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When employers look for senior people — and 31 percent will be, a new survey says — the evidence is they’re all looking for the same qualities. Industry experience is important; so is proven problem solving.

Nowhere on the list of qualities a CareerBuilder survey reported as important to employers was craziness listed. Perhaps that trait was covered by the “Is creative” characteristic that 43 percent of the respondents look for in a new executive. keep reading…

The most important part of the recruiting process is the recruiter’s initial meeting with the hiring manager. With the right approach you can save an incredible amount of time and energy, and hire better candidates. In addition, you raise your standing with hiring managers to that of a true business partner.

In any profession, whether it is in business or sports, one must study the best to learn what they do that sets them apart. In sports, athletes like Kobe Bryant, Lionel Messi, and Lance Armstrong are legendary for their relentless drive for perfection and extraordinary work ethic in training. In recruiting, we can study executive recruiters who are given key assignments by business leaders and regularly command large commissions.

I recently spoke with Robert Fong, a managing Partner for the Global Advanced Technology Practice at Nosal Partners, an executive search firm in San Francisco. We discussed the importance of the first meeting with the hiring manager.

Two key factors that set them apart are the time reserved, and the order in which they approach gathering information:

• An hour to an hour and a half is typically reserved for the meeting.
• The recruiter spends the first part of the meeting learning about the business and what priorities the position will address.
• The position description and how it relates to the business priorities is then addressed.
• Only after learning the above, does the recruiter gather information about the candidate qualifications.

This is the diametric opposite of the approach taken by most in-house and agency recruiters. They:

• Spend 10-30 minutes at most in the intake meeting.
• Focus almost solely on the candidate qualifications.
• Spend little time on the position description.
• Spend no time on learning or understanding the business.

Let’s break this down step by step: keep reading…

The science of recruiting is years behind our peers in other disciplines, but when I see research like this journal article, ”Paying More to Get Less: The Effects of External Hiring versus Internal Mobility,” I know we’re beginning to catch up.

This study was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly in September 2011 and recently described in detail by Peter Cappelli (my favorite Wharton Professor), in his column for HR Executive magazine, Paying More to Get Less.

It is perhaps the best work I’ve seen in years.

In the original research, the author describes how he dug into the data of one financial services firm to identify and track a number of jobs filled by both internally and externally sourced candidates over a protracted period of time.

He then compared subsequent performance ratings of the incumbents (over years) and found statistically significant evidence that:

• Internal candidates performed better than those hired from the outside.
• External candidates took as long as three years to achieve the performance levels of their internally promoted peers.
• External candidates were paid 15% more on average.
• The performance of individuals who were externally sourced was higher if they were not brought in through search.

Now this is science I enjoy … not because it is necessarily true beyond the one firm in which the study was done, but because it is transparent, describing methodology openly and in a way that we (dear readers) would be able to improve on and replicate within your own firms.

As someone who is getting tired of tons of unsupported opinions stated as fact and megatons of research by vendor content creators with serious conflicts of interest, this is refreshing. Give me more.

We end this week with a collection of odds and ends and surveys from our overflowing inbox.

Our first item is especially worth reading for those of you with teenagers. (If your offspring is graduating from college this spring, skim this, but don’t miss the next item.)

Since you’re a recruiter, you already know that jobs for millennials, let alone seasonal work for 16-19 year-olds, is tough to come by. That’s not likely to change, says Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“While teen employment is likely to see further improvement this summer, job gains will probably once again fall short of pre-recession figures,” said John A. Challenger, CEO of the global outplacement firm. Last year about 1.1 million teens got jobs. More will find jobs this summer, but not a lot more. keep reading…

Before we experienced the 2008 economic disaster, the phrase “war for talent” seemed to be overused by every corporate and agency recruiter I came in contact with. It seemed to go away until the first or second quarter of 2011 and now seems to be back on every executive and recruiter’s mind. Recruiters across the country have shared with me the excitement they have about recruiting again — about building talent pipelines, implementing social media, bolstering up their LinkedIn connections, and creating new and compelling candidate value propositions.

Let me start by giving one word of advice: stop!

If you are serious about recruiting the best talent, take this as an opportunity to build a recruiting culture throughout the entire organization — up to and including the CEO. Don’t make the mistake of throwing all of your time and money into new-fangled technologies, building talent communities, or costly social media campaigns unless you have the basic principles of recruiting drilled into both your recruiting staff and your hiring executives.

Let me ask a few questions:

1. What is your organization’s candidate value proposition? Does everyone involved in the recruiting process understand these points? How is this information communicated to candidates?
2. Are you really using your social networks/connections? Are you continuously broadcasting your open positions to your networks? Are you growing your LinkedIn connections?
3. Are you building talent pipelines? How do you create a talent pipeline? How do you communicate to and track those in your pipeline?
4. Are you interviewing consistently and effectively? What questions is the recruiter asking? What questions is the recruiting committee asking?

Most of those reading this can probably provide a detailed answer as to what they are doing in each of these areas. For example, every time I ask the question “Why would someone want to join your organization” I get a very lengthy answer. Whether I ask the CEO or the recruiter, both can rattle off 10-15 bullet points of why any particular candidate should pack up their current offices, quit their jobs, and walk across the street to a new, fantastic, opportunity.

In the same way, everyone talks about growing their social networks, particularly LinkedIn, and the value this brings to their recruiting effectiveness.

On the surface both of these issues seem like great news — but are they really?

As the competition for finding, engaging, and attracting the right candidate heats up, every organization needs to reassess their understanding of, and strategy for, implementing each of these focus areas.

Let’s go through the four questions I asked earlier. keep reading…

In this session, we will talk about the things that every recruiter, staffing manager, HR professional or sourcer can do to make the most of the little time that they have with the hiring manager and a checklist of what they should be walking away with from a req meeting. We will talk about how to write the best job requisitions, how to ask the right questions of the hiring manager, and what the best ways are to target profiles.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on HR be sure to check out TLNT!

1. Treat ALL people like gold

2. Hire for personality and culture fit

3. Hire for a skill set that drives results

4. Communicate like no other

5. Onboard like a champion

I met with a client today who made me smile — a Cheshire-Cat-Eating-Grin Smile, as a matter of fact.

He said, “Heather, I need to invest in the screening phase to figure out if these candidates are a good fit for our culture and our clients. That way, I don’t have to give up resources when I fire them later.”

DUH! 

After I wiped the grin off my face, I told him I was proud of him and glad to hear it. (I refrained from reminding him I’ve been preachin’ that for years.)

Pay now or pay later … either way you’ll pay. 

If you are a recruiter, HR professional, supervisor, or leader who wants to fill the seat, there is no need to read more of this post. Good luck to you.

However, if you want to fit someone with your organization and have him stick, read on. keep reading…

In more 10 years in the staffing industry in various operational, managerial, and corporate roles and in different countries, I have interviewed, coached, and trained hundreds of recruitment consultants from all over the world. Though local differences must be taken into consideration, the characteristics that make you a top performer in Salt Lake City also work in Singapore or in Paris. Based on what I saw, heard, and learned, here is my quintessential list of the 5+1 habits that make a top-performer in any economic cycle or market: keep reading…

We started measuring quality of hire a couple of years ago. What started out as a simple exercise to see how we were doing turned into an interesting experiment. We realized in order to save the company money and increase productivity, we needed to measure quality of hire and sources of hire together. The results were interesting, and in one case the result was actually surprising.

There are a few hire-quality formulas out there, and you can make it as simple or as complicated as you deem necessary. In our case, we took the simple route.

Quality of hire is defined as the percent of new hires who pass their one-year anniversary and score at least “meets expectations” on their first review. For example, we grouped together all the new hires from the first quarter of 2010. We then ran a report dating to the last day of the quarter a year later, 2011. We determined what percent of those hires were still employed and were not on performance improvement plans, etc. We did this on a quarterly basis.

This is simple but effective. It doesn’t matter whether the employee was a poor performer, an excellent worker who was disillusioned, or a job-hopper.  Ultimately, the business is negatively impacted if it loses talent in the first year, or is dealing with a poor employee.

The results of our experiment have been illuminating. keep reading…

There are plenty of whitepapers and blogs that attempt to define and describe the candidate experience, but can we go further? Can we find a way to make it part of a holistic recruitment approach, and think of it more like a product, or a “deliverable” item?

Granted, it is hard to imagine that the candidate experience can exist independently of a talent acquisition strategy and vice versa. Instead, we need to refine the entire recruitment strategy to ensure the candidate experience is pre-targeted and delivers real value to the customer.

So, What’s the Product?

Recruiters are always looking to enhance, differentiate, and sell their products, but what exactly is the final recruiting product? Some may say it’s the job offer, but if we think about the way recruitment tools and strategies have evolved, this definition alone cannot capture it.

All of the recruiting and talent resourcing efforts that use interactive media sites — creating user-friendly career pages, blogs, communities, etc. — are designed to draw in and gain candidate interest. They hope to entice candidates (as much so as hiring managers) to “buy” into a recruitment process in the hope of obtaining a job. But, if the product is only the job on offer — and this can only be given to one person — this would leave most of the customers who applied with nothing to show for their “purchase.” If we say that the final product is the company job offer, we are bound to have many unhappy customers.

Instead, we can argue that the one thing all buyers can receive from an organization is a candidate experience. Whether they actively apply for a position or they are approached, and regardless of whether or not they are offered and accept the job, the experience is the one thing each applicant can receive.

From the moment the first connection is made, be it a click on a site, an email or a telephone call, the experience begins. keep reading…

In part 1 of this article I highlighted the many reasons why prioritizing positions, employees, and business units was necessary, and how it could dramatically increase business results. In the following sections, I will highlight the methodology and steps that HR leaders need to take in order to prioritize HR’s customers and programs. keep reading…

Why HR Must Prioritize Its Internal Customers

Prioritization is one of the highest-ROI practices available to HR leaders, but unfortunately most in HR have failed to take advantage of it. It takes very little time or money to prioritize your internal customers, but the results can be dramatic. keep reading…

Talent wins.

If you look at the most admired and successful companies all around the world, those who have figured this out and found a way to get the best talent, top the list. Apple was named the most admired company in America in 2011 by Forbes for the fourth year in a row due to its “blistering speed of product development.” Berkshire Hathaway has been on the Forbes list of most-admired organizations year after year. They are known for their keen eye for buying organizations at a discount and running them extremely efficiently.

From Southwest Airlines’ service and efficiency focus to the exceptional brand management of Procter and Gamble, there are many organizations who share the “Most Admired Company” status based on a myriad of different business concepts and classifications.

More importantly, whether selected for product management, exceptional service, investing, or for any  other varied categories, these organizations all have one thing in common. They take the talent game seriously and make finding and growing the best talent a top priority. Do you think Apple employs good product managers? They are known to have the best product managers in the world today. How did they get the talent? They, like others in the group, got the best talent by either developing it from within or acquiring it from outside. The bottom line: talent wins.

It isn’t easy however to get where these “Most Admired” organizations are, and it’s not easy to stay there. There are several common mistakes that can keep an organization from reaching its potential and kill the chance of it ever joining the list of most-admired companies. keep reading…

Would you hire Meryl Streep?

She’s 62, you know. And sure, she’s been nominated for 17 Academy Awards, but prior to winning this year for her brilliant portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady” she had a pretty questionable track record. Only two awards out of 16 opportunities. That’s barely better than a 10% success rate. And did I mention that she’s 62? She has been making movies since 1977. Half the time she doesn’t even get nominated!

She once went five years without a nomination back in the 1990s. It has been two years since her last movie came out. I think she might be losing her edge. Unemployed for two years … do you really want to take a chance on her? Maybe the times are passing her by? Maybe she can’t keep up with younger actresses? What if she can’t adapt to all the new technologies? What if she’s uncomfortable working with directors who are younger than she is? That could be a problem. And you know she was unemployed before she got this part. Can’t we find a currently employed actress for our next film?

Sound ridiculous? Of course it does. Any producer or director would give up a reservation at Chateau Marmont to work with the woman who is arguably the finest screen actress of the past 50 years and the acknowledged successor to the brilliant Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn. Yet we hear these same arguments every day in conversations with recruiters and hiring managers. All the myths that exist about people who are unemployed — particularly those who are on the other side of age 50. keep reading…

Here’s a link to a Forbes magazine article that was pushed to me last month (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on Mark Murphy’s new book Hiring for Attitude. The key point of the book and the article is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.

For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.

I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.

Consider this: even highly motivated people with a track record of success can develop bad attitudes and become disruptive workers when they don’t work well with their boss, when the job promised is different than the one taken, or the resources needed to do the job right are not provided. In most cases, the person got the bad attitude as a result of these underlying root cause issues. So to solve this problem make sure the person you hire fits the situation from top to bottom. Now that’s radical. keep reading…

Walk into any workplace and what’s in the air? Besides the burnt popcorn. We mean that other thing. That sweet scent of romance.

Yes dear reader, just in time for Valentine’s Day CareerBuilder tells us what you’ve been suspecting all along: your office mates are mating up. If the survey is to be believed — and why not?; they surveyed 7,780 people who all can’t be pranking us — then almost 4 in 10 workers have dated someone they met on the job.

Awkward, if one of them thinks it’s going places and the other one … you get the idea. Fortunately, 31 percent of those relationships lead to marriage. (Which is no guarantee things won’t get even more awkward a little down the road. But this is the season for love, so ignore our dose of ugly reality. Or read on to the part where we tell you how Challenger, Gray, & Christmas snuck in a warning about office violence.)

HR people out there, this stat’s for you: CareerBuilder says 18 percent of office dating is between boss and their report. Women were more likely to date up than men, 35 percent to 23 percent respectively.

Of the industries reported, you just had to know that hospitality by far (47 percent) has the most co-dating co-workers. Healthcare also made the top five list, which, considering how many parents hoped their offspring would marry a doctor, is no surprise. But financial services (40 percent)? And transportation and utilities (43 percent)? And IT (40 percent)? These also made the top five? Really?

Now moving on to that warning about workers pulling a Valentine’s Day Massacre  from Challenger, Gray & Christmas (hereinafter CG&C). “Some companies are facing an entirely different problem: their workers have lost that loving feeling and the consequences can be dire,” reads the press release we got from the global outplacement firm.

“Often in situations where managers are aware of a problem between two or more coworkers, they merely look the other way, letting the employees work it out amongst themselves.  This may work in some situations, but in others, this hands-off approach can have disastrous results,” says CGC CEO John Challenger.

The press release offers a whole bunch of ideas to increase civility and reduce animosity. Missing from the list, and very conspicuously considering Valentine’s Day started this whole thing, is the free supply of large amounts of chocolate.

A Vowel Please

From the “Can I buy a vowel?” department comes Goood Job, the latest in a long line of companies entering the employee-referral-social media business we’ve talked a lot about (and includes socialcruiter, socialreferral, and many others). In short, here’s how Goood Job works:  keep reading…

I just read that the average Silicon Valley tech salary is over $100,000. I’ve seen starting salaries for CS graduates come pretty close to the magical $100,000 mark. Google recently had to give a 10% raise to all its employees just to stay competitive.

Yep, programmers are getting expensive. But my experience has been that most great programmers don’t really have salary as their No. 1 consideration when deciding where to work. They only worry about salary when the job is so awful that it has to pay well or they couldn’t imagine sticking around.

Here are 10 things that many programmers think about first, long before salary even comes into play: keep reading…

Note: I’m writing this “think piece” as part of a series of articles designed to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue. keep reading…

Recruiters often think that their sole clients are their hiring managers. Oftentimes, those same recruiters end up having their “star” candidates decline an offer.

As hiring professionals, we need to be investing in both of our clients — hiring managers and candidates. We are technically in a sales role; we need to sell opportunities to candidates and candidates to hiring managers. Investing in any sales role is not necessarily about money, but more about time.

Challenge yourself to take a quick litmus test: keep reading…