ERE.net

Consider this as a basic truth: in tough economic times every job looks better, especially the one you already have.

This would imply that during recessions there are fewer good people actively looking and it’s tougher to get the best passive consider to even discuss your career opportunity. If this is the case, one could conclude that the bulk of the people who are looking during economic downturns tend to be those who are unemployed or marginally employed.

Since this group does not represent the best-of-the-best, you’ll need to rethink your entire sourcing strategy to make sure it’s targeting the people you want to hire. Here’s a short video describing how good people enter the job market. Now here’s a quick test to determine how well you’re doing: if you’re seeing less good people than last year using the same sourcing techniques, stop using them!

However, if you do find a few good people, regardless of how you’re finding them, expect these candidates to have more objections and concerns than usual. And the better the candidate, the more objections the person has. So, if you can’t smoothly and professionally handle objections, you won’t be placing many top performers.

Here are some ideas on how to deal with some common objections. They’re more prevalent with the economy on shaky ground. The theme behind them all is to reveal very little information about your assignment until you have a complete understanding of the candidate’s background. By withholding information, you’ll gain candidate interest. This is the key to applicant control.

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For as long as HR has been a separate function from the business, there has always existed a certain tension when it comes to who is primarily responsible for influencing employee retention.

Business management often argues that recruiters are not presenting the right candidates, and in perfect “hiring hindsight” find fault on the basis of candidate education level, character attributes, work experience, technical skills, compensation, etc.

Recruiters are quick to remind management that they present, but do not select, candidates for hire, and that most employees who leave a position do so because of other issues such as training, keep reading…

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

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Close your eyes. Now think of the perfect mate. Are you done? Close your eyes again. Think some more. How long is your list of requirements of the perfect mate? Are there five of them? Ten? Perhaps, you have 20 requirements.

Think about your list again. Are each of those really requirements of your ideal mate? Or are those desired attributes? On which items are you willing to be flexible? For example, some people say the religion of their mate is a requirement while height is only desired. For others, it is the other way around.

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Fast and personal customer service is what I insist is core to being an effective 21st century recruiter. Every candidate should receive a personal response customized to their questions and needs. Candidates should be sold positions on the basis of the goodness of their fit in the position and to the degree they exhibit the skills and competencies needed.

Yet, many recruiters are challenged to provide this level of service. Here are a few quotes from recruiters: “I have received almost 500 resumes. Over 90% of these people are not qualified or not what my company is looking for.” Another said, “I have been overwhelmed with candidates. Some fit our needs, but most don’t even take the time to read the job description…I wish I could reply to every candidate, but if I did, I would not be doing my job!”

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Quick, look at the following real job titles found on company websites and tell me what they mean:

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Article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

Last week we introduced the concept of an employment product manager, an individual who would oversee the development and positioning of employment opportunities using approaches similar to those used by product managers in a products company.

This week we will turn our attention to the development of a prototype job description for such a role and explore where the role should be positioned in the modern organization.

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

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

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According to Ben Franklin, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Given all of the changes that have taken place over the last 10 years, there is no evidence that corporate recruiting departments are getting better at hiring top talent. In fact, a good case can be made that things are getting worse at an accelerating rate. Some examples:

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Here are few comments I have recently received from recruiters about what they are experiencing. It seems that some things never change.

“I have received almost 500 resumes for a single position. Over 90% of these people are not qualified or not what my company is looking for.” Another wrote, “I have been overwhelmed with candidates; some fit our needs but most don’t even take the time to read the job description. I wish I could reply to every candidate, but if I did I would not be doing my job!”

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There’s a trainers’ game called “try harder.” It has two learning points: 1) trying is not the same as doing; and 2) telling someone to “try harder” seldom helps them get the job done. The “try harder” game is played out time after time in recruiting and is a major reason why it does not get the respect it craves.

The High Cost of Trying

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Did you know that the very highest-quality candidates have estimated “drop off rates” as high as 90%…once they have scanned a position description? This means that all of your efforts in branding and marketing to get these high-quality candidates to look at your jobs become an immediate waste of time. It is the equivalent of a realtor advertising a mansion, then showing a shack. Action Steps That You Can Take To Develop a “Position Marketing Template” In order to make your descriptions compelling, you need to develop a template that can easily guide position description writers to produce great sales descriptions every time. Here are the steps in that process:

• Find the current position description for the job you are currently in and see if it would entice you to pursue your own job based solely on the wording in it. Is it even remotely accurate? Next, grab some of the descriptions that you currently use for positions that you’re not getting the volume of quality candidates needed, and see if they suffer from the same characteristics you noted regarding your own job.

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I often am asked, “What is the easiest way to improve the number of top applicants who actually decide to apply for jobs?” The answer is easy: Rewrite your position descriptions so that they excite candidates rather than turn them off. It’s easy to do and it produces dramatic results.

Employed Top Performers Require a “Better Job”

Unemployed people and semi-anxious people are significantly less picky about applying for open job opportunities, and in some cases apply for any and every job. The job title matters little to them, and no matter how mundane the position description is, they will apply. Any job is a better job to them. But what few people know who haven’t researched the topic is that the very highest quality candidates have estimated drop off rates as high as 90% once they have scanned your position description. Top performers are curious just like everyone else; however, all of your efforts in branding and marketing to get these high-quality candidates to look at your jobs becomes an immediate waste after they scan your position description and then immediately move on because they see no indication that this job is superior to or better than the job they already have. Here are four facts to consider:

• Top performers already have pretty good jobs.

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Not too long ago, my company was approached by a client who wanted our help with a technical professional search. Our client provided us with the following job ad:

“C#.Net, ASP.Net, and MS SQL. Experience with ASP.Net a plus. Bachelors in Computer Science required. Experience with large database experience a plus. Excellent technical and non-technical communication skills required.”

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Managers have a hard time assessing competency and motivation, even though many have gone through some type of formal interviewing training. It turns out the real problem is not the questions being asked; it’s not knowing the job they’re evaluating the candidate against. Not knowing real job needs turns out to be the root cause of the most common hiring mistakes: hiring people who are partially competent, or hiring people who are competent but not motivated to do the work required. If you’ve taken the recruiter diagnostic assessment, you know that knowing the job and knowing your market are prerequisites to being a great recruiter.

Here’s a short reading list to get you started here. The books listed below are essential reading for all top managers and recruiters, and the articles will give you instant credibility when you suggest using a different approach as you take your next search assignment. The Required Reading List If you want to be a top 10% recruiter within a year, check these out:

• First, Break All of the Rules - What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. The basic premise is if you want to hire and retain top people, you must clarify expectations and then hire people who want to do this work.

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In the May 13 Los Angeles Times, a front-page story described how top-tier college grads were making decisions about which of their many job offers to accept. The article started with the idea that when the demand for talent is far greater than the supply, companies need to be more aggressive and more creative in their recruiting efforts. It went on to say that with the first wave of baby boomers starting to retire, and with fewer replacements graduating from college, demand would continue to outpace supply for the foreseeable future.

With this scenario at play, the grads involved were going to be choosier. No surprises here. What was a surprise, though, was how they were choosing one job over another. While the company brand was important, it was not the overriding criteria. The actual job itself and who the person they would work for were far more important. This is especially vital as companies develop their recruiting strategies. Top Gen-Ys decide to take one job over another based on the specific challenges the job involves, the chance to grow, the chance to be mentored by a strong manager, an opportunity to learn new skills, the opportunity to work as a team of other top people, and the chance to do something important. Oddly - or, maybe not - this is pretty much the same criteria which top experienced people use when accepting a new offer. Look at your online job descriptions and the documents you provide to potential new hires, whether those hires are entry-level or experienced professionals.

1. Do your online job descriptions meet the more discriminating selection criteria that top people use when deciding to explore new career opportunities?

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As you know, I suggest that recruiters prepare a performance profile whenever starting a search assignment. A performance profile describes the top six to eight performance objectives a person taking the job needs to do to be considered successful. It differs from a job description in that it doesn’t describe skills or traits, but rather what the person needs to accomplish with his or her skills and traits. For example, rather than saying that a person must have five years of accounting experience and a CPA, a performance profile would say “Complete the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements by Q2.”

To accurately assess competency and motivation, it’s always better to define what the person taking the job needs to do, rather than what the person needs to have in terms of skills and experiences. The hiring team should prepare these performance profiles together and put the top six to eight objectives in priority order. This way, consensus is reached on job needs before the search process begins. Clarifying expectations up front not only increases assessment accuracy, but it also is the prime reason why top people select one job over another. It is also much easier to prioritize and agree on performance objectives than on skills, experiences, personality traits, and academic background.

The following is a performance profile for a recruiting manager for a typical company. To start preparing any performance profile, first figure out the major objective. Then uncover the problems and challenges that the person is expected to face the first year. You can also ask the hiring team what the person taking the job needs to do to be considered truly successful. From this, a performance profile can be prepared that includes assessing the problems, putting plans together to solve the problems, and then implementing solutions and achieving objectives. Here’s an example of a good major objective, and some typical problems most recruiting managers face.

Major objective: During the first year, convert the recruiting department into a flexible team that can meet all of the hiring needs of the company with top quality people within three to four weeks of any opening. Typical hiring problems faced by a corporate recruiting department:

• The hiring team doesn’t see enough good people for most positions
• Hiring managers aren’t as involved or cooperative as they should be.
• It takes too long to interview, select, and complete the hiring process.
• Recruiters are handling too many requisitions and have too much non-recruiting stuff to do.
• Managers are too picky; sometimes, for dumb reasons, the best candidates don’t get hired.
• The candidate tracking system requires too much effort to keep it up to date.

Here, in priority order, are the critical performance objectives for the recruiting manager taking on this role. As you’ll see later, you’ll only need to ask two questions to determine if a candidate is both competent and motivated to do this work.

Prioritized List of Performance Objectives for a Typical Recruiting Manager

1. Evaluate and rebuild the team. Within the first few weeks, meet with all key team members to determine each person’s ability to handle the challenges of the job. From this, develop and implement an action plan to strengthen the department to meet the company’s aggressive hiring needs. (Here’s a link to an online recruiter assessment form you might want to use for this part.)
2. Identify the real hiring problems. Quickly understand the hiring challenges the company is facing, and with key company leaders put together an aggressive recruiting plan. Determine budget needs, additional resource requirements, and obtain executive buy-in and approval.
3. Prepare a process flow chart of the hiring process. Working with the team and IT, prepare an end-to-end process map of the company’s hiring process. Identify key bottlenecks and problems. Implement short-term fixes as necessary to improve performance.
4. Reorganize the recruiting department. During the first 45 days, determine the optimum department organization. Evaluate different organization approaches ó considering centralized vs. decentralized, process vs. function, and high volume vs. high value.
5. Establish a workforce-planning process. Within 120 days, put together a rough workforce plan based on the sales forecast and the company business plan. This plan needs to identify key hiring needs by job type for the next four quarters. Revise recruiting plans and processes to reflect key hiring requirements. Establish a means to update this rolling 12-month plan on a quarterly basis, based on forecasts from key managers.
6. Upgrade technology. Lead the effort to evaluate existing technology for adequacy. Determine if problems are due to user competency or weak technology. Implement training programs as necessary to improve performance. Begin a two-year plan to overhaul the technology platform to improve both productivity and hiring performance by at least 50 percent.
7. Completely revamp the sourcing process for active candidates. During the first year, rebuild the career website to reflect the needs of good people who don’t have time to look. Rewrite every online job description to ensure that each one is exciting, compelling, and easy to find. Create a “wow!” experience for all candidates at every step in the hiring process — including online and onsite. Cut the time to process candidates by 50 percent.
8. Develop and implement a passive-candidate sourcing program. Develop a small, in-house executive search team to handle all critical positions. Staff as needed to ensure that candidate quality is the primary objective. Hire a top-notch research team in combination with executive recruiters who can network with senior-level executives and key technologists.
9. Get hiring managers totally involved. Quickly determine the general ability of hiring managers to both assess candidate competency and recruit top performers. Begin the implementation of necessary training. Work with the senior executive team to upgrade the importance of hiring to ensure line manager buy-in and commitment.
10. Convert the recruiting department into a line function using performance-based metrics. Within 12 months, develop a series of metrics to track real-time performance of all critical steps in the hiring process. Work with IT to develop a web-based dashboard that all managers and recruiters can use to track the status of each search. Specifically monitor incoming candidate quality by sourcing channel, time-to-fill, recruiter vs. hiring manager quality variance (this compares the assessment among different interviewers) and sendouts per hire. Set up improvement programs for all critical factors.

There are probably a half-dozen more objectives that could be added to this list — including tasks like upgrading the employee referral program, improving the university recruiting process, and establishing the use of performance profiles as the core of the onboarding process. Regardless, if every member of the hiring team doesn’t understand and agree to the use of performance objectives before interviewing, they will not assess the person accurately. Rather than using a performance profile, they will use some combination of intuition, a rough understanding of job needs and one or two key traits to assess the person. The chance of getting the assessment right using this approach is remote, especially if they vote yes or no before hearing what other members of the hiring team think of the candidate. When all members of the hiring team understand the real job needs as described in the performance profile, interviewing accuracy increases and consensus is much easier to reach.

As part of the two-question performance-based interviewing process I recommend, interviewers need to spend 10 to15 minutes digging into a candidate’s comparable accomplishments to determine relevancy, fit and interest. Here’s an earlier ERE article for more on this interviewing approach. Maybe one of the objectives above should be to convince hiring managers to use performance profiles instead of job descriptions when starting each new hiring assignment. This alone will increase individual recruiting productivity by 30 to 50 percent by ensuring that good candidates don’t get excluded for bad reasons. There are three to five times more top people available who can ace the performance profile but not the job description. Now imagine what would happen if you use the performance profile as part of the onboarding process and even expect your new hires meet the objectives defined once they start.

A performance profile can have a profound positive impact on just one hire, or on thousands. Start by creating one for your own job and on your next assignment to see the difference. Before you know it, you’ll have converted the recruiting department into a flexible team that can meet all of the hiring needs of the company with top quality people within three to four weeks of any opening.

Here’s something you might want to consider whether you’re hiring active, passive, or not-so active or not-so-passive candidates. At some point in time, they will all read your job descriptions to decide if it’s worth considering your open position. If the audience you’re targeting either can’t find this job easily or don’t find it compelling if they do find it, you won’t see as many good people as you should. Don’t be smug and assume that the candidates you’re trying to hire won’t read your ads. Even referred or passive candidates read your ads. Many even request them with the common retort, “Send me the job description and I’ll see if I’m interested, or see if I know someone.”

Since the job description is a primary marketing tool, it had better be well-written and convincing. On the business marketing side, these would be equivalent to the advertising copy, the flyer, or the product brochure. Now, to throw another twist into the equation, these marketing documents need to reflect the different buying patterns of your audience. The copy itself needs to reflect how different groups (age, race, gender) respond to advertising. This affects the length of the ad, the media used to deliver it, and the words used. Young people, for example, won’t respond to the same message as a mid-career person — nor will they look in the same spots. Many women have different career aspirations than men, and they don’t look in the same places. Diverse candidates are looking for different things than their non-minority peers, and passive candidates don’t care about compensation (unless it’s equity). Salespeople do. Since advertising is the front line of sourcing, you need to customize it to meet the varied needs of your target audience. Here are some ideas to consider and things you can do right away to get started making your advertising more effective:

1. Stop using traditional job descriptions as the basis for your advertising. Not even the worst company in the country would consider using their product-specifications listing as their primary marketing copy as some HR/recruiting departments do. Online job descriptions should summarize the challenges and opportunities in the job in some type of flashy document or web page with a creative title and compelling copy. To get started, ask the hiring manager why a top person would want this job. Finish with, “What does a top person need to do to be considered successful?” Then start off your ads with the most compelling stuff.

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Let’s play “Recruiting Monopoly.” As you’ll see, there are a number of critical stages in this game that correspond to the recruiting and hiring processes at most companies. You’ll start the game with $500 from the bank. If your hiring processes are really good, you’ll be able to win more than $3,000 (an ROI of 600 percent!). But if your hiring processes aren’t too good, you could go bankrupt before the first person gets hired — and go directly to jail. You’ll have to play the game a second time in order to hire another great person. This could get costly if your hiring processes are consistently a losing proposition. Let’s get started and see how well you do. Remember, you’ve got $500 at the start of the game.

Step 1: The Use of a Workforce Plan

A workforce plan is an annual forecast of hiring needs by position, by quarter. A plan like this gives you a three-to-six-month lead time on using all available sourcing channels to find top people. You earn $200 if you have a workforce plan in place and lose $100 if you don’t have one. Give yourself another $200 if you update this forecast quarterly. Forecast-to-forecast changes provide instant information about what’s going on in your business and what’s going to happen.

Step 2: The Quality of Your Job Requisitions

If you use traditional job descriptions that rely too heavily on skills, academics, and experiences, you lose $50. If you can’t obtain consensus from everyone on the hiring team as to real job needs before you start interviewing candidates, you lose another $50. If you suffer moving-job-spec syndrome, you lose another $50. If managers say they’ll know the person when they see him or her, you lose another $50. If recruiters can’t get enough time with the hiring manager to discuss the job, you lose another $50. You earn $250 if everyone on the hiring team is in agreement about the responsibilities and challenges involved in the job before they interview anyone. Getting consensus upfront is how you obtain consensus at the end. An article on performance profiles might help in this area.

Step 3a: Sourcing and Finding Top Active Candidates

If you’re an employer of choice with great candidates coming to your door without you doing any work, you don’t even need to play this game. For everyone else, if your jobs are easy to find using a Google or Yahoo! search — and don’t require candidates to go to a job board or directly to your website — you earn $100. Give yourself $50 if top candidates can very simply find your jobs at the top of the list just by putting in the city and job title. You earn $50 if your jobs have unique titles combined with compelling copy. You lose $100 if you do not have any of the above. You lose $50 if the first line on the job description is the requisition number. You lose another $50 if the ad copy emphasizes skills and experiences rather than opportunities.

Step 3b: Sourcing and Finding Top Passive and Diversity Candidates

Give yourself $100 if you have the ability to generate the names of top passive and diversity candidates through sources like Internet data-mining, competitive intelligence, or online networking tools such as ZoomInfo and LinkedIn. You lose $200 if you don’t do this step or if you can’t convert these names into a steady stream of great candidates. You win $100 if you can convince most of the people you network with to give you more names of highly qualified referrals. You earn another $100 if you spend more time calling these referrals and getting more referrals than you do working the original cold list of names. An article on networking might be useful.

Step 3c: The Use of Employee Referral Programs to Find Top Candidates

You earn $100 for having a professional and well-marketed employee referral program that consistently delivers strong candidates. Using Jobster qualifies here if everyone on your team uses it regularly. You earn $100 if recruiters personally and proactively solicit the names of top people from your top employees. You lose $200 if you don’t have a well-managed employee referral program in place that generates at least 20 percent of all new hires.

Sourcing Bonus!

Collect $500 if you have a consistent supply of top people for every important position.

Step 4: An Effective Interview and Assessment Process

You lose $100 if every interviewer interviews their own way. You lose $100 if you string a bunch of 30-minute interviews together. You lose $100 if your managers make instant decisions based on first impressions or gut feelings. You lose $100 if one superficial “no” vote can override the collective judgment of two or three other interviewers. You win $100 if all managers use a structured interview of some type and if they are trained and certified. You win $100 if there is some formal written assessment process in place that prevents superficial assessments. You win another $100 if this assessment is used in combination with a formal debriefing session with all interviewers before anyone makes a “yes” or “no” decision. You win $100 if top people come out of the interviewing process and feel they have been thoroughly evaluated. You win another $100 if these same candidates understand the job and specific challenges associated with the job.

Go Directly to Jail! Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.

You lose half of the winnings you’ve accumulated thus far if you have to do searches over again more than 50 percent of the time. If good candidates get rejected for the wrong reasons and you need to find more candidates, you’re wasting your time. One slate of three to four candidates should suffice for any search. Some of the problems here include lack of consensus on real job needs as well as weak interviewing skills. If you have no winnings, stay in jail.

Step 5: Recruit, Negotiate, and Close

You lose $50 if you focus too much on compensation and not enough on the reach of the job and career growth. You lose $50 if more than 50 percent of candidates say “I have to think about it” when you extend an offer. You lose another $50 if you don’t know why you lost the previous $50. You lose $50 if you ask candidates if they’d relocate on the first call. You lose $100 if more than 30 percent of good candidates exclude themselves from consideration at anytime before the offer stage. You lose $50 if you can’t convince candidates they should take the job with just a modest salary increase. You earn $100 if 80 percent of the best candidates you want to attract are willing to stay involved through the whole assessment process. You earn $100 if you close 80 percent of your best candidates who have multiple opportunities with fair offers. An article on negotiating compensation will help here.

Step 6: Post-Offer Challenges

You lose $100 if more than 25 percent of your candidates who have accepted offers either don’t show up, accept counter-offers, or accept offers from other companies. You earn $100 if this happens less than 10 percent of the time. You earn $100 if you have a pre-boarding process in place during the period when the candidate accepts the offer, but before starting. This includes one or two formal meetings or discussions with the hiring manager.

Step 7: Onboarding

You earn $100 if you have an effective on-boarding process in place and lose $100 if you don’t. An effective on-boarding process includes training as necessary, a formal process to ensure that candidates have a clear understanding of job expectations before they start doing the job, and the preparation of some type of development program to ensure on-the-job success.

Step 8: Management and Development

You earn $200 if you have mostly good hires in combination with good managers and a formal staff development program. You lose $200 if managers aren’t as involved as they need to be in ensuring the success of their newly hired team members. Weak management is the primary cause of good hires gone bad.

Step 9: Talent Performance

You lose $500 if too many top people leave too soon for dumb reasons like weak management, inadequate resources, or the work not being consistent with candidates were told it would be. In this case, everything you’ve done has been a pure waste of time. You win $1,000 if most top people perform as predicted during the interview (that is, extremely well), if they are highly motivated, if they work well with others, if they have the potential to grow, and if they attract other top people. After all, this is the whole point of the game.

How Well Did You Do in Recruiting Monopoly?

What’s the ROI of your hiring process — your total winnings divided by the initial $500 as a percent? A properly functioning recruiting and hiring process should have an ROI of at least 100 percent. You’re really in trouble if you went bankrupt. In this case: Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. But who cares? After all, it’s just a game…

In my recent article, Does Your Company Really Have What It Takes to Hire Top Talent? I presented a 10-point assessment on how to measure your company’s ability to hire top talent. Take the evaluation to see where your company stands. In this article, I’ll make the case that by implementing an operating system for hiring top talent, companies will finally be able to win the war for talent by making sure everyone involved in hiring is on the same page, using the best tools and techniques available.

Even better, I’ll suggest that a proven operating system (OS) already exists: performance-based hiring. By establishing a set of standards used by every participant — vendors, recruiters, hiring managers, IT, candidates, all members of the interviewing team — you can make hiring top talent a systematic business process. The purpose of this OS for hiring top talent is to maximize candidate quality while reducing time to hire to two to three weeks and cutting cost to hire by more than 50%. These are achievable goals. Consider this: If a company is not an employer of choice, or when candidate supply is less than demand, it takes enormous resources to consistently hire top people.

This situation is more difficult when technology doesn’t integrate well with new and existing tools, when every manager does it his or her own way, when recruiter competency varies from strong to weak, and when best practices are ignored due to lack of time or leadership. An operating system is the key to winning the war for talent, and there is no need to wait for some new solution just around the corner. The marketing knowledge to quickly find and source top people is available today. The technology to process information efficiently and improve recruiter productivity is available today. The skills to recruit and close top people are available today. The assessment tools to accurately assess candidate competency are available today. What’s lacking is a unifying OS tying all of these processes together. Performance-based hiring can become this unifying OS. Thousands of managers, recruiters, and top candidates have already used performance-based hiring successfully. Companies as diverse as Yahoo!, AIG, Texas Instruments, Wells Fargo, Red Bull, the YMCA, Verizon, HealthEast Care Systems, Texas Instruments, and Broadcom are now successfully using performance-based hiring. Position type doesn’t matter. These companies are now using performance-based hiring to hire camp counselors, entry-level call center operators, nurses, engineers, software developers, investment advisors, managers and executives. Furthermore, these same companies are now starting to push their vendors to support these standards. This is the tipping point in converting a great hiring process into an OS. Performance-based hiring addresses three core recruiting and hiring processes:

1. Describing how job descriptions must be written

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