically improving the candidate experience.
11. Remote and global work grows dramatically — the growth of hiring manager acceptance and improvement of remote work tools will make recruiting significantly easier at firms that are willing to offer remote work options for hard to fill jobs. If you expect to effectively attract and use global talent, offering remote work is an absolute requirement.
12. A shift toward being proactive — recruiting has historically been 100% reactive in that it only acts when a requisition is opened. In a fast-changing world, that results in many missed opportunities because the best candidates are not looking at the same time that you have an opening. We are already seeing a gradual shift toward a proactive “pre-need” model where talent is continually recruited and recruiters alert managers about current talent “opportunities” even when no requisition is open.
13. Onboarding/off-boarding gains recognition — as more firms take the time to calculate the dollar impact of slow and weak onboarding, resources will be shifted toward dramatically improving it. Areas in which it must improve include stretching it out over time, metrics, getting new hire input, more online information, and continuing recruiter involvement. Once you quantify the impact of great onboarding, you will also likely increase your focus on the employee exit process because it stinks at most firms. Off-boarding is becoming more important because hiring, losing, and later rehiring top employees will become much more important as “long-term single firm” employment becomes a less-common goal among top performers, game changers, and innovators.
14. CRM use grows — customer relationship management approaches and tools have proven to be amazingly effective on the business side of the corporation. The same tools will continue to be adapted to in prospect and candidate management until they dominate.
15. Internal movement grows in importance — an area that has to be classified as among the most impactful but poorly managed processes is internal mobility. Kevin Wheeler has written extensively on how it must be improved. The best firms are beginning to use metrics to learn that current internal movement and promotion processes simply fail to identify and proactively move internal talent to areas where they would produce a higher ROI. Future processes at all major firms will use recruiters and technology to proactively move both individuals and teams.
16. The future of outsourcing — Kevin Wheeler recently wrote an article highlighting areas in which internal recruiting has stumbled and where outsourcing will grow. I am much more pessimistic, in that I have found little metric evidence that shows that RPOs routinely produce superior candidate quality or ROI. In addition, they generally choose a “vanilla” approach and seldom use advanced tools and strategies. In addition, they cannot build your brand or provide a competitive advantage if their services are also available to your talent competitors.
17. Interviews and assessment must improve — Lou Adler has frequently mentioned his preference for performance-based interviews (instead of behavioral interviews) for improving interviews and assessment. I also see that the traditional corporate practice needs dramatic improvement but without metrics that connect interview scores with on-the-job performance, progress will be slow. The use of live Internet video interviews will continue to grow until they become standard practice.
18. Technology permeates everything – we all are supportive of new technologies, but I warn against technology fads. I am cynical about adopting technologies until the underlying process is refined. Adding technologies to weak processes like performance appraisal, reference checking, skill assessment, onboarding and applicant tracking do not automatically produce a measurable improvement in process output quality. They do make administration easier, but HR needs to learn to stop selecting “solutions” simply because they make HR’s life easier. I agree with Kevin Wheeler that simulations and games will soon begin to play a large role in attracting and assessing candidates. At least for the near term, I would also be concerned about vendor reliability and consolidation when I made my technology-buying decisions.
19. Corporate webpages must evolve — there is no weaker source of “authentic” information about a firm than corporate career websites. Job seekers have learned to use social networks and secondary sources (i.e. Glassdoor, JobVent, Vault, etc.) to get unfiltered information about what it’s like to work at a company. Unless corporate websites include authentic employee blogs and videos that allow a prospect to “see and feel” their job, their importance and value will diminish dramatically.
20. The future of executive search — Lou Adler, undeniably a leading expert on executive search, has written about the potential value and how to bring executive search in-house. He notes and I agree that many have not done it effectively in the past. I see the future of executive search firms narrowing as social media makes finding and building relationships with executives much easier. If executive search firms continue to be slow to adopt technology, new strategies, performance metrics, and pay for performance, they are likely to see their role continue to diminish.
21. Large job boards will be challenged — large job boards are fine for active candidates that have updated resumes. However, if your focus is on getting top performers, game-changers, and innovators, you shouldn’t allow recruiters to even consider large job boards. Many niche boards will continue to add value.
22. Job descriptions must be rejuvenated — we all agree that most job descriptions are inadequate and actually hinder the accurate sourcing and the selling of prospects. A more scientific and marketing approach to job descriptions and job postings are needed.
23. The death of resumes — we have all at some point complained about the use of resumes as accurate assessment tools. Up to two thirds contain misstatements, and waiting for candidates to finalize their resume is a major impediment to reducing time to fill. The long predicted “death” of the resume may actually begin shortly as firms begin to accept professional profiles (i.e. LinkedIn profiles) at least initially in lieu of resumes. The public visibility of these profiles automatically makes them more accurate than resumes. They are also more likely to be current and readily available then a formal resume.

Final Thoughts

I’m looking forward to the dialogue and being challenged by my colleagues and readers. If you have a question or topic for us to tackle, let us know by sending it to todd@ere.net.

Last week I had the pleasure of serving as the chairperson of the Fall ERE Expo in Hollywood, Florida. During my opening remarks, I discussed five things that are “keeping senior recruiting leaders up at night.” The list seemed to resonate with the crowd at the Expo, as many took time to talk to me about it. It was created at a “Recruiting Summit” hosted by CareerXroads on August 17th in Oak Park, Illinois, and Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin get the credit for pulling many different responses together into these five coherent themes.

The survey, while not scientific in manner, included input from over 20 powerhouse organizations, including Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin, Kimberly Clark, Lilly, Campbell’s, Limited Brands, Cargill, State Farm, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Target, and others. The five items, along with my commentary, are presented below:

Relentless Pressure to do More with Less

On this one it’s easy to respond, “Duh, welcome to Corporate America,” or “Duh, welcome to the global business landscape.” This isn’t going to change. But one basic and fundamental impact “confessed” by many at the Summit is the increasing fear of recruiter burnout. Activity is increasing, and team sizes have been reduced. Many recruiters have worked their tails off over the last few years in a difficult economic climate; this definitely includes our team at DaVita. Can we maintain (or restore) a more healthy work-life balance for our teammates?

For me, this was an “in my face” reminder that I, as the leader of the team, have to more proactively address this issue. I’ve not given it enough personal energy or attention, and I simply have to do a better job and step up to address the challenge. Please check back with me in a few months to see how I’m doing — perhaps at the Spring Expo, March 23-25 in San Diego.

Recruiter Competency Development

Some of the key thoughts from the Summit included: How do we as leaders ensure that we’re giving our recruiters the right tools and training to be more effective in a rapidly changing world? More specifically, how do we teach them to be more effective business partners — especially with HR generalists who don’t seem to want to play nicely in the same sandbox?

My add-on: it’s hard to develop meaningful competencies against an unknown target. If you don’t have a recruiter competency model, get one or build one. If you need help, talk to Linda Brenner or Kim Rutledge, or your internal OD team. If you’ve had one for awhile, perhaps it’s time to refresh your model. We are.

Increasing Diversity

Building more diverse leadership teams, creating a compelling value proposition for diverse candidate pools, and managing the burden imposed by the OFCCP and other regulatory bodies in reporting on diversity were hot topics. Lucky for all of us, Reggie Stewart presented a solid diversity construct during his keynote speech on Wednesday, and I’m ready to adapt it and start taking more definitive action. Thank you, Reggie!

Workforce Planning and Pipeline Development

“Scarce talent pools,” “retiring workforce,” and “increasing competition” were common themes from Summit attendees. “Where will we find the engineers we need?” “How many nurses do we need, and where will they come from?” As much as it gets mentioned, few seem to be doing the combination of planning and pipelining well. Major kudos to those who are. Larry Clifton at CACI is ahead of most of us. A big part of his success is that he keeps it fairly simple (think Econ 101): “it’s just demand & supply” analysis. Check out his Fall Expo presentation (and all the others).

Proving the Value of Recruiting

This one is closely tied to #1. When facing relentless pressure to do more with less, recruiting leaders have to step up their game and effectively make the case for more and/or different resources. This requires a combination of good metrics and good business acumen to sell the case for change. Many seemed to feel hamstrung by not having the right processes and tools to generate the right metrics. I’ve been fortunate: we’ve been able to invest in great tools and process at DaVita. For many, there is no easy answer, but if this is an issue for you and you’re looking for someone to brainstorm with, give me a shout. No promises, but I’ve had some success in building business cases and am happy to share.

In addition to “the numbers,” there is also the basic human principle that bad news travels faster than good news. If recruiting “messed up,” word gets around our organizations much more than when we hit a home run. Are we intentional enough in our internal communication to overcome bad press? I need to be a better story-teller; how about you?

My Closing Soapbox

Whether you’re a senior recruiting leader or a fairly new recruiter, what are you sensing in your organization? Are you experiencing these same things, or do other things “keep you up at night?” And more importantly, what are you doing about it? If you’re constantly saying that all-too-common phrase “it is what it is,” then let me politely suggest that you’ve already lost the battle. That is not the attitude of a great leader. You’ve accepted the status quo. You accepted defeat. Don’t give up! How about altering that cliché to say: “It is what it is, until I accept the challenge to go change it.”

Great leadership will overcome these challenges and we won’t have to lose sleep at night. My focus is sharper than ever and I’m ready to move forward much more decisively. Won’t you join me?

I want to hear from you. Let’s get a good discussion thread going in the ERE community by commenting on this post.

As has become the norm for all of our events for the past 2 years, we will be live streaming many of the sessions for free for those of you who can’t make the trip.

Of course we can’t bring you all of the benefits of attending the events live in person like the tremendous networking and access to our expert speaker faculty, but if it is not an option for you to be there in person, clear your schedule for Wednesday and Thursday so you can take advantage of the stream.

This year, you will find some new ways to participate in the Expo, including a way to submit questions directly to the speakers during the sessions — both via email and phone. Everything will be taking place at www.ereexpo.com/2010fall/live/, so make sure you bookmark that page!

Here is a schedule of what sessions will be streamed: Note: All times listed are EST

Wednesday, October 27

• 8:45 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. – Welcome Remarks from chairperson Tony Blake
• 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. – Keynote Presentation: Building a Diverse, Multi-Generational Workforce Resulting in Innovative Solutions and Outstanding Service, led by Reggie Stewart
• 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. – Panel Session: Recruiting’s Transformation with Andrew Gadomski, Mike Boissonneault, Melissa Mounce, Jim Schnyder
• 11:15 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Your Employer Brand: Is it more than just a logo?, led by Heather Polivka
• 2:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. – Going Glocal, led by Chris Hoyt
• 4:00 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. – 10 Steps to High-Yield College Recruiting, led by Kevin Wheeler

Thursday, October 28

• 10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. – Panel Session: Meet Your Job-seekers, with Gerry Crispin, Mark Mehler, Abel Alvarez, Steven Monzon, Ben Waychoff, Madilyn Holland
• 1:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. – Creating an Integrated Global Recruiting Function, led by L.J. Brock
• 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. – How the Talent Acquisition Function Must Change to Remain Viable and Relevant Beyond 2010, led by Carol Mahoney

For those of you who use Twitter, you can also join the conversation with attendees and others by following the #ereexpo and make sure to use that when participating in the discussion.

A big thanks to our live stream sponsor InsideConnector for helping make the live stream possible.

Take Time to Think Strategically

Years ago when attending a week-long management development class in the foothills west of Denver, I had the chance to participate in an interesting exercise. We were told to “go outside, walk around, and think strategically.” For the next hour, I meandered around in a daze, and my brain started to hurt. Was I really thinking strategically? How did I know for sure? Was I confusing tactics for strategy? What would I report on to the class when the exercise was over? Would others laugh at me and say “THAT’S NOT STRATEGIC!” Well, you get the idea.

In the end, the point of this exercise was simply that if you don’t separate yourself from the day-to-day minutia of your job (and life), it’s really hard to take a step back and think strategically.

During my career, I’ve attended seven ERE Expos (side note … I should propose a “Frequent Attender” loyalty program: attend nine conferences, get the 10th free!). Anyway, each one gave me a great opportunity to step away from the day-to-day craziness of running a recruiting team and deeply reflect on what we were doing, and where we were going. From personal experience, I can tell you that sitting on a beautiful beach in South Florida is a great place to do this reflection.

Here are three suggestions to get you started on your beachside strategic thinking:

1. What is my vision for my team (or myself) for the next one to three years? Have I articulated it to others? Can I even articulate it?
2. What are the top three things we (I) need to focus on to make this vision a reality?
3. How will I know that we’ve (I’ve) achieved the vision? Write down specific outcomes (preferably measureable) that you are shooting for.

Give yourself the gift of a little time away to think strategically. The ocean waves are calling out your name.

Build Your Professional Network

One of the absolute best things about attending an ERE event — OK, the best thing about attending an ERE event — is the people you meet. ERE has allowed me to develop a deep professional network of people who I can call on for ideas, a quick sanity check, or just plain old commiserating (“hey, you’ll never believe this…” stories) to share a laugh. Plus, this is a great place to socialize your new-found vision that you formed on the beach (see point #1 above). “Hey, I was walking on the beach last night and was thinking about … what do you think?”

When you attend, set a goal — not just to collect business cards, but to make quality connections. If you make five or more quality connections in a three-day event, I would consider that a solid success.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to be proactive. If there are people you want to meet — maybe one or two of the ERE faculty, or someone from a company that you respect, or someone in your industry — reach out to them ahead of time and let them know that you would appreciate the chance to meet with them, and why. This can pave the way for a productive face-to-face greeting/meeting in Florida. (Based on my experience, I would suggest that offering to buy a coffee or an adult beverage will likely increase your probability of success!)

Lastly, please don’t repeat the mistake I made several years ago. I was so heads-down/focused on my day job, that when my position got eliminated I felt very vulnerable because I had let my network go; it was weak, to say the least. I had spent all my energy for the corporate-good but hadn’t devoted much of it to my own good. It doesn’t take a lot of time to keep this in better balance, and for a recruiter, ERE Expo is a great place to start this rebalancing process.

Which is a nice segue to my final point …

Be Intentional About Your Personal Development

Similar to #2, it is way too easy to focus on your job, your team, your boss and your organization — and not take time for you. Nearly everyone has faced major challenges the last two years with global economic struggles (smaller budgets, bigger workloads, etc.) that have inhibited the time and dollars dedicated to personal development.

Get a copy of the conference agenda and circle in red which sessions are likely to have the most benefit to you. No need to wait until you’re there. Plan it out ahead of time. If time and/or money are an issue, then write down a simple business case and present it to your leadership. Show them what you want to attend, and how it will benefit your organization. Most leaders will respond positively to a well-constructed case. And then book early to save dollars.

Once you’re at the conference, write down your key takeaways from each session and share them with others. When I send members of my team to a conference, I expect them to develop a PowerPoint presentation to teach others. This solidifies the learning and increases the commitment to personal improvement/change.

Be intentional about building a better you. Then pass it on.

If you have any questions or comments, please respond to this post, or feel free to email me at tony.blake@davita.com. My next post will be “Tony’s Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Conference Experience.” I hope to see you in Florida in about 12 weeks.

Even though ERE Expo ’09 (Spring) ended more than a month ago, I thought of writing this piece connected to that event. Thanks to an invitation from Todd Raphael of ERE, I flew down to San Diego from India and enjoyed making a presentation on “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” It was one of the breakout sessions and obviously many had other choices to attend. To those who I missed interacting with, I am now making an attempt to share my thoughts again through this medium.

Before I got into the main theme of my presentation I shared some thoughts about India. I assumed that most in the audience would not have experienced India and hence a small introduction helped them to appreciate the context. My PowerPoint presentation is embedded below, along with this write-up. It will be good to go through that with the following synopsis in mind:

The introductory part:

• India is one-third the size of the U.S., but has almost four times the population. The U.S. is more than five times richer (GDP) than India, which is still largely an agricultural economy. However the Indian population is considerably younger. This is a huge opportunity — and also a challenge — for the leadership.
• India is a land of contrasts. This is bewildering to outsiders and exasperating to Indians. Things are changing faster than ever before but not as fast as all of us want.
• One of the reasons for the contradictions is India’s complexity.
• The IT industry is currently the best-known face of India in many parts of the world. It has had impressive growth. Even with the general slowdown it expects to do relatively well. This means that it will continue to need skilled manpower.

The hiring environment in India and the importance of “references”:

• Meeting manpower requirements is a major hiring challenge, given the complexity and contradictions in the country. Recruiters have to cope with problems of access, unique expectations, and the multiple influence groups. The bulk of what follows is an attempt to cope with much of this.

About my employer, Aricent:

• Aricent is an international leader in the field of communications software. It believes in restricting its business to niche communication software development, testing, and maintenance rather than spreading thin into multiple application areas. It has operations in 19 countries worldwide. About 80% of development work happens in India.

• Some of our top co-creations with our esteemed “who’s who” list of customers in this line of business have been amazing.

• Aricent’s success in the field of communication software also lies in its capabilities of hiring the right people at the right time, and doing so using the most cost-effective channels and processes. One of the salient features of hiring at Aricent has been its employee referral program named “iRefer.”

iRefer: The Case Study

I presented Aricent’s iRefer program to illustrate the theme of my presentation, “10 Secrets-to-Success of Employee Referrals in India.” Let us now see what these 10 secrets are:

Inspiring Awards and Recognition:

• A successful participant of this program can easily earn 10% to 15% of his/her annual salary through referral bonuses, plus many other special awards in kind.
• Special monthly/quarterly/annual prizes for winning referrers have always been a big draw amongst the employees.

Adhering to Service Level Agreements:

• The members of the recruitment team are committed to certain SLAs with the referrers as part of the program. Data showed that the adherence to SLAs have been approximately 95%. This gives the confidence to the employees to participate in such a program.

Enhancing Participation:

• The team focuses on increasing participation in different ways. The participation has grown from 9% to 35% in the last seven to eight years.
• Transparency in process, timeliness at every stage of process, personal engagement with individuals and groups, and effective internal communication have been the essential factors in enhancing participation.

Branding and Communication:

• Unlike in many organizations, the internal branding and communication for an employee referral program are handled by the recruitment team itself. These activities are not outsourced to the corporate marketing or the communications teams. This helps to reduce the cycle time considerably since there is exclusive focus.
• The essence of branding and communication has been to feel the pulse of the employees and build themes around that to inspire them to participate in all the programs under “iRefer.” In fact, the brand “iRefer” too was a result of an all-employee global contest for proposing the most appropriate name for the referral program. In the below presentation, one can see various creative uses of different communication methods.

Special Hiring Programs:

• These are the “toppings” on the base programs. Special programs are announced over and above the regular plan to fulfill short-term requirements of either special skills or some specific levels of people within a specific period of time.
• Two such special programs have been showcased in the presentation. One of them helped us to hire a certain number of engineering college graduates in an off-season. We did an off-campus drive and had amazing gains in a short period of time at 25% lesser cost per hire. The second program gave us great results, too, when we set out to hire people with special and specific skills which were slightly different than our usual needs.

Catching “Boomerangs”:

• iRefer’s contribution to our multi-channel “ex-Factor” program was significant. 57% of “boomerangs” we hired through the “ex-Factor” program were through “iRefer.”

Analyzing Metrics and Success Measures:

• We are all aware that “data without analysis is paralysis.” Like the way an immense amount of data mining is done in the whole recruitment function, “iRefer” too captures a lot of data. We have tools and processes to do so. The success of the referral program is dependent on how swiftly we can respond to different situations and requirements and how we can consistently improve our processes and systems to respond so. Correct and timely analysis of data makes us learn and improve fast.
• One such case study showing how a change in communication methodology helped to increase the flow of resumes.

Feedback Mechanism:

• Taking feedback from referrers and potential referrers is as important as giving feedback. While the recruitment team is committed to give timely feedback on the referred candidates to the referrer within the defined SLAs, it is also important to take feedback from the referrers at regular intervals.
• The feedback from referrers is taken through an internal satisfaction survey and through a structured chain of escalation hierarchy. In addition to that, we have an “iRefer” help desk on our intranet.

Benchmarking Industry for Improvement:

• Learning from good competitors and sharing with them are always great ways to improve. This is true for all industries. The recruitment team of Aricent has been benchmarking its own “iRefer” program with many big names in the industry through formal and informal sources. Some of the data given against each competitor could be estimates and are based on the best possible information available.

Overcoming the Negatives:

• Employee referral programs also have to deal with certain negative perceptions universally. The main perceptions which we focused on are (a) possible lack of transparency in the system; (b) possible nepotism; and (c) the fear of “money” affecting relationships. The need to communicate upfront, educate employees correctly about the processes/norms, and ensure robust policies are the essential ingredients to overcome these possible negatives.

I had ended the session with two additional slides on how “iRefer” would operate in the current recessionary environment and posed some questions for the future.

I hope all, particularly the ones I left behind at San Diego, enjoy going through the presentation. If anyone wishes to connect with me, post a comment here.

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.