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As recruiting and staffing professionals, we all need to be detailed and diligent when interviewing our hiring managers to ensure we are prepared for both effective advertising and sourcing strategies. But what things do we really need to ask a hiring manager?

It all depends on what we currently know and don’t know about the position we are recruiting. List the things we do know about the position to make filling in the gaps much easier when discussing them with the hiring manager.

Let’s take a look at some topics that we may to discuss depending upon the current relationship we have with the hiring manager. keep reading…

by John Sullivan and Laureen Edmiston

Several weeks ago ere.net published an article that asked the question “what are the dumbest things that recruiters do.” After surveying recruiters on ere.net, Twitter, and at the recent SMA symposium in Seattle, it is clear that most feel the dumbest thing recruiters do is…

Not managing the candidate experience — the candidate experience is the perception of the sum of interactions with an organization throughout the hiring process. It includes every communication, the design of the process, the fairness of process elements, the quality of information exchanged, and the honesty with which questions and concerns are addressed. Providing a poor candidate experience can have many negative consequences, including an increased candidate dropout rate, negative word-of-mouth, and decreased loyalty to the overall brand.

The rest of the “Top 10” are… keep reading…

Director of Fun.

That was the title I was looking at on a resume for a marketing director position. As I read through the applicant’s accomplishments and responsibilities, I could see that it was clearly a marketing-type position. It stuck out, just not in a good way.

What may have seemed like a great little thing to have on a business card as an attention-getter had now turned into a liability. Nobody knows what a “Director of Fun” does. And sure, maybe “Marketing Director” isn’t all that specific on its own, but give me some context (industry, company size, and market) and I can pretty quickly figure out what you’re doing.

Using these fun titles externally is a mistake.

What’s in a Title?

Now listen, I’m not a super stickler for titles. I know it’s what you actually do that’s the real important point.

If you’re an HR manager but you’re doing HR assistant work, I’m going to treat you as such (and vice verse as well). And we know title inflation is a big part of the hiring process and it can help make business transactions flow easier. Go into large banks and insurance brokerages, some with hundreds of branches and I’ll bet you find a VP or SVP in the building.

Wacky job titles simply confuse most real people.

So yes, titles can be B.S., but I think most people know that. If you walk into a brokerage and find most people are managers and directors and the top guy is a SVP, you still contextually know people’s roles and who is in charge. It might be a shift in thinking, but you aren’t reinventing the wheel.

Now “Director of Fun”? Or “Corporate Magician”?

Fun titles Not So Fun in the Real World

Some organizations think funky job titles are a great way of expressing a company’s culture or to stand out from the crowd. Moo.com sent over some of the most interesting examples of this. Here are my top 10 head-scratching titles Moo listed, in no particular order:  keep reading…

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates.

We conducted an in-depth survey with LinkedIn last year that indicated that 82% of their fully-employed members were unlikely to even consider switching jobs unless directly contacted by a recruiter or through an employee they’ve worked with closely in the past. This increased slightly to 83% in this year’s survey. This is shown on the graph, with the dark blue line representing the satisfaction level of those surveyed (4,550 fully-employed LinkedIn members) comparing their job seeking status and job requirements over time.

From a strategy standpoint, the idea is to find candidates either the moment they actively enter the job market, or before. But to do this, you need a different process for sourcing and recruiting the 83% who are not actively looking than used for those who are. This is what is meant by an “Early-bird Sourcing Strategy.”

The surveys also highlighted the fact that most companies spend most of their recruiting resources targeting the 17% who are actively looking. Making matters more challenging, while most passive candidates are open to a discussion with a recruiter, they would only consider a significant career move to switch jobs.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be hosting a few webcasts describing how to develop this type of early-bird sourcing program. Part of this will describe some of the workflow process changes required to support the strategy, and the specific competencies a recruiter needs to possess in order to implement it. These changes are not insignificant. keep reading…

If you have posted a position on a job board and not received the response you were expecting, you have probably been through adaptive preference formation to reduce your cognitive dissonance. To put it simply, you became Aesop’s Fox and decided that the job board you posted on did not work.

Posters remorse happens a lot when it comes to job postings, and as a result sometimes recruiters may not fully appreciate the power of advertising their open positions. In fact, when speaking about job postings, many technical recruiters see them as an ineffective way to attract talent.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the apathy around postings is directly related to job boards, even though over the years leaders within this space have adapted their offering to make sure that postings get distributed to more relevant candidates. Forward-thinking job boards have made significant strides in developing a solid job distribution network, and yet recruiters generally remain unimpressed with the “post and pray” model.

You cannot really blame recruiters for being disappointed in the results they are getting; however, there is a need to address the posters’ accountability in the whole process.

Job postings do work. They can attract great candidates both passive and active. They can also generate referrals. Passive job seekers often glance at the job email that arrives fresh in their inbox each morning. Recruiters tend to forget that they have a significant influence on the response quality they receive.

Over the last 12 months the number of poorly written postings being submitted to sites within the technology recruitment field has increased significantly. Fewer candidates combined with low-quality postings means poor results for everyone. As a result, organizations are investing more in the proactive searching and networking side of things, but not on postings. In fact the lack of focus on quality postings is getting worse, and some organizations are missing out big time.

Postings do have a place in the talent acquisition mix; they can even act as the recruiter’s recruiter if optimized correctly.

Below are some tips to help you increase your chances of success with job postings. keep reading…

Let’s get real here. Anyone who thinks LinkedIn is in the doghouse when it comes to recruiting the best talent isn’t a real recruiter, or they don’t know the difference between active and passive candidates, or they think sourcing is recruiting. So I’m going to use this article (and this webcast) to set the record straight.

First, let me first define a real recruiter:

1. They have excellent relations with the hiring manager and the hiring team. As part of this, 100% of their candidates they present are interviewed by the hiring manager, and none are bad.
2. They understand what it takes to maximize quality of hire, and achieve it on every assignment.
3. They thoroughly understand real job requirements and why the job is important to the company. As part of this they can convince their hiring managers that using traditional job descriptions minimizes the opportunity to hire top performers.
4. They are subject matter experts when it comes to knowing the company, the industry, the compensation ranges for the positions they handle, and the competition.
5. They prepare sourcing plans and programs based on how the best talent looks for work, especially passive candidates.
6. They are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to real people and getting outstanding referrals.
7. The best candidates consider these recruiters great career advisors and proactively refer other top people to them.
8. They can accurately assess competency and job fit on multiple measures including how the hiring manager and the person will work together.
9. They maximize their first contact to final close yield (candidate opt-out rate) by recruiting at every step in the process.
10. They can close the deal by emphasizing the career growth opportunity, not the compensation.

Being a real recruiter is less important if cost per hire is more important than quality of hire, and your management team is comfortable with hiring average people. However, if you want to implement a raising-the-talent-bar strategy, or facing a situation where the supply of talent is less than the demand, you need a real recruiter to pull it off, and in most cases they’ll need to target passive candidates. (Here’s a “real recruiter” competency model we created, if you’d like to rank yourself or your teammates. You need to score at least 35 out of 50 points to be considered a “real recruiter.”)

From a “let’s get real recruiting” standpoint, LinkedIn has a major edge over its current rivals. This is important since 82% of the professional fully employed categorize themselves as passive candidates. With real recruiting in mind, here are my top reasons why LinkedIn has a significant edge over Facebook, Google+, and those newbies who think they offer a better solution. keep reading…

Is your company among those who reject the unemployed because they are unemployed?

If you are — and a report from the National Employment Law Project suggests the list is longer than you might think — be careful. You’re walking a thin line between legal discrimination, and the kind that just might result in a disparate impact complaint from the EEOC.

At the behest of some 50 members of Congress, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held a day-long hearing on the matter several months ago. No formal statement has come out of the hearing, but the attention focused on the issue by the EEOC and Congress is raising concern among the employment bar. Labor lawyers are counseling employers to act carefully, avoiding blanket policies against hiring the unemployed.

Unless you are hiring in New Jersey, it is legal to include language in a job posting discouraging the unemployed from applying. In the Garden State, however, it became illegal on June 1 to discriminate against the unemployed in print or online ads. But everywhere, it’s bad PR to include the kind of wording that turned up in the now-infamous Sony Ericsson job posting.

Legal or not, employment lawyers at Foley & Lardner warned a few months ago that “employers can expect their hiring practices concerning the unemployed to be scrutinized.”

With an unemployment rate (in June) of 16.2 percent, twice that of whites, blacks could well be disproportionately impacted by a blanket “no unemployed” policy. Thus, said the Foley & Lardner lawyers, “The issue also seems ripe for a disparate impact test case, perhaps even one brought by the EEOC itself against an employer.” keep reading…

Spend your days driving a honkin’ dual-tandem, 700 hp eco-machine through the most beautiful city in the world.

This was the winning job posting for a creative job posting contest we recently ran. This one was for a bus driver for the city of Vancouver, Canada.

Keeping on the bus theme, most of us recall Jim Collins’ theme from his bestseller Good to Great: In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

Which brings us to my rather superficial Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting. The quick summary goes something like this: imagine your bus is a big job posting with compelling titles, flashy neon lights, cool horn, and stuff like that. It’s a big bus with enough space for all types of people, although some routes would just be for sales folks, or engineers, or whatever. The idea is to get everyone to want to get on the bus and drive it. This is what good sourcing is all about. Good recruiting is about putting the person in the passenger seat as soon as the person gets on board, with some type of clever phrase like “would you be open to go for a drive if this job represented a true career move, even if it only offered a modest salary bump?” Most talented people will eagerly hop on board, at least to go for the drive.

Once on board you’re going to conduct a quick screen to see if the person qualifies to be on the bus and possesses the “Achiever Pattern.” This means the person is in the top half of the top half from a performance and quality of candidate standpoint. If so, you’re then going to describe a job that is slightly bigger than the person now holds. If the person shows interest in proceeding, ask about a major accomplishment most comparable to the job just described. The candidate will then begin to sell you as to why he or she is qualified. You’ve now successfully put the person in the back seat.

Of course, now you’ve got to figure out where to let the person off the bus, which gets to the real purpose of this article and why you must learn to train fleas. With this as the first stop in our bus ride, let me add some destination points. keep reading…

I’ve written many times about actions recruiting managers can take to improve the impact of recruiting, but with the ongoing pressure many recruiting functions feel to do more with less, now is a great time to review a short list practical, easily implemented actions appropriate for an individual recruiter or manager. These low-hanging fruit are capable of producing dramatic results and do not require significant resources.

12 Simple Actions Capable Of Improving Recruiting Results

Over the past decade I’ve engaged with several hundred organizations around the world. Based on my observations in dealing with each of them, the following 12 actions categorized by recruiting lifecycle stage are proven to produce results quickly. keep reading…

I’ve been trying to figure out what to make of Jobaline.

In some respects, what the recruitment tech vendor offers is just another — if more clever — screening variant intended to weed out resume spammers. Interesting, but no game-changer as I told Jobaline founder and CEO Miki Mullor.

What did catch my attention, though, is that Jobaline also attempts to rank applicants on their “seriousness.” An elusive concept to be sure, Mullor says “People who are more serious about a job will take more time on the website.”

Mullor wouldn’t detail everything that goes into the Jobaline mixer, but the amount of time a candidate spends responding to questions is one of the measures, as is the number of jobs a candidate has applied for. Out of the crunching comes a score Mullor says suggests the candidate’s level of interest in the job. keep reading…

I recently received an email with a job spec on it. An associate who had received it from a recruiter forwarded it to me because of my feelings on this type of “recruiting.” She (the recruiter in question) was obviously spamming the job opening to her entire email list. The email follows:

Subject: HR Software Sales Executive — MN or Denver

Hello,

We are looking for an HCM Sales Executive in MN or Denver. If you are interested or know someone worth speaking to, please let me know asap!

Sales Executive — HR Software Company

Location — MN or Denver

Compensation — Base — $100K/Plan — $225K

Our mission is to help employers dramatically improve the employee experience by making “must do” workforce communications more effective, more strategic and less costly. We execute an on-demand, personalized and searchable HR communications application suite that supports the entire workforce life cycle from “hire-to-retire” – and includes solutions for: onboarding, benefits decision support, work/life events, employee policies, total rewards statements, manager effectiveness and HR/Service Center staff.

Our solutions are rapidly deployed, provide a broad range of features for significantly less money than traditional communication venues and are hosted and maintained by providing a low total cost of ownership and allowing your internal HR and IT professionals focus on more value-added work.

Why work here?

1. You get paid on first year setup, maintenance, & other fees
2. Working WITH an inside sales rep generating leads
3. We have a lot in the pipeline; it needs to be CLOSED
4. Growth was 62% last quarter
5. We are growing and cash flow positive

Requirements -

1. Being a hunter, cold calling, and working hard
2. Very strong selling Software as a Service (SAAS)
3. MUST be able to orchestrate a deal internally & externally
4. 5+ years selling HR/HCM software
5. This person MUST be a awesome CLOSER

Responsibilities -

1. Carrying a $1.5M first year quota
2. Covering MN & CO
3. Selling Software as a Service is CRITICAL
4. Working with an inside sales person, hand in hand
5. Strong CLOSING skills — we need a CLOSER

So what’s “wrong” with this method? There are many things that don’t work about this type of “recruiting.” I’ll point out some of them: keep reading…

click to enlarge

One of the things that frustrated me when I was a recruiter was a poorly written job description. This was just one of many puzzle pieces that provided the impetus for me to leave recruiting and work on aligning talent strategy with corporate strategy.

For those of you who are responsible for writing job descriptions and/or approving them for your company (hiring managers, corporate recruiters, RPOs), what guidelines do you follow to produce exceptional and accurate job descriptions? Do you even follow any guidelines? Has anyone ever taught you how to write an effective and accurate job description? Have you thought about what’s necessary to attract the “right” candidate for you and used these things to recruit those top performers so they want to come to work for you? Do you just throw the job description onto your “careers” page, a job board, or social networking site, and hope (I always say “hope” is never an effective strategy) great candidates find you? But most importantly, is your job description a reflection of an aligned executive team, benchmarked employees, and well-thought-out recruiting practices that are directly in line with executive alignment and culture?

One of my LinkedIn connections passed on a job description through his network for one of his connections who’s looking for inside sales folks. The individual who wrote it is a VP of Sales & Marketing. I’m not sure if he’s responsible for all their recruiting or if this company also employs corporate recruiters and/or 3rd party agencies. Either way, this is a wonderful teaching example of what won’t work, unless you’re looking for low-quality employees. I’ve included the entire job description (click to enlarge) with the company’s name removed, for obvious reasons.

As you read this, can you see some of the main the issues I’m seeing? It occurs to me that they are just casting a very wide net to see what they may catch. Let’s look at the most important items. keep reading…

As many of you know — I announced it at the ERE Expo in San Diego — I’ve decided to bring recruiting back to recruiting. This is my new old mission. Somehow this has been lost in the past few years when overall candidate supply exceeded demand. Hiring top talent is not the same as finding top talent. While sourcing is a step in this journey, it is only a step, and one getting easier each passing day.

Consider this: at the current rate, by March 11, 2012, everyone will be connected by one degree of separation with everyone else either via LinkedIn or Facebook. (FYI: I define sourcing as the process of name generation only. If you pick up the phone and call a person who did not apply, and convince him or her to consider your position, you’re recruiting. If the person applied for a job and all you’re doing is qualifying the person, that’s screening, not recruiting.)

While sourcing is getting easier, recruiting these now-more-visible folks is getting harder. This will become even more challenging as the demand for top talent accelerates, and everyone makes a wholesale shift to contact the same passive candidates you’re contacting. In this case, good recruiting skills will make all the difference as to who attracts and hires the person. keep reading…

As most of you know, I think job descriptions are the primary reason why companies can’t find or hire top talent. For this reason alone they should be abolished. Here’s the first dozen of a zillion reasons why. keep reading…

There are two core types of recruiters: those who fill positions with any available candidate, and those who source, recruit and hire Achievers. I define Achievers as those in the top-half of the top-half. These are people who raise a company’s talent bar. In a recent ERE article I described the important of measuring quality of hire and how to do it. Hiring more achievers is how you do it. Now consider this: recruiters who can hire Achievers on a consistent basis are worth their weight in gold, and at $1,300 per ounce, that’s significant.

Unfortunately, finding and hiring Achievers is no easy matter. For one thing, based on a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 75% of them aren’t looking (see more below). For another, they’re harder to recruit, they tend to get more counteroffers, and if they are looking, they get snatched up quickly.

In this article I’d like to accomplish three things: keep reading…

If job descriptions aren’t illegal, they should be.

Let’s hold a mock trial. You’re one of the jurors. We don’t need unanimity here, a mere super majority will do. Here’s a link to the public survey so you can be involved and register your verdict, and see the results. But before you vote, you must hear all of the evidence.

Let me first state my rather obvious bias and claims in my opening statement: there is no doubt in my mind that skills-infested job descriptions prevent companies from hiring top performers and limit their ability to hire diversity candidates. Furthermore, managers and recruiters who rely on these are doing their companies a great disservice. I will prove this during this trial by providing convincing evidence to the following: keep reading…

Having trouble finding the right talent for your positions? Getting bombarded with the wrong types of candidates? I’ve consulted and worked with a number of clients over the past 10 years, and in that time have seen many good recruiting practices and programs, as well as my fair share of bad strategies and processes. I’ve come up with a short list of the most common barriers I’ve witnessed to recruit top talent. While this isn’t a complete list, these are the top few that most will be able to relate to. keep reading…

I’m a major advocate of parallel benchmarking, i.e. learning from the best practices that have been successful in completely different business functions or industries than your own. A key parallel practice from advertising and marketing that recruiting and HR practitioners need to be aware of is “delivering authenticity.”

Being authentic is about much more than simply being accurate. It’s about developing a perception among your target audience that they can trust what you say, that your message is credible, honest, or genuine, and ultimately convincing. There are many times when people are accurate in what they communicate, but not credible or perceived as being genuine.

As a subject, authenticity has received much more attention these days, largely due to the rapid growth of social media, which many perceive as a more authentic communications channel. Peer-to-peer messaging, a tenet of social media, isn’t subject to the layers of bureaucratic editing that render most corporate messages generic and bland.

Compounding the issue today is the fact that many of us communicate with a highly diverse global audience comprised of individuals from different cultures each with established expectations and communication idiosyncrasies.

Most of the discussion about authenticity has been limited to expounding the need for it, with little attention being paid to how to assess or measure the degree to which your messages are in fact perceived as authentic. This article focuses on the approaches that an organization can use to assess the authenticity of recruiting messages. keep reading…

Recruiting is about to be forced to start looking for people and assessing them in very different ways than they have.

The nature of organizations is transforming right under our noses, but most of us are too deep in the forest to see what is happening. Over the past 100 years business owners and human resources folks created the concept of a job as a way of looking at and doing work. We define a job as a set of skills, experiences, and activities that a single person does. We record that set of skills, experiences, and activities in a document we call a job description. The idea is that many people, each doing a little thing, will produce something larger and more complex than they could have produced themselves.

Recruiters and hiring managers look for the people who are very good at doing the “little thing.” Recruiters and hiring managers use the lists of skills and experiences to search for people and assess them by looking for the ones that match the defined requirements.

This worked fairly well in the mechanistic, industrial world where there was some correlation between experience, training, and performance. In those kinds of organizations, it may still work well. But fewer and fewer organizations do this kind of work. Instead they need people who can do much bigger things and think more broadly. They are looking for out-of-the-box ideas and disruptive solutions to create innovative products and services and meet the far-more-complex needs of their clients and customers. They need people who are willing to experiment and take risks to find a disruptive solution. The old idea of cataloguing the required skills, experience, and activities runs out of gas. We don’t know what these skills, experiences, and activities are; they change constantly and they are interdependent on others in our team.

Many recruiters I talk with already know this in their gut, but have trouble expressing it or explaining it. keep reading…

Maximizing your use of time is the key to hiring more top performers. In a recent webinar with Jobs2Web, I described the sourcing sweet-spot. This is the point just before and just after a fully employed person decides to consider looking for another position. This time-frame represents the window of opportunity to hire the best passive candidates and early-birds with less effort and salary premiums than any other point.

If you get to these top people first, you’ll have no competition, and they’ll be much easier to recruit since they’ve already made the decision to pursue a new job. However, it’s what you do when you first connect that will determine whether you’re successful or not in hiring them. This involves a number of critical recruiting key skills. These are described below.

If you’re a recruiting manager, evaluate your current crop of recruiters and any new hires to determine whether they have these skills or the ability to learn them. If you’re a recruiter and you want to hire more top performers, you need to be exceptional in these areas. As you’ll see, hiring top performers without paying unnecessary compensation premiums requires great recruiters, great opportunities, and great hiring managers. Without these, it just becomes a numbers game. But as Chicken Little, or some other similar authority, once said, “the early bird catches the worm, as long as you have a good fishing pole.”

Passive candidates and those just entering the job market — the early-birds — are a different breed of prospect. For one thing, they’re not desperate. This changes the game entirely from those who have been looking for more extended periods of time. More important, if they’re good, they’ll be very choosy and they will get multiple offers. But since you’re first, and if you play your cards well, you should be able to reel in these top performers in greater numbers than those recruiters who find them after you do. In this case, your competition has to play catch-up. This is a great position to be in. But to pull it off you have to be an exceptional recruiter. Here are the key recruiting skills needed to turn these top candidates and prospects into great hires.

Recruiting Skills Required to Turn Hot Prospects Into Great Employees keep reading…