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.

If we have not worked with a hiring manager in the past, then we will need to discuss all of the following with them.

List of Competitors or Target Companies

Have a list of 3-5 competitors ready for the meeting, even if we aren’t sure those should be on the list or not. Sometimes a target company may just be a company that is local and not necessarily in the same industry.

• Discuss the competitor list with the hiring manager.
• Are any companies he/she has hired from in the past?
• Which, if any, companies listed would be most preferred for their next hire?
• Do they have any additional companies they would like to add to the list that are also highly desired for the target list?
• Also, very important, are there any companies on the list that he/she would not want to see candidates from?

*Note, oftentimes if a particular company has lower hiring standards and a hiring manager knows that already, it can save us from wasting time trying to present those candidates upfront.

Take 3-5 Profiles to the Meeting With You

Make sure the profiles you take offer a slight variety, to give you a hint of what the manager will bite on. Ask the hiring manager if they have 2-3 example profiles either from current employee resumes or someone who has left the company who had the right resume profile for you to compare your sourcing with.

• How flexible are they on the educational background?
• How flexible are they on the years of experience?
• Which skills are most important to them?

Required Skills & Educational Background

Ask questions around the skill/educational requirements to identify where this hiring manager is flexible.

• For example, if a requirement says MBA in Accounting, would they also consider someone with a master’s degree in Accounting?
• Or if the experience level says bachelor’s degree with 5-7 years of experience, would they consider someone with a master’s who has 3-4 years of experience?
• What are the absolute skill requirements you need in this person — e.g. software knowledge or industry knowledge?
• What is the minimum educational requirement?

Ask for Names of People

Oftentimes, a hiring manager has the name of at least one person in mind who they have either previously worked with, or know through others, or even know them as they are an internal candidate working in another group.

• Do you have any names from your past or current staff who you would like to be contacted about your opening?
• If so, do you know the name of at least one company they have worked for?
• Do you have any contact information or even a resume for any of these people?
• How do you know them or know of them? (This is key information you can use for your cold-call).

Inquire About Past Hires

Recycle what is known and then add to it. If a hiring manager has had success with particular resources in the past, then don’t discount them as a “repeat resource.”

• Where have your best hires come from in the past?
• Existing employee referral? Who?
• Did they come from networking or advertising from any organization or association?

Associations & Organizations

As staffing professionals, we need to ask the hiring manager for names of organizations and associations. We can definitely conduct our own research; however, there may be a particular group the hiring manager already knows. You need to get that information from them.

• Are you personally members of any professional organizations or associations? Which ones?
• Is there anyone from within those organizations who you would be interested in considering for your opening?
• Which company do you know they have worked for in the past?

Describe a Day in the Role of This Person

This will give you some understanding of the departmental culture to gauge the type of person who will “fit in” to this team.

• What are the day-to-activities this person will be involved in?
• What other areas of the company will this role interface with?
• Will this role require traveling? How much on average?

As a recap, below is a list of things you should know after an initial hiring manager intake meeting:

1. List of target companies
2. 2-3 example profiles
3. List of names to contact immediately
4. Resources for both advertising & sourcing
5. Blurb about the day-to-day of this role for both evaluating and selling to passive talent

As recruiters, we do not have the luxury of time to have gaps in our initial intake meeting with a hiring manager. Be organized and ready for both our advertising and sourcing efforts after the first meeting with the hiring manager. If we have an organized list of what we need ready for our meeting, we will save time in the long run being able to identify the right slate of candidates the first time around and fill the requisition more efficiently.

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…

Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — potential applicants assume that the company puts its best foot forward when it describes a job. So when they compare your dull, legalistic description with your competitor’s more compelling description, they will simply apply elsewhere. The net result is that you lose candidates unnecessarily, harm your employer brand, and you will eventually frustrate your hiring managers.

Not taking advantage of employee referrals — the best-practice firms approach 50% referral hires (the percentage of all external hires who come from referrals). Failing to fully use referrals means that you will miss out on a large number of high-quality, prescreened, and presold candidates. Because employees are no longer doing some of the recruiting work, your recruiting workload will increase.

Not learning the business — obviously if you can’t speak “their language” and you don’t understand their problems, hiring managers will be less responsive to your requests. Your lack of knowledge will also make it more difficult to communicate with, to sell, and to build relationships with candidates.

Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — higher-level jobs require a different level of service, knowledge, and relationship-building. So using the same process that you use for lower-level jobs on more sophisticated, technical, or management jobs will result in fewer returned calls, a higher candidate dropout rate, and lower-quality hires.

Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are gone quickly, so a drawn-out process or slow decision-making will likely mean that candidates with multiple offers will be gone. Managers will also become frustrated if a slow recruiting process means losing the best.

Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews are traditionally weak predictors but poorly executed interviews dramatically increase the chances of making a major hiring error. Poorly designed interviews may also screen out innovators and turnoff top candidates, because they have not felt challenged.

Using active sourcing approaches for passive candidates — posting your jobs using active sourcing approaches like job boards, newspaper ads, and job fairs means that the 75% of the workforce that is not actively looking for a job will never see them.

Not prioritizing jobs — focusing on low-value jobs with little business or revenue impact will anger your managers and reduce their business results. It may eventually lead to lower recruiting budgets, after executives see that your hiring is not prioritized and in line with their business priorities.

Not identifying job acceptance criteria — if you don’t proactively ask for their job acceptance criteria, you can only guess about what it will take to get a top candidate to say “yes.” Although it is ranked as #10, not tailoring your recruiting marketing and candidate-selling approaches to the decision criteria of top candidates almost guarantees that you will lose these candidates. Because these individuals have choices, they will simply wait until an opportunity comes along that precisely fits their requirements and expectations.

Final Thoughts

Nearly 80% of CEOs select talent management as the business area that requires the most change. As a recruiter, if you are going to dramatically change, you have only two basic choices, 1) stop doing the dumb things that negatively impact your results or 2) start doing smarter and more effective things. The “stop doing dumb things” choice is probably the easier of the two because it doesn’t require you to learn anything new.

So if you are recruiter or recruiting manager with limited time and resources, we recommend that you use this “dumb things” list to begin the process of changing and improving your recruiting.

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: 

1. Sales Ninja
2. New Media Guru
3. Social Media Trailblazer
4. Corporate Magician
5. Master Handshaker
6. Communications Ambassador
7. Happiness Advocate
8. Marketing Rockstar
9. Problem Wrangler
10. Digital Dynamo

Master handshaker? Problem wrangler? Whose hands do these people shake, and what problems do they wrangle?

In a quote from the press release, Moo.com’s Paul Lewis says,

“Traditional one-word job titles no longer act as an accurate description of what a person does or what they are like. So why not stand out a bit by giving yourself a job title that sums you up as a person rather than limits you to just one aspect of what you do.”

The funny part to me is that Lewis is credited as Head of Marketing (and here, too, on his Twitter profile). And while it may not stick out, I know that he is in charge of marketing. This is helpful if I ever need to get in touch with someone in marketing at Moo.com, or if I ever need to hire someone with some marketing chops.

Taking a Step Back

Fun titles can be great for internal teams. It can help put a fun spin on being at work, especially at some of the less pleasant, white-collar jobs that are out there.

But when it comes to dealing with people outside of the company, it is time to make a decision: do you communicate what you do clearly, or, do you avoid that and try to educate every single person you meet about that fun job title — only to have them forget what you actually do five minutes after they meet you? Or worse, you are mocked for not having a real title and people question your business skills and savvy?

Even the Gen Y guy inside me knows the right answer: you always pick clarity first.

Once a client or business partner gets to know you and your company, they’ll know you’re fun and cool, even in spite of an ordinary job title. And you should be just fine with that.

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.

Here a just a few of the big ones:

Some Big Workflow Changes Required to Support a Passive Candidate Early-bird Sourcing Strategy

1. Elimination of traditional skills-and-experience-laden job descriptions for recruiting advertising purposes. To be effective, voice mails, emails and job postings need to emphasize the long-term value proposition of the job plus some of types of projects the person will be working on.
2. Implementation of a “sequence of steps” recruiting model including a career discovery process vs. a transactional (“find and apply”) hiring process. This represents the heart of the workflow changes required and why different recruiting skills are essential. Passive candidates evaluate job changes using a hybrid of long- and short-term criteria. Collecting this information often takes multiple meetings and discussions with the hiring manager. This is fundamentally different than active candidates who have an economic need driving their decision-making.
3. Development of virtual talent communities driven by proactive In-Out employee referral programs. An In-Out auto-matching referral program is a relatively new concept. The idea is to automatically connect a newly opened job with the company’s employees’ pre-qualified first-degree connections. The purpose of this is to push compelling career messages (an outbound process) to people who are not looking. Typical talent communities are comprised of active candidates who have signed-up (inbound) to follow the company.

 Highlights of a Recruiter Competency Model for Passive Candidates

Recruiting passive candidates requires more talented and tenacious recruiters. We’ve developed a complete, multi-factor passive candidate recruiter competency model with a detailed ranking score to help recruiting leaders assess their teams. Email me if you’d like a sample version of the full recruiter competency model, but following are the essential factors (a warning to recruiting leaders: do not allow your recruiters to contact passive candidates unless they possess these skills):

1. Partners with Hiring Manager: recruiters don’t have much credibility with a top person who’s not looking, if they don’t know the hiring manager extremely well. More important, if the recruiter and hiring manager are not both working in tandem, it’s impossible to move top people through the sequence of discovery steps mentioned above.
2. Someone Worth Knowing and Subject Matter Expert: recruiters must know the company strategy, the company’s basic financial strength, the industry and where the company stands, the competition and why the company is better positioned, and all of the associated compensation and benefit issues. When a recruiter contacts a person who’s not looking — especially the best ones — these prospects are deciding not only if the career opportunity is worth pursuing, but also if the recruiter is credible.
3. Develops and Implements Customized Sourcing and Networking Programs: as shown in the graphic above, those who aren’t looking need to be contacted directly either via email, through networking, or employee referral. Getting the names of these people is easy. However, getting on the phone and developing deep networks of highly qualified prospects is the difference between having a list of names and some great prospects open to talking with a hiring manager.
4. Understands Real Job Needs and Associated Career Opportunity: passive candidates will always want to know a few things about the job just to determine if it’s worth a serious discussion. Recruiters must be able to present this on multiple levels, including the job’s importance, some of the key projects and tasks involved, the impact of these on the company’s business plans, and why it represents a career move for the right person. Most recruiters drop the ball here, and not only lose a potentially strong candidate, but also a great networking opportunity.
5. Accurately Assesses Competency, Motivation, and Fit: recruiting passive candidates involves not only thorough job knowledge, but also the ability to assess the prospect’s ability and motivation to do this work. A key part of this is determining cultural, job, and managerial fit. Since these candidates aren’t looking, good assessment skills allows the recruiter to compare actual job requirements to the candidate’s background, and credibly demonstrate why the job represents a career move.
6. Recruits, Advises, Negotiates, and Closes Top Prospects: Persuading top prospects who are not looking, getting them to engage in a series of career discussions, pushing the process along, and then closing the deal on equitable terms is what recruiting passive candidates is all about. Collectively this is represented by the 6Cs of Passive Candidate Recruiting. Very few of these overlap with the skills required to find and recruit active candidates.

Unless you have a big employer brand, it’s impossible to attract the 83% of fully-employed professionals who aren’t looking using the same sourcing and recruiting techniques used for the 17% who are. These are two different worlds, and while most recruiting leaders recognize the difference, I find it puzzling that only a few are willing to do anything about it.

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.

• Write clear and readable job postings that clearly and unambiguously state the job title.
• Place key skills or desired associated skills near the beginning of the job description field so they can be viewed highly in relevant searches.
• Avoid the temptation to make your job postings simply a list of skills, as you may miss or deter potential candidates even where your job posting features highly in their search results.
• Conversely, padding the job posting with overly descriptive content or irrelevant skills will lower the job advertisement’ss ranking. Although the job posting may match more job seeker searches, it will not feature as high in the order of results and thus reduce the response received.
• Blend in the human aspect. Candidates within the technology world are generally more adverse to change than people within other sectors, even if they are in a role that they don’t like. Use your posting to paint a picture of where you are trying to take them. The more they know about the organization, the more comfortable they will be with the idea of changing roles. They want to know if they will fit in.
• When you can, specify the rate or salary. Contract job postings showing a rate get at least double the applications than those without. Permanent job postings showing a salary get 20 percent more applications than postings showing no salary.
• Where HTML formatting is available, use it to enhance your posting. Emphasize key words however remember less is more.

If you think about the content of your posting and the intended audience then you should see a dramatic improvement in the results you receive. Do not put a posting out there for the sake of it and hope something will stick. Put one out there to help someone find their dream role.

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.

It’s about strategy, not tactics. Hiring top talent is not the same as filling positions with good people. Unknowingly, most companies employ a “candidate surplus” hiring model to fill their open positions, even the most critical ones. These means their hiring processes are designed around the idea of getting lots of people to apply, with the hope that a good person emerges. A talent scarcity model is totally different. In this case the hiring process is much more focused, designed around the concept that great talent is much more discriminating and a career opportunity discussion/decision dominates every step, from first contact to the final close. When viewed from a quality-of-hire perspective, LinkedIn’s advantages and options in the hands of a recruiter who actually recruits, rather than just screens, are far superior.

LinkedIn is a network, not a list of names. As mentioned in an earlier article, LinkedIn is not just a list of names to find and send emails. Instead it’s a 360° dynamic network of smart connections. Compare the flat list of Facebook to a clumsy hub-and-spoke distribution system (a one-to-many network) vs. instantly connecting everyone with everyone else by one degree of separation. This is almost equivalent to a point-to-point (everyone directly connected to everyone else). It’s this multi-level interconnectivity that allows a recruiter to Cherry Pick, PERP, and hopscotch (some advanced recruiter networking terms, see point 4) around his/her first degree connections and find a slate of pre-qualified candidates with a few phone calls and emails.

The short summary: a network is for networking, and real recruiters know how to network. On this basis LinkedIn is far ahead of its rivals.

Sourcing is not recruiting. If you have an excess of top talent to choose from who apply to your ads, you don’t need real recruiters. Microsoft was in this enviable position in the ’90s and Google claimed this space in  the ’00s. But selecting from a pool of top applicants is not recruiting; it’s screening and assessment.

Equally important, getting a list of names is sourcing, not recruiting, no matter how clever you are at Boolean searching. For example, there was a recent blog about how cool it was to be able to find primary school teachers in Ireland using state-of-the art Boolean terms. As a comparison test, I found pre-qualified candidates for the same job by calling up three headmasters at private schools in Ireland whom I found using LinkedIn’s seemingly prosaic advanced search tool. Even better, these candidates were all pre-qualified (I asked who the best primary school teachers they would want to hire again were) and they all called me back right away because I mentioned the headmaster’s name.

Navigation and the UI is critical. If you’re going to use a network for networking, LinkedIn has no peers. It was architected with this in mind. Real recruiters are as interested in finding hot prospects as they are in finding a person directly connected to a hot prospect. Getting referrals who have already been vetted and will call you back is the key to maximizing quality (see point 3 for an example), time to fill, and recruiter productivity (number of searches handled). You can accelerate this benefit by asking your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with at all of their prior companies. This is a PERP (proactive employee referral program). Then, when you have a search, search on their first-degree connections (LinkedIn easily allows you to do this). This is a high-yield effort. You can also Cherry Pick these connections by asking your employees (or any of your first-degree connections for that matter) about specific people in their first-degree connections. While you’re at it, using LinkedIn you can easily hopscotch around any profile you find by clicking the “Search for Similar People” button, the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature, and even a person’s Recommendations. A multi-point network like LinkedIn allows you to do this stuff instantly. No other social media provides this type of interconnectivity.

Sourcing passive prospects and sourcing active candidates are not the same, nor should the choice of tools be. At the root of much of the LinkedIn vs. Google+ vs. Facebook vs. whatever debate is the fact that finding and recruiting people who are not looking requires a fundamentally different process than the one used for screening and selecting candidates who apply for your jobs. LinkedIn is great for real recruiters who are willing to pick up the phone and network. If you have plenty of great people to choose from or you’re willing to settle on the quality-of-hire metric, LinkedIn is probably not the best choice for you. On the other hand, if you’re a real recruiter you know it was designed with you in mind.

Long before I became a recruiter (I was an engineer working on inertial guidance systems), my first boss asked me to explain how these two concepts relate and why they were important to understand and apply: “Energy = Mass times the Speed of light squared and you can’t push on a rope.” I guess I was slow, since it took me a few years to figure it out. For a good engineer, knowing both is essential. The same principle can be applied to recruiting. If you think sourcing is recruiting, or that LinkedIn is not the primary platform for recruiting, you’re stuck on only half the solution to any complex problem.

(Hint: it relates to the adage – to a person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)

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.”

The labor specialist group at Weil, Gotshal & Manges concluded a detailed account of February’s EEOC hearing on unemployment discrimination with this:

Given the EEOC’s attention on blanket prohibitions against hiring unemployed applicants, employers run the risk of raising the EEOC’s interest when imposing these types of bans, which could culminate in a lawsuit brought by the EEOC or by individual job applicants denied employment because of such a prohibition. Even if the EEOC or a claimant would not ultimately prevail, given the cost and distraction associated with defending against such claims, it would be prudent for employers to investigate alternative ways of achieving their goals, if practical, rather than relying solely on employment status as means of evaluating job candidates.

Irrespective of the EEOC threat, there’s a groundswell of support to “do something” about the nation’s job situation and its 14 million unemployed and another 11.3 million underemployed and discouraged workers.

New Jersey’s law had the support of the state’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, who’s often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. New Jersey neighbor, New York, and Michigan have taken up similar legislation.

At the federal level there are two bills dealing with the subject. The more moderate, introduced last month by Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro, makes it unlawful to publish a job posting that contains discriminatory language. It also prohibits employers from refusing to consider or hire an individual simply because they are unemployed.

Enforcement is up to the aggrieved individual in a civil action or by the Department of Labor.

The second bill adds the unemployed as a protected class to Title VII. This would make the EEOC the enforcement arm, and subject employers to all the reporting and compliance requirements.

The likelihood of either federal bill passing is probably not high. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, particularly for the DeLauro bill. With elections coming up next year and unemployment showing no sign of abating, both the White House and Congress may grasp at anything that suggests help.

A poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project found 90 percent of respondents agreeing that discriminating against the unemployed is unfair. Some 63 percent favor the kind of Congressional action embodied in the DeLauro bill.

The poll got widespread attention when The New York Times wrote about the issue of unemployment discrimination.

The article notes that “there are legitimate reasons that many long-term unemployed workers may not be desirable job candidates.” These range from using employment status as a screening tool, to concerns with atrophied skills, and recruiter concerns that workers laid off early in the recession may simply have not been good performers.

Last year, I referenced other reasons for excluding the unemployed, including the usual bias to hire passive candidates.

Popular sentiment, however, is that excluding the unemployed from consideration isn’t right. In a matter of a weekend, USAction collected over 25,000 signatures on a petition calling on job boards to refuse ads that include discriminatory language against the unemployed.

Three of the largest job boards — CareerBuilder, Dice, and Monster — say they discourage customers from including such language in job postings.

On the same day the Times’ story appeared, Monster used its blog for the second time this year to say, “We at Monster strongly oppose this practice and advise our clients on the risks of discriminating against any individual.”

Both CareerBuilder and Dice said they have policies against discriminatory language in job ads. Both monitor ads for compliance with relevant law, advising customers when one comes across and removing it if the client doesn’t.

Dice’s SVP, Tom Silver, pointed out that “Today, there are talented professionals who may happen to be unemployed largely due to circumstances beyond their control. Companies should seek the best talent that has the right capabilities and cultural fit. Limiting a company’s chance to find successful colleagues — only puts the employer at a disadvantage.”

Peter Weddle, executive director of the International Association of Employment Web Sites, the job board business group, said it “strongly opposes any form of discrimination in hiring, to include discrimination against those who are unemployed.”

While USAction did not contact the IAEWS before launching its petition, Weddle said the matter is really one for the government.

“Until a Federal law is passed,” he said in an email, “it’s unclear what if anything we should or should not be doing. In general, we don’t believe it is a job board’s responsibility or role to ensure employer compliance with employment law. That’s the federal government’s job.”

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.

One key point: from a talent strategy standpoint, and paraphrasing Collins’ “right people on the bus” concept, the idea is to first get the most talented people possible onto the right bus, but don’t let them off until you get them to the right stop. Unfortunately, most companies have predesigned bus routes and too many filters to even get the right people on the bus in the first place. Worse, it takes an act of god to change bus routes.

Second key point: to get great people onto the bus to begin with, you can’t use job descriptions. That’s why these must be banished as boarding passes. To take this idea one point further, I’m going to suggest that once you have the right person on the bus, create a job that offers the person a true career move, not a lateral transfer. In HR speak, write the job spec after you’ve found the person, not before. Here’s this same idea in more graphic terms: rather than try to fit a round peg (the person) into a square whole, modify the shape of the hole (the job requisition) to fit the round peg (the person). Now comes the hard part, since you’re already thinking this is not possible. That’s why you first need to understand the point about fleas.

Zig Ziglar used to tell a story about how fleas can be trained to jump lower (not a typo). Before any training, fleas can naturally jump 20″ or so high, unless you put them in a 5″ mason jar with a lid on top. After 20 minutes or so, the fleas get tired of bumping their heads on the top, and “learn” to jump only 4.9″. When you take the top off of the jar, none can get out, since getting out is beyond their perceived current ability. They’ve mentally put a limit on their jumping ability. The idea here is that many folks in HR and recruiting sometimes act like trained fleas, seeing only the restraints preventing them from implementing change, rather than the opportunity in doing so.

Of course, banishing skills-based job descriptions and writing the job spec after you’ve chosen the person raises legal compliance issues, impacts ATS and workflow design, affects recruitment advertising, requires better workforce planning, changes the role of the hiring manager, requires flexible budgeting, and even requires figuring out who should be driving the bus. Despite these challenges, the benefits are enormous compared to the issues to be overcome. As a minimum, you’ll hire more talented people; you’ll increase on-the-job performance, job satisfaction, and retention; your newfound job design flexibility will allow you to structure work to better meet the needs of a demographically changing workforce; and your hiring productivity will soar by eliminating all of the self-imposed bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Of course, to pull this off you’ll first need to recognize there’s no lid on the jar, except for the one you put there.

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.

Attracting Talent

1. Make your job postings exciting – many recruiters pull job descriptions from internal systems that were written long ago for purposes other than marketing an opportunity and are to put it simply, dull. Recruiters should rewrite them so that they sell the exciting aspects of the job and give applicants an idea of how they will be able to influence the future. At the very least, they should be tested against competitors’ descriptions to ensure they are more compelling.
2. Encourage referrals – it has been true for a number of years that the highest quality hires come from employee referrals, and the widespread growth of social media makes it even easier for employees to identify and build relationships with top talent. Unfortunately, employees are not trained recruiters, so if you want them to be effective at building/mining their networks, you will need to advise them of what practices work best. Also remember: nothing kills a referral program more than a slow response to referrals, so review and respond to each within 24-72 hours.
3. Revisit previous high quality candidates — often times you can save tremendous resources by simply revisiting the stars that got away. Reach out to candidates who voluntarily dropped out of the process, turned down an offer, or who were finalists in a field where a super candidate ended up getting the job. Times change, and it’s not uncommon for candidates to regret decisions. Also look at bringing back former star employees who have left your firm.
4. Ask references for referrals — in addition to harnessing the power of employee referrals, you should ask the references of top candidates and new hires to provide you with one or two additional names of top people who they know.
5. Target innovators — innovators may contribute more to profitability than top performers, so tout in advertisements that you’re looking for innovators and then revisit your screening approach to ensure that potential innovators are not screened out by overly rigid and antiquated competency profiles that do little more than maintain the status quo. Make sure ample time is allocated in the interview process to both sell your organization’s ability to innovate and probe the candidates’ ability to be innovative. Because innovators can be vocally intolerant of outdated practices, educate your hiring managers to expect a degree of different behavior from them during the interview.

Assessing Talent

1. Add real problems to interviews — although there is some value in talking about the past, interviews can be dramatically more valuable when they focus on real problems new hires will face if they join the organization. Don’t give them a puzzle or a theoretical situation. Give them a real difficult problem that only the best could solve. Remember, even if you don’t hire them, you can take advantage of the ideas candidates supplied (consider it free consulting).
2. Make interviews more feasible — people who are currently working have difficulty scheduling and attending multiple interviews, without placing their existing job in jeopardy. Make it more feasible by making changes to accommodate their schedule. Consider dedicating at least one night or weekend day a month to allow individuals with scheduling issues to interview outside of work hours or using video interviews that don’t require travel. Second, consider instituting a policy where all interviews are completed in a single day.

Engaging/Selling Talent

1. Ask candidates for their job acceptance criteria — selling top-quality candidates is always difficult, but you can make it much easier if you start out by asking candidates to identify the key factors they will consider when evaluating an offer. In addition, have them outline deal-breaking factors that would cause them to drop out of the process or not consider an offer. Tailor your assessment/selling approach around these factors.
2. Use mobile — effective communication is an important part of recruiting, so you want to identify and use the communication channels that are favored by top candidates. The very best these days rely heavily on smart mobile devices, so you need to learn how to effectively communicate on channels that are commonly used on such devices, including texting, micro-blogging, and social networking applications. Videos can be more powerful than words, so consider making and sharing a personalized video that actually shows the exciting aspects of your firm that can be viewed on a mobile device.
3. Help managers sell your firm — unfortunately, most managers do a poor job selling the company to potential recruits. Rather than trying to build up their sales skills, survey your key employees to identify the specific factors that make your firm superior to competitors and compile a list hiring managers can use to better position the opportunity.

Miscellaneous

1. Reduce spend on low-impact actions — although you may have a tradition of using newspaper ads, job fairs, and large job boards, they often produce only mediocre candidates and have a relatively high cost. More effective tools to consider as alternatives include referrals that you proactively seek out from your top performers, using LinkedIn, and recruiting at the monthly events of local professional organizations and clubs.
2. Target key individuals for retention — high turnover puts a strain on recruiting resources, so lighten your future load by proactively identifying a handful of high impact employees who might be at risk of leaving and who would be very difficult to replace. Work with their managers to identify the job elements and factors that excite them and keep them happy, as well as the factors that might cause them to consider leaving. Then work with their manager to ensure that they are continually provided with an ideal job, following a retention plan that is tailored to each individual.

Final Thoughts

If you frequently listen to consultants and vendors, you could get the impression that the only way to dramatically improve recruiting results is by spending millions of dollars on sophisticated solutions. While most high-dollar solutions are valid in some cases, they aren’t in all. Simple actions taken by individual recruiters and hiring managers can also produce dramatic almost immediate results, without requiring a stratospheric budget.

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.

Before we go any further, some background.

Jobaline launched a few months ago on the premise that it could cut the time recruiters spend reviewing resumes, yet still find quality candidates. It does this by having recruiters and hiring managers mark up their job postings so candidates have to provide specifics for the most important of the requirements. Jobaline codes these posts, which can be placed anywhere: corporate site, job boards, etc.

Both sides can come up winners here. The employer flags the most important requirements, while the candidate can amplify what’s in the resume, or offer details that might not be in the resume at all. These micro-resumes, as Jobaline calls them, can prompt some candidates to opt-out and resume spammers aren’t very likely to start filling in response boxes.

However, it’s hard to see how that would compensate for the work involved in reviewing all the extra information. Heck, if you read my post yesterday about recruiters not even reviewing the resumes of those they want to phone screen, it’s evident that the last thing recruiters want is more to read.

Perhaps needless to say, Mullor makes the point that by reviewing just the responses to the tagged requirements recruiters can quickly build a short list. It’s the second piece of this, though, that’s particularly intriguing. Jobaline ranks the candidates on their seriousness.

The obvious question is whether this score has any significance. Neither the content of the responses nor the candidate resume are considered. Pure and simply, Jobaline looks only at the mechanics of the process to create a behavioral score.

It doesn’t take an I/O psychologist to wonder about the validity of the score. Mullor acknowledges that Jobaline is too new to have enough data to be able to say what or even if there is any correlation between the seriousness score and candidate quality or interest. Anecdotally, he says, some of the clients who are testing the service are reporting good results. (Recruiters themselves can affect the score, as they review the micro-resumes.)

What I find interesting is that Jobaline is part of what seems to be the cusp of an emerging trend to adapt behavioral marketing — and search — concepts to recruitment. It’s probably not just coincidence that Jobaline and Bullhorn partnered a couple months ago.

Bullhorn, a dominant force in the staffing and sourcing world, not long ago introduced Reach. Among its many features is a predictive formula that looks at a recruiter’s LinkedIn network and lists those who may be preparing for a job search. It, too, takes its cues from search and marketing, looking at such behaviors as profile updates and new recommendations.

Intuitively, what Bullhorn Reach does makes sense. The more time I spend getting my profile in shape and posting content, particularly if this is a change from what I’ve been doing in the past, then it seems reasonable to say something is up. Whether I’m preparing for a job search or simply making good on my New Year’s resolution is still up in the air. It will require validation to establish the degree of correlation. But for not now, Bullhorn Reach simply raises a flag that a recruiter might want to pursue.

With Jobaline now available to Bullhorn users, Mullor points out that it adds a second data point for recruiters. Bullhorn scores resumes on keyword matching and other elements to create a ranked list of applicants. Jobaline, Mullor notes, is “an additional layer of scoring.”

Does it make a difference? It will be sometime before Jobaline is able to collect enough data to know. Even so, it’s an indicator that vendors are beginning to adopt behavioral measures for talent acquisition.

Some years ago, Yahoo! HotJobs talked about doing this very thing. By analyzing both the profile activity of its members and their Yahoo! search behavior, HotJobs was thinking it could predict who was about to become an active job seeker. I don’t know if it ever went beyond a thought exercise, although something similar was tested for predicting car-buying behavior and it turned out well.

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:

1. This isn’t recruiting. Recruiting is calling and networking with people to “hunt” out quality and qualified candidates for an opening. It’s discussing a candidate’s current situation and interests to see if your job is even what the candidate is interested in. It’s determining if the candidate may be a fit for you. It is presenting an opportunity and creating interest, etc. It’s not sending an email into the webosphere and hoping someone looking for a job contacts you. Hope is never (and I don’t use the word “never” lightly) an effective strategy.
2. The recruiter copied the top half of the opening directly from the company’s website. She doesn’t work for the company, so why does she use “our” and “we”? She couldn’t even be bothered to put together an email from her. For example, “My client …”
3. When she gets to the actual job specs she uses the info directly from the spec provided by the hiring company. Now that’s not the issue. The issue is what I read between the lines, which tells me the company doesn’t have the first clue how to determine what type of employee will be successful with them. One of the reasons to work there is that the prospective employee will be working with an inside rep who will be generating leads. Does this mean the rep won’t have to cold call and find his own leads? Will he get to rely on someone else for his leads? What if the inside rep isn’t meeting his objectives? What is the quality of a rep who wants to rely on an inside rep to provide his leads? They also say they “provide a broad range of features for significantly less money…” Are we to assume they’re looking to attract the Wal-Mart shopper?
4. “Being a hunter, cold calling, and working hard” — I just love this one. Why do they find it necessary to mention they need a hard worker? Big red flag.
5. The company grew 62% in their last quarter. 62% of 1MM is not impressive. 62% of 10MM is far more significant.
6. The spec mentions working with an inside rep twice. Hmmmm.
7. “Covering MN & CO” is not a responsibility. It’s a territory. If you want to list the territory and make it significant, you need to put it in the “requirements” section and say something like, “X years of successful sales into MN & CO calling into new accounts.”
8. “Strong CLOSING skills – we need a CLOSER.”  Do you think they need a “closer”?

I think you get the idea. I don’t believe any quality candidates will respond to a job like this, and even if this job spec did attract “A Players” it says nothing about cultural fit with the company, hiring manager, or the team the candidate would be working with. Research indicates that nearly 90% of employees fail for reasons having nothing to do with skills and abilities.

But here’s where it really got interesting for me. I was very curious as to the client company’s thoughts about this type of recruiting on their behalf. The purpose of my investigation into this was to provide me with possible evidence of what I’ve been saying for years. Recruiting, by and large, doesn’t work on a multitude of levels. I was able to find out who the hiring company was very easily. I just Googled some of the text she copied directly from the company website. Poof, I had the company. I proceeded to forward the email to the CEO to see what type of reaction I’d get. The CEO called me almost immediately and also forwarded my email to his CFO. I missed the initial call from the CEO, but the CFO was able to catch me between calls. The CFO confirmed my suspicions. He didn’t seem to think there was any problem with this form of recruiting. This type of recruiting doesn’t cost them any money up front. He didn’t seem to think this type of “recruiting” was spam. I wonder if he has any clue to the costs on the back end???

Looking further into his background gave me all the information I needed. He spent eight years as an auditor, controller, and analyst for a large, well-known CPG company and then founded a search firm specializing in accounting, finance, and IT. It never ceases to amaze me how people with no experience whatsoever in search are able to be “successful” recruiters. Would you hire an accountant with no accounting experience? Yes, I know, it’s a rhetorical question. This also indicates further that companies don’t know how to recruit. After 12 years in staffing he then took eight years off to be an “investor” prior to joining this HR software company as its CFO. And the CEO … he’s lacking the background to truly understanding the harm this is causing his company. His opinion was to let the “bean counter” manage the process.

As a company, what will you be? Good or great?

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.

The company’s name is listed in the first sentence but there’s no indication of what this company does, a brief description of who they are, what makes them a company you would want to work for, etc. Is the writer of this job spec “assuming” the reader knows what they do? Do they think this is going to attract top talent? If they aren’t going to take the time to put together a well-thought-out description, how will they be to work for? This is the type of job description that will probably attract candidates who are just looking for a job because they need one. Maybe this job can tide them over until the economy improves …

What does this company sell? It says that they want someone with experience selling the “SAAS Model,” specifically Sales 2.0 Tools. Is this the product?

They are looking for an inside rep … Where will this candidate be located? Will they be required to work at the corporate office or from home wherever they live? What’s the territory? Is it vertically focused?

Is there a quota? What’s the average deal size?

What about the comp plan? Why is it missing? Leaving the plan out may cause the reader to assume some things.

• Candidates who aren’t looking for work will probably not even waste their time looking at this. If the plan range is not there the plan may be lousy.
• Leaving a comp plan out of a description makes me wonder what they’re trying to hide.

Putting the comp plan in the description like this can also do a number of different things:

• It may attract candidates who have never earned anywhere near the plan.
• It may keep higher quality candidates from looking at this if they’re already making more money than the plan. They don’t know if the plan is negotiable based on experience, talent, quality, etc.

Five years of inside sales required. Do you know anyone in inside sales who is just waiting to move to outside sales once they have enough experience? Granted, not all inside reps want to move outside, but many do. You may capture candidates who are happy in the status quo.

What percentage of time is spent qualifying inbound leads vs. outbound target account penetration? It takes very different types of sales skills to farm (qualify inbound leads) and hunt (outbound penetration). It would be valuable to the candidate reading this to know where they need to be stronger.

Lastly, and most importantly, they say they want a “team player with an entrepreneurial spirit …” Does that sound like an oxymoron to anyone else? I’m not saying one can’t be a team player and be entrepreneurial. Culturally, candidates (and companies) will be more heavily weighted to one or the other. I suspect this company has never invested the time to look at their culture and even attempt to align it to be sure they are all on the same bus headed to the same destination.

That should be enough to get you thinking more broadly about what you should be doing internally to be able to generate a high quality job description. I’d love to hear any thoughts, comments, concerns, or questions about this topic.

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.

Here are some interesting stats by way of a LinkedIn survey we conducted in late 2010, to validate this point. First, only 8% of the fully employed professional pool of candidates were actively looking and open to considering a lateral transfer. Another 10% were causally looking, but only interested in a better job than the one currently held. Everyone else needed a significant bump in compensation or a significant career move to even consider engaging in a conversation. Without a big employer brand, recruiters need to make the case that the jobs they’re representing offer something better. This is the first step in real recruiting.

As part of this “bring recruiting back to recruiting” mission, I put together this quick list of things modern-day recruiters need to be able to do to recruit top passive candidates. While they’re all important, which ones would you select as your top three?

1. Know the job
2. Know the industry and competition
3. Partner with the hiring manager
4. Market the job via voice and email
5. Network, network, network
6. Accurately screen and assess talent
7. Recruit and influence top prospects
8. Negotiate and close the offer
9. Don’t take no for an answer
10. Sell a career move, not a lateral transfer

Your top three might be different, but here’s mine.

Although the ability to partner with the hiring manager is essential, it’s second on my list, since in order to be a partner you need to know the job. That’s why knowing the job is first on my list. Third on my list is not taking “no” for an answer. To some degree these three in combination with all of the rest all represent a chicken-and-egg-type problem. (You can download a flyer with a more complete version of this Recruiter Circle of Excellence you see in the graphic, including a ranking scale, on the Recruiter’s Wall.)

Without knowing the job, there is no way either a hiring manager or a top candidate will respect your judgment or be swayed by whatever eloquence you manage to muster. Without knowing the job, persistence won’t help much, either. It will be like pushing on a rope. While there’s more to it than this, this is the reason I consider real job knowledge as No. 1.

Job knowledge is not simply knowing the list of skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. It’s understanding the actual work the person actually needs to do to be successful. For example, having a CPA, 5-10 years in corporate reporting including SOX, and strong international reporting experience is not knowing the job. Moving the company to the international financial reporting standards in two years, building a team of eight staff and professional accountants to assess and upgrade the current, cumbersome domestic SEC and SOX reporting process, and quickly developing a worldwide set of accounting policies, is knowing the real job.

Without this type of detailed job knowledge, you’ll get little respect from the hiring manager, and top people with other things to do will dismiss you out of hand. Of course, to obtain this critical information you need to get it directly from the hiring manager. One way to better understand the job is to ask these questions during the intake meeting:

• What are the big things the person will need to accomplish in order to be considered a top performer?
• Why would a top performer who is not looking, who is fully employed, and has multiple opportunities, want this specific position?
• What are the biggest challenges the person will face on the job?
• What are the big areas of leadership and/or strategy the person would need to successfully handle?

After you have these answers, then go through every critical skill on the job description and ask, “What does the person need to do with the skill as part of the actual job?” For example, for strong communications skills, you might get something like “make weekly presentations to the design review committee.”

If the manager asks why you need to have this information, tell him or her that this is the information passive candidates who aren’t looking need to know in order to decide if they just want to enter into a conversation. Then as a real zinger, ask the hiring manager if he or she would agree to see a person who could perform all of the work listed, but didn’t have exactly the same background listed on the job description. If the manager says “of course,” you now know the job. In parallel, you are moving toward partnership status.

If the manager says no, persist and ask the questions again, or read this article before you ask the questions again. The key: do not start looking for a candidate until the hiring manager says the real job as defined is correct, and also agrees to see all candidates who have done comparable work. Otherwise everything you do afterwards will be problematic.

With this “new age” job profile in hand, start contacting passive candidates and ask this question: “would you be open to talking about a possible career move, if it was significantly better than what you’re doing today?” They all will say yes. If not, persist and ask the question word-for-word again. When they say yes, you must then get these candidates to tell you about themselves first. Use this time to determine if the candidate is highly qualified and would see your job as a career move. If so, recruit the person. If the person is not perfect for your spot, network and get three names of some great people who are perfect. This is where persistence and all of the other skills listed in the Recruiter Circle of Excellence above will come into play. But if you don’t know the job, and aren’t a partner with your hiring-manager client, all of the persistence and skills listed won’t help much.

1. Except for the list of responsibilities, they don’t define jobs at all; they define people taking the jobs. If these descriptions left out the required skills, years of experience, industry background, and academic requirements, they’d actually offer something useful as a place to start.
2. They’re bogus. If there are more than a few people who can do the work required without having all of the skills, experience, industry, and academic background listed on the job description, it means the list is bogus. We all know managers develop these lists as rough guidelines to filter out the obviously unqualified. Rarely is it based on a scientific study including a detailed job analysis correlated with the skills and experiences of those already successfully performing the job. On this basis alone, the requirements listed are questionable.
3. They’re illegal. If qualified minorities are excluded from consideration based on bogus criteria, wouldn’t that constitute some type of questionable selection process? Additional proof: we all know many people who get promoted into these roles or hired from the outside who don’t possess the requirements listed. (See point 4 below for more on this.)
4. They aren’t used for internal promotions. The reasons people who get promoted into bigger jobs are primarily because of their leadership, potential, team skills, and a track record of delivering results. By definition, a promotion means these people don’t have the experience and skills listed on the job description. The purpose of these moves is to obtain these skills and experiences. So if they’re not used for internal promotional moves, why should they be used for outside hiring?
5. They eliminate high-potential candidates from consideration. The best people — especially passive candidates — want career moves that stretch them. Few top people will respond to a job posting that emphasizes skills and experiences unless it’s with a well-known company, or if they are persuaded to check it out through a trusted person or recruiter who contact them. This extra hand-holding narrows the field of people who would even be interested in talking. Worse, most hiring processes screen out these people before they even get through the door.
6. They don’t predict on-the-job performance. We’ve all met plenty of people with the requisite skills, academics, and experiences who aren’t top performers, and we’ve all met plenty of top performers with a different mix of skills, experiences, and academics. Think about all of those top performers who got promoted in point 4 above. If they don’t predict performance, why would anyone use them to screen candidates?
7. They turn off passive candidates. The best people — even those who are looking — base their decision to evaluate a company, compare offers, and accept one over another based primarily on the three Cs: career, compensation, and culture. No one bases it on the requirements listed in the job description. So why even include them in the posting? Idea: just include the bare minimum of requirements while emphasizing the employee value proposition and a high-level summary of the big projects the person will be handling.
8. They make diversity hiring more difficult. Many, if not most, diverse candidates bring a different mix of background experiences to the table. That’s one of the reasons why they’re invaluable hires. Under this situation, why would you want to apply a non-diverse, generic filter to screen out diverse candidates? Yet this is what happens when traditional job descriptions are used to find non-traditional hires.
9. They’re designed to weed out the worst, not attract the best. Most people justify the reason for listing skills and experiences in their job postings by saying it’s to eliminate the clearly unqualified. Unfortunately, in the process, they also prevent the best from even applying. This idea might be okay if the supply of top-notch, high-potential qualified candidates is greater than demand. Since this is rarely the case, on this point alone, they should be abolished.
10. You don’t need them for building a pool of candidates. There is no law that says you must list all of your job requirements to build a pipeline of candidates for future jobs. (If you think there is, please ask your lawyer to cite it for you and include the actual verbiage in your comments. Also, don’t cite the Uniform Guidelines, since it doesn’t describe how to create a pool of candidates.) Somehow people have gotten the idea that posting an individual job description is based on some legal requirement. Actually, the idea was created as a way to maximize revenue for job boards. Consider pre-Internet advertising: most companies posted large display ads advertising groups of jobs. This is now coming back in vogue as companies create candidate pipelines.
11. They decrease employee satisfaction and increase turnover. If you don’t tell people what they’ll be doing before they start on a new job, the likelihood the person will find the actual work involved exciting, appropriate, and satisfying is problematic. Clarifying expectations up front has been shown to be the primary driver of on-the-job performance and employee satisfaction. In my mind this should represent the bulk of the job description, with some minimalist statement about the skills and experience requirements.
12. They make no sense. Why not fit the job to the person, rather than fit the person to a job? I’ve worked on many search assignments where the initial job was modified to optimize the person’s abilities and passions. While this was done to increase the likelihood the person would accept the offer, the end result was that jobs that were sculpted this way resulted in improved on-the-job performance, reduced turnover, and increased employee satisfaction.

Of course, you need some level of skills and experiences to handle the actual job requirements, but in most cases managers use job descriptions as shortcuts to get the requisition approved. Unfortunately this shortcut has serious downstream repercussions, as described above. Without defining the real job as a series of performance requirements or tasks, we eliminate the best possible candidates from consideration, increase the difficulty of hiring more diverse candidates, and hire people who are unlikely to perform at peak levels even if they are fully qualified. It’s hard for me to believe anyone can defend the use of job description from a business, legal, or moral standpoint. But I’m sure many of you will try.

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:

1) define the Achiever pattern; 2) describe how to quickly identify it during the phone screen; and 3) offer some ideas on how to recruit people who are Achievers. (For those who are less inclined to read, here’s a YouTube summary of this article.)

First, let me offer this generic definition of an Achiever: a person in any job who, year after year, is in the upper 25% based on performance in comparison to his or her peers. This would be considered a B+, or better. Here are some of the ways I would suggest how to define performance, but don’t hesitate to contribute your own:

The Classic Achiever Pattern

• Consistently meets or exceeds performance objectives.
• Performance objectives get more challenging each year.
• Delivers high-quality results on a consistent basis on all types of projects.
• Works well with all types of people and with cross-functional teams.
• Works well with all levels of people inside and outside the organization.
• Makes a significant technical or business impact.
• Self-motivated, requiring little direction.
• Goes the extra mile. Does more than required.
• Gets the results despite the problems and challenges.
• Doesn’t make excuses, makes it happen.

As a result of the above, the classic Achiever tends to get promoted more quickly, gets formal recognition, and typically earns more in comparison to the 75 percent not in the top quartile. Interestingly, in the first 5-10 years of their careers, Achievers tend to have less absolute experience (in years) than their peers, due to their more rapid promotions. So if a company screens on years of experience, they’ll tend to eliminate many of the high-potential candidates from consideration before they even have a chance to evaluate them. (Note: this is a huge, counterintuitive point. You might want to review your sourcing process to see if this is happening to you.)

From an assessment standpoint, it’s pretty easy to recognize this Achiever pattern, if you don’t first get seduced by the candidate’s first impression and presentation skills, strong or weak. I suggest that during the interview or first phone screen, spend at least 20 minutes on the work-history review. As you go through the person’s resume, look for evidence of this Achiever pattern. This evidence consists of things like:

• Rapid promotions or assigned to bigger projects at quality organizations.
• Higher compensation, including extra bonuses and bigger raises.
• Assigned leadership positions for a variety of projects consisting of multi-functional groups.
• Formal recognition for exceptional performance, including awards, honors, and letters of commendation.
• Technical recognition including patents, whitepapers, presentations, and industry acknowledgments.
• Strong academic background, academic awards, and strong institutions.
• Upward growth including an expanding portfolio of accomplishments.
• Mentored others and was mentored.
• Hires top people including previous employees or was hired by a previous supervisor.
• Exceptional skills in one or two areas.
• A pattern of self-development, especially during gaps in employment.

A person doesn’t need to have all of these to be categorized as an Achiever, but to claim the title, look for a pattern of exceptional performance over extended periods of time — especially recently — if you want to hire the person.

Identifying Achievers is actually far easier than finding and recruiting them. The key idea to remember here is that Achievers don’t look for new jobs or accept one the same way as everyone else. The chart above will help explain this.

The blue line represents a growth curve for the typical Achiever over time. During the early phases of a typical next job, the Achiever is growing rapidly, making a big impact, and highly satisfied. This is represented by the far left steeper part of the curve. These people would be the Super Passive candidate.

If the job doesn’t change much after a year or so, growth and impact starts to decline, along with satisfaction. During this phase of diminishing growth, the Achiever isn’t likely to proactively seek another job, but would be open to taking a call from a recruiter to explore better career opportunities. The key to attracting these Explorers is the need for a clear career move. Since they’re fully employed, not looking, and reasonably satisfied, they have no need to compromise. To attract Achievers in this phase, you need to move slowly and engage in a series of career-oriented information gathering sessions.

Many Achievers find new jobs during this Explorer phase. Obviously, not every top person finds a job this way. If not, and growth continues to decline, Achievers move into the Tiptoer phase. In this job-hunting phase, these people call former close associates and previous mentors, asking to be considered for opportunities as they develop. The scope of this is very narrow, contacting trusted confidants only, since the person is still fully employed. This is true networking, and many of the remaining top people get jobs this way. While they’re not as picky during this phase as Explorers, Achievers won’t settle for less than a significantly better job.

For those Achievers who don’t find new opportunities either during the Explorer or Tiptoer phase, a more classic job-hunting process begins with using search engines, niche job boards, and more expansive networking. If they’re fully employed, they’ll still be looking for the best opportunity in comparison to what they have, or what they’re considering. From a recruiting standpoint, they’ll be picked up very quickly, typically within a week or two after starting their expanded search process.

My advice to companies and recruiters who want to attract more Achievers is to be different, be first, and offer career moves, not lateral transfers. Very few Achievers are ever so desperate that they’ll take a job that doesn’t offer significant upside opportunity. If you do happen to hire someone under these conditions, expect the person to leave at the first sign of an economic upturn.

At a primary level, being different means your job postings have to emphasize career opportunities and clearly define what’s in it for the candidate. (Here is a LinkedIn and SHRM posting that will give you a sense of how job advertisements should be written.) Being first is important, too. Unless your recruiters or employees are snatching these Achievers up before, or as soon as they enter the market, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to source and hire enough of them to raise your talent bar. But even if you do find enough of them, you still need to offer them true career opportunities in order to hire them.

We just completed a joint survey project (September 2010) with LinkedIn focusing on the job hunting status of its 75mm+ members. These results will be published shortly, but for now, consider the fact that more than 75% of the people categorized themselves as Super Passive, Explorers, or Tiptoers. This means only 25% are active or semi-active. So while the idea of hiring more Achievers is a worthy objective, achieving it will take a major redirection of the sourcing, recruiting, and hiring processes most companies now employ.

You can quickly determine if you need to rethink this process at your company, just by categorizing all of your candidates as Achievers or not, using the definition presented earlier. If you’re not seeing or hiring enough, you know you need to start doing something different.

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:

1. Job descriptions define average people, not the best performers.
2. Diversity candidates often have non-traditional experiences and, as a result, are wrongfully excluded from consideration.
3. It’s what people do with their skills and abilities that should be used to judge their performance, not the amount of skills and experiences they possess.
4. Job descriptions don’t define the actual job. They define the person in the job, and the criteria used is suspect at best, since there are a great many people who can excel in the job with a different mix of skills and experiences.
5. There is no law that says you must post boring job descriptions.
6. Job descriptions violate the Uniform Guidelines.
7. If job descriptions aren’t used for internal promotions, why should they be used for external screening and selection?
8. There is no scientific basis for the creation of the these job descriptions.
9. Competency models are only slightly better than job descriptions in minimizing the core problems involved in using job descriptions.

If you’re not seeing or hiring enough top performers or highly-qualified diverse candidates, the root cause of the problem can be attributed to the use of skills-infested job descriptions. Following is a quick summary of the proof to be presented during this trial. Witnesses will be called for each phase.

1. Top performers tend to get promoted more rapidly than under-performers. As a result, after a few years, they have less overall experience than the average person in the same job. If average years of experience and skills is used as the cut-off for screening when hiring from the outside, then the best people — those in the top-half — will automatically be excluded.
2. Diverse candidates tend to have non-traditional experiences, yet can still be top performers. Traditional job descriptions don’t account for this type of equivalent or comparable experience. On this point alone, job descriptions are discriminatory and should be banned, unless it can be proven that the absolute values defined for the KSAs are essential.
3. In cases where adverse impact has occurred, the Uniform Guidelines requires that the job selection process to be validated. Part of this includes a job analysis and proof that the assessment process accurately predicts on-the-job performance. A job analysis is a formal study of what the actual job entails and what it takes to successfully perform the job. A job description is not a description of the job; it’s a description of the person in the job, and therefore not acceptable proof.
4. The Knowledge, Skills and Abilities required for job success are derived from the job analysis. Three points will be made during the trial itself to demonstrate how KSAs are misused. First, most people who write job descriptions, including a listing of the KSAs, don’t conduct a proper job analysis first. Second, while KSAs are needed to perform the job, these are dependent variables, and having these KSAs doesn’t mean a person can do the work successfully. This is a form of the logical argument “asserting the consequent: just because A requires B, doesn’t mean having B determines A.” Third, the Obama administration is now formally undergoing a “Hiring Reform” reform initiative questioning the value of KSAs and how they’re assessed for these same reasons.
5. Competency models are weak substitutes for KSAs and job descriptions for similar “asserting the consequent” logic flaws. For example, just because someone has the important competency labeled “drive, self-motivation, or initiative,” doesn’t mean it can be universally applied in all situations. Being driven could be a result of the manager, the culture, or the actual work itself. It will be proven in trial that unless a competency can be directly tied to the job analysis, measuring it generically has no validity from an assessment standpoint.
6. A job analysis that lists a series of performance objectives required for job success eliminates the need for traditional job descriptions and the use of absolute KSAs for assessment purposes. Candidates can then be evaluated by obtaining a comparable accomplishment for each required performance objective required.
7. There is no legal requirement to post boring job descriptions or use a one-step hiring process to advertise job openings. For example, the OFCCP would not find fault with the following two-step hiring process. Step one: a creative posting highlighting just the challenges and opportunities, listing few, if any, requirements. Step two: everyone who applies gets an email describing the job challenges and requiring the person to submit a one-page write-up summarizing their most comparable accomplishments.
8. The rules have changed. There are few traditional job experiences anymore, so why continue to look for a declining population of people with traditional experiences. The economic bust, generational differences, the globalization of the workforce and the relationship between the employee and the employer have undergone such massive changes, that relying on the relic of the past — job descriptions — is comparable to using the telegraph to send text messages.
9. Top people, including diverse candidates, don’t decide to apply for a job, or compare multiple offers, based on the job description. They are more interested in the challenges and growth opportunities, the leadership qualities of the hiring manager, the company culture, and overall impact they can make. For this reason alone job descriptions should not be used for advertising purposes. Job descriptions are the lazy way out. Managers use them to replace thinking and job boards use them since they’re formulaic and easy to scale. Unfortunately they cause more harm than good.

Since we haven’t gone to trial yet, and this list is only a summary of what we’re going to prove during the actual trial, let’s stop for a moment and get your initial reaction.

Based on the above, do you think I would lose at trial or could a make a convincing case that traditional job descriptions, if they’re not outright illegal, should be banned? The third option is even if they are not illegal, traditional job descriptions do prevent companies from hiring people in the top half and minimize their ability to build a diverse workforce. Here’s a link to cast your verdict, and here’s a link to the results. As far as I’m concerned it’s an open and shut case, but don’t hesitate to add your jury room comments.

Use of Social Media

Recruiting teams need access to all the popular online destinations, such as Twitter and Facebook. Give them the ability to comment, blog, share, and have real conversations with potential talent on the web. They’re grown-ups, aren’t they? You hired them because you trust they will represent your company well. Put a social media policy in place and get moving. Once up and running on social networks and in the blogosphere, learn to have more than just an account. Build a real presence. Build community. Build excitement and buzz that spreads and attracts talent. AT&T and Starbucks are examples of two companies using social media the right way to attract high-caliber talent. Check out Trust Agents and The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web to get a better picture of using social media the right way.

Push vs. Pull Marketing

Gone are the days of the post-and-pray mentalities for recruiting departments, dumping budgets into job boards and search firms. That is push marketing: pushing out job orders. Here now are thousands upon thousands of free resources, sites, and online communities at your disposal. Use them! Recruiters can go beyond job postings and place tailored PowerPoints on Slideshare, insightful pictures on Flickr, descriptive videos on YouTube, and select whitepapers on Scribd and Docstoc. Spread your content in key places online and make sure to provide good titles, tags, and keywords to be found. This is pull marketing, and will bring more traffic to your career site and ultimately produce a better applicant pool to work with.

Lack of a Sourcing Function

Recruiters are overworked today with paperwork, processes, and compliance laws, not to mention the fact that they need to find and source quality candidates for their positions. It’s nearly impossible without having a sourcing team or resources internally or externally. Outsourcing is an option. Training and shifting internal talent is an option too. Hewitt Associates is an example of a company that understands the importance of the sourcing function. It breaks its talent acquisition team into specific tasks, with dedicated sourcers being used on and offshore, finding and submitting talent to recruiters. Sourcers today need to be well-versed in the latest trends in social media and mobile recruiting, as well as a high proficiency in advanced Internet search techniques with Google. This will ensure the sourcing function covers good ground to find qualified talent.

The Application Process

Don’t make job seekers jump through hoops to apply to your positions. Some companies have more than 10 steps amounting to over 20 minutes to fill out. This is too long! Simplify the application process. Fewer steps equal more candidates, guaranteed! The best application processes require uploading your resume, verifying your information parsed by the ATS, and hitting the submit button. Done! Better yet: how about giving your email address and bypassing everything. For most, this just isn’t reality though. Recruiters need data to be successful, and an ATS helps to get this data in the form of extensive profiles and questionnaires. Recruiters also need to be more accessible, more visible during the application process. Think about providing a live person via instant message or video chat on your career site, or a dedicated job applicant support phone line to guide confused candidates and do light screening. Other options such as company Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups, and YouTube channels that tie-in are a must.

Job Descriptions

Most employment ads online either have too little information or way too much. The information that is available usually has too much corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo and uses company acronyms and internal program names. Ads like these can be confusing and misleading. Sit down with the hiring manager and get all the facts out on the table. Uncover every detail possible. Develop a job description that really sells the job! Make it relevant to the job seeker. Make it interesting. Show some excitement. Talk like a real person. Tell people what the job will really do and the importance it plays with your company or client. Strike a good balance of information with an enticing sales pitch. Make me want to apply!

Many more talent barriers exist today. I’m interested to hear about the makeup of your recruiting team, how you find talent today, and what unique challenges you face.

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.

Most Current Recruiting Messages Aren’t Authentic

Recruiting messages can be presented via a variety of channels, including corporate websites, job postings, print collateral, social media services, and during 1:1 interaction throughout the assessment and hiring process. Unfortunately, regardless of the channel used, most recruiting communications rate low on authenticity. Over the years the language used to “differentiate” an organization has become commonplace and today accomplishes the exact opposite of what it was introduced to do. While an organization may honestly work to enable a family-friendly environment, such generic claims could be discounted or ignored because most organizations make similar claims. Given that candidates today can quickly peer validate corporate communications, organizations must abandon their legacy approach to communication and devise measures to test the authenticity of all messages moving forward.

Seven Factors That Increase Authenticity

There are a variety of factors that increase a message’s probability of being perceived as authentic, including:

• Support data — the availability of data or specifics about a program that support the subject of the message.
• Credibility of the source — the credibility of the source based on the accuracy of previous messages.
• Shared values — the perception of shared values and experiences between the author and the reader.
• Candidness — the degree to which messages acknowledge imperfection.
• The degree of professionalism — the extent of professional appearance in the design, editing, and writing, as well as any pictures that are included (too much isn’t a good thing).
• The degree of filtering — the extent to which messages are scripted, screened, or filtered by corporate executives.
• Two-way messaging — the extent to which you provide opportunities for questions, feedback, and comments by others.

Checklists for Assessing Your Current Recruiting Messages

Let’s assume that your corporation already has developed a corporate website and a complete set of recruiting communications. Use the following checklists for to determine whether your approaches to communicate via your website, social networking initiatives, and structured interview process rate high on authenticity.

Assessing Your Corporate Website

Examine your current website using the following checklist. Tally your points to determine how authentic your efforts are.

1. Overall design (2 points) — does the overall design of the site appear to be overly “corporate,” i.e. generic layout, tightly controlled content spaces, conformity in presentation of content? If no, award yourself two points. (Note: Being overly consistent in messaging can make your organization’s messages seem controlled and perceived as rigid and intolerant of diversity).
2. Pictures (2 points) — do pictures presented include real employees in unscripted activities? If yes, award yourself two points. (Note: Professionally staged photos where everyone is smiling, photogenic, and every possible demographic group is represented are immediately identifiable as “fake.”)
3. Videos (2 points) — does your site feature or link to externally hosted employee-produced videos offering non-scripted insight into life inside the organization? If yes, award yourself two points. (Note: Videos that are professionally made or edited are easily dismissed as propaganda.)
4. Candid information (2 points) — does your site share candid information about current challenges, weaknesses, and past mistakes that demonstrate that you know your organization isn’t perfect, but that you are aware and acknowledge your shortcomings? If yes, award yourself two points. (Note: It’s a lot easier to trust positive information from a source that shares or at least doesn’t try to hide less-than-positive information.)
5. An opportunity to interact (2 points) — does your site provide visitors with the ability to comment on your content or to ask questions? If yes, award yourself two points. (Note: Even if individuals choose not to take advantage of this option, soliciting feedback, questions, and comments sends a message that you are willing to listen.)
6. Blogs (2 points) — does your site link to externally hosted blogs written by current employees, alumni, and other relevant stakeholders? If yes, award yourself two points. (Note: Linking to externally hosted content not subject to PR editing sends a message to your audience that you are not afraid of how those who know your organization best will write about it.)
7. Employee profiles (1 point) — does your site serve up in-depth profiles of employees and their work, excluding executives and managers? If yes, award yourself one point.
8. Quotes (1 point) — are a majority of the quotes that appear on the site attributed to a named employee in a non-managerial or non-recruiting-related role? If yes, award yourself one point.
9. Glowing adjectives (1 point) — when presenting something positive, is it presented free of a long list of glowing adjectives such as excellent, great, leading, infinite, etc.? If yes, award yourself one point. (Note: Contrary to what you may have learned in English class, a long list of glowing adjectives in copy doesn’t inspire action. Research shoes it actually turns the audience off!)
10. Values and culture (1 point) — does the information presented that covers the corporate culture and values provide specific examples of how your organization acts in certain situations that bring the culture and values to life? If yes, award yourself one point.
11. Podcasts (1 point) — does the site provide access to podcasts made by managers discussing their groups’ work, without an identifiable script? If yes, award yourself one point.
12. Links to external information (1 point) — does the site provide links to information about the organization developed and maintained by third parties, such as management publications, trade associates, professional groups, etc? If yes, award yourself one point.
13. Numbers and dollars (1 point) — when specific programs are mentioned in website copy, do you disclose the participation rate by employees in the program, or the level of investment the organization has made to make the program available? If yes, award yourself one point.
14. Frequently asked questions (1 point) — does your site present frequently asked questions and answers that appear in language a candidate may actually use, versus that of a recruiter, PR representative, or in-house council? If yes, award yourself one point.
15. Diversity (1 point) — does your website disclose how your organization defines diversity, what percentage of the workforce falls into each diversity classification, and what unique programs exist to support diverse individuals? If yes, award yourself one point.
16. Benefits (1 point) — if your site discloses information about benefits, is the information detailed enough that potential candidates could compare it to past packages or offerings from other organizations? If yes, award yourself one point.
17. Regional variations (1 point) — does the information provided vary based on the location of the visitor? If yes, award yourself one point.

Out of the 22 possible points for authenticity on a corporate career website, how do you score? If you scored:

16-22 Your organization excels at being authentic via its corporate career site.

11-15 Your getting there, but a little more work is needed.

0-10 Your organization’s website is in need of a serious overhaul!

In the next installment of this series, I’ll tackle measuring the authenticity of social media initiatives and your interview process.

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.

They know that work is more cross-functional, requires more collaboration and sharing, and relies less on how things were done in the past. Jobs today are harder and harder to define as they are constantly morphing around us. Nothing remains constant for very long. Part of the reason we have lost 14 million “jobs” since the start of the recession is because of this confusion. The “work” these people were doing, for the most part, has not gone away. It has been diffused into the organization or been transformed into technology. In some cases it may have been sent somewhere else, but this is temporary until a way to automate or eliminate the need for it is found.

New jobs will have an expectation of scope, responsibility, and effectiveness that we have primarily only seen in law firms and consulting companies until now. These new jobs will not be static and will require an eclectic set of skills. For example, a very successful WordPress template creator, who works for himself, started out as a computer science major. He then moved to engineering and after a brief stint as a computer engineer became a graphic designer and typographer. This then led him to start a business writing code to create beautiful templates noted for their outstanding focus on fonts and colors. He combined several “jobs” into one, but had to start his own business to earn money doing it.

I believe that we will evolve to focus on roles people can take on, rather than on specific skills and experience. We will look for people who have the ability and the mindset to find where they can add value on their own. And people who can move from technical to soft areas with ease will be in high demand. Many companies are experimenting with putting people into role-based work. Google, for example, often assigns engineers to a team where they work out, with the team members, the role they will play. The same happens routinely at IDEO, the well-known design firm in Palo Alto, California.

Organizations are realizing that when people are assigned to or choose roles to play in an organization they are often more creative and efficient than when they are confined to the duties prescribed by a title or position.

I just read an amazingly thought-provoking blog written by IDEO CEO Tim Brown. In it he talks about IDEO’s quest for T-shaped people, who he believes are the engine of IDEO’s creativity and success. He describes these people this way: the vertical shaft of the “T” represents the depth of expertise/skill that a person exhibits, while the crossbar of the “T” represents the amount they are willing and able to collaborate. People who are T-shaped are well-rounded and versatile. They are better able to contribute their ideas to a discussion and are able to take on a variety of roles. It’s no wonder that IDEO is one of the firms pioneering the change to formalize role-based work and reduce the work that is based on position or title.

We have a ways to go to fully realize the potential of role-based work, as we are caught in a web that pays and promotes people based on such criteria as degrees, years of experience, time in the current position, and so forth. T-shaped people, free to take on different roles as work changes, are far more valuable than those trapped in rigid silos of scope and responsibility.

However, Baby Boomer/hiring manager attitudes about work, laws, and policies will have to change, and there will need to be sweeping changes in how human resources thinks about compensation, promotion, and development to fully transform organizations.

At the Future of Talent Institute, we are focusing our research this year on this issue and will be doing surveys and working with some organizations closely to better understand how role-based work will be defined and what skills recruiters will need to be successful. You can follow our thinking on this at my blog, Over the Seas, and also at our website, www.futureoftalent.org. I’d also love your comments and thoughts on what you are seeing.

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

1. You must be able to walk very slowly, not run. People who are fully employed and very strong always have options, even when you get to them first. Most important, they will not move fast. They want to evaluate the situation and compare it to others that will come along. They will give more value to the long-term career growth opportunities than the short-term issues. Good recruiters know they must move slowly, not selling the job, but selling the idea of a staged series of steps where information is mutually shared, all leading toward the best career move among competing alternatives. Moving too fast is a turn-off. It’s equivalent to making a passive candidate complete an application before you talk to the person.
2. You must be able to instantly convert your job into a career move. Passive candidates and early-birds don’t need another job; they want a better job, generally some type of significant career move. If you don’t know the job at a detailed level, you’ll sound like a used-car salesman selling smoke and mirrors. Knowing the job allows you to ask a few questions early in your conversation to see if there are any gaps or voids in the person’s background that your job fills. If you can fill enough of them, your job becomes a career move. For example, if the budget or team the person has managed in the past isn’t as big as your opening, you have a tremendous chance to excite the hot prospect. Doing this with flair, sophistication, and aplomb is essential, but it all starts by preparing a performance profile with the hiring manager. Without this, assume you won’t be hiring too many great people.
3. You must have exceptional verbal and written skills. Top people need to see the recruiter they’re using to advise them as someone credible. This means you need to speak well, have a complete understanding of the job (the performance profile), your company, and your industry including the competition. This includes preparing well-written emails and professional advertising copy. If you’re not comfortable speaking to people you don’t know who are more senior to you organizationally, you’ll not be able to influence them to consider what you have to offer.
4. You must understand human behavior. Candidates’ job requirements change depending on how long they’ve been looking and how desperate they are. You need to find this out right away. If a candidate is not looking, but open-minded, or has just started looking, you need to recognize that the person wants career-oriented information, not detailed job specific information. I wrote a few articles on Maslow a while back that provide some insight on how to adjust what you say and what you do based on where the person is in their job-hunting process. If you don’t modify your approach with this in mind, it’s comparable to selling a hammer to a plumber, or a laptop to someone who wants a smart phone.
5. You must be a partner with your hiring manager client. Good hiring managers — those who can attract and hire strong people to work for them — are an essential element in hiring more talented people. Good recruiters come next. Eliminating job descriptions is number three on the prerequisite list. Four is recruiters and managers working together, both having a completing understanding of real job needs, trusting each other to accurately assess candidates and jointly working through the recruiting process. If you don’t have all of these elements in place, you won’t be able to hire stronger people unless you have a great brand, an excess supply of top talent, and a willingness to spend more than necessary to convince people to accept your offers.
6. You must break some rules. If you want to hire top performers who you’ve found in the sourcing sweet-spot, expect to break from tradition and aggravate some people. For one thing, ignore the job description. For another, ask for forgiveness, not permission, from the comp department. Top people are not part of the average population. They make more money, have less experience, and won’t play by the rules. So you can’t either, if you want to hire them. If you’re uncomfortable with this, you need to only handle candidates who have responded to your ads. You won’t find many top people this way, but you’ll sleep better at night.
7. You must get the candidate to sell you. Selling isn’t recruiting. Paying salary premiums isn’t either, or playing hard-to-get with a person who’s desperate. Anyone can do this. Presenting a career move in a persuasive manner in order to get a top person who’s fully employed and/or has multiple offers excited enough to tell you why he or she is a perfect fit is recruiting. Being able to pull this off is the key to hiring more top performers. It requires that you know the job, use the interview to look for career gaps, and ask respectful, but challenging questions, that encourage candidates to present in-depth insight into what they’ve accomplished. By staying the buyer this way, you’re able to establish and maintain applicant control.
8. You must determine if you’re interested in the prospect, not the other way around. Most recruiters waste so much time calling up top people — both active and passive — making a bumbling pitch about a job opening, hoping for a statement of interest from the prospect. If not, they move to the next name on the list. If the person says yes, they then qualify the person and hope the person is reasonably good enough to send to the hiring manager for an interview. This is a very low yield and time-consuming process. By presenting your opening as a career move, you’ll be able to get the candidate to describe his/her background before you give too many details. Done properly, you’ll be in a position to determine if you’re interested in the candidate for the opening, rather than the candidate making this decision. This is one of a number of critical steps involved in maintaining applicant control.

You know you’re getting better at maximizing the use of time when top prospects tell you they just started looking or are not looking. If you’re determining interest, you can either then decide to move forward at a slow-but-steady pace, or obtain two to three great referrals if you decide they’re not qualified. Since you’re a partner with your hiring manager clients, 100% of your candidates will get interviewed. Since managers are using performance profiles, not job descriptions, to determine competency and fit, fewer candidates will be excluded for bad reasons or superficial interviews. Since you’re offering career moves, rather than non-descript jobs, fewer candidates will voluntarily opt-out of the process along the way.

On top of this, with a career move as the focus, fewer candidates will be screened out at the beginning and fewer offers will be rejected due to monetary reasons. Collectively, this is how you hire twice as many top performers in half the time. Of course, these are rules you must not break.