If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Most HR/recruiting execs would suggest hiring managers themselves as the likely assignee. Others would contend that HR/recruiting is responsible for the quality of the candidates, but managers are responsible for the quality of hire. Others would suggest there are too many variables to assign it to anyone.

Further confusing the issue is determining when quality of hire should be measured. If you do it before the person starts, you’re measuring the sourcing and selection process. After the hire, you’re measuring the hiring manager’s management and leadership abilities as much as you are the candidate’s ability to perform the job needs. Compounding the time variable is the measurement standard. If you use a different measurement technique for before and after, then you’re left with a comparison between oranges and cell phones, or more likely, experience and qualifications vs. performance.

It’s because of these complex issues that I believe that HR/recruiting must take responsibility for quality of hire. If not HR/recruiting, then who?

Here’s my rationale behind the nomination.

1. Maximizing quality of hire is the most important strategic role HR/recruiting can play. Other than maximizing on-the-job performance and retention, there is no more important role for the HR/recruiting department. Not wanting responsibility for this seems odd to an old recruiter like me. All the executives I’ve placed thrive on this type of challenge. Why would HR/recruiting be reluctant to take on — even demand — this responsibility?
2. The CFO is responsible for the capital acquisition process, so why shouldn’t HR/recruiting be responsible for the talent acquisition process? While the financial department doesn’t select, install, and run the capital equipment it approves, it still manages the approval process and strongly influences the ultimate decision. This parallels the role HR/recruiting should play in the talent acquisition process.
3. Having responsibility means the process is adhered to, not the decision itself. Developing and monitoring the hiring/selection process is the role of HR/recruiting. This means developing and implementing processes that ensure that the best candidates are seen and hired. There should be an audit process as part of this to ensure that the best decision has been made, and that if it has not been, the process is modified.
4. There is a huge tactical and strategic cost to making mistakes. HR/recruiting needs to deal with all the mistakes, including finding replacements and dealing with the legal and employee relations issues. The opportunity costs of bad hires alone provides the rationale for some type of vigorous and auditable selection process. Who else could possibly lead this type of cross-functional effort?
5. If not HR/recruiting, then who? Hiring managers should police themselves on quality of hire. Some do it, most don’t, and even those that do, don’t do it well. Regardless, there should be one standardized process that works and is used company-wide. This is the primary reason why hiring managers can only be held responsible for the successful performance of the person hired, not the process used. If some managers want to use their own process, they need to be held 100% responsible for mistakes, including the costs associated with this. This is one way to convince them they should use the approved process.

Of course, if HR/recruiting is given the responsibility for maximizing and measuring quality of hire, there comes some programs that need to be implemented to pull it off. Here are some quick recommendations:

1. Stop using job descriptions to source and select candidates. If you describe the work that needs to be done and assess candidates on this, before and after the hire, you’ll solve the dual measurement problem and reduce turnover dramatically. The primary reasons new hires underperform and/or leave is lack of understanding of real job needs and a poor fit with their hiring manager.
2. Develop sourcing programs that target high-quality candidates, rather than eliminating the worst to see who’s left. This is not insignificant. It means you must stop asking knockout questions and stop posting boring ads. The only reason companies ask knockout questions is to eliminate weak candidates who apply. If you change the sourcing paradigm to target great candidates, rather than hoping great candidates fall through the cracks, you eliminate the “eliminate the weak candidates” problem at the strategic level.
3. Use a performance-based talent scorecard and evidence-based assessment system to measure pre-hire quality. Competency models and behavioral interviews are too generic and do not measure a candidate’s ability and motivation to perform the actual tasks required for success. Instead, candidates should be evaluated across all real jobs, including their ability to work effectively with the hiring manager. Quantifiable evidence of consistent and comparable past performance needs to be the basis of the yes/no decision.

With this type of process in place, HR/recruiting’s role then becomes one of ensuring that the process for maximizing quality of hire is being followed — not making the hiring decision. This is comparable to the authority given, or taken, by the CFO, in ensuring that capital expenditures are justified in some reasonable fashion. Maximizing the quality of every single hiring decision is the primary strategic role of the HR/recruiting department. If HR/recruiting wants a seat at the strategic table it should demand this responsibility.

For as long as I can remember, recruiters have focused on cost as the primary measure of their effectiveness and value to the organization. The most popular recruiting metric has been cost-per-hire, and recruiting functions justify their existence by showing how much less expensive they are than an outsourced solution.

This, however, has begun to change.

Even though we are in a recession, skilled talent is hard to find, and demographic projections indicate a long-term swing toward a candidate-driven market. If you are in Europe or recruit for European operations, the aging workforce and the lack of fresh, skilled talent has to be a major concern.

Positions are open longer and hiring managers ask for more resumes to review, not being satisfied with those recruiters provide. There may be hundreds of candidates on the job market at the moment, but managers are still frustrated at the inability of their internal recruiters to find what they consider quality talent. The most important metrics today are those of speed and quality. The best recruiters are measured on how quickly they present candidates and on the quality of those candidates.

In many organizations, outsourcing decisions are being made on these metrics, not on cost. Managers are finding that having a good employee when they need one is much more important than how much it costs to get him or her.

But one hurdle looms over all of this. That hurdle is to define what we mean when we say that one candidate is “better” than another. How do recruiters and hiring managers define quality? Who defines it? And how can it be tracked? These are the tough questions that need answers.

Quality can be defined and here are a few ideas on how to do it. The only caveat is that this process has to be dome for each type of position in your organization.

Number 1: Establish specific competencies or traits that equal quality in the minds of your hiring managers and use it to assess candidates

Most hiring managers do not have any definition of a “quality employee.” Some managers say that they know a quality employee when they have one, but they struggle with a hard definition.

A recruiter’s job is to help them create that definition. The place to start is to unravel the skills, competencies, and traits of the best performers. Unravel the ones that really differentiate average and superior employees and make a list of those. A list should be short and clear, with levels of accomplishment included. It might look something like the diagram you see with this article. I usually try very hard to keep the list to two key items per topic.

It may also be very useful to look at the worst performers and see what it is they don’t have. By listing the characteristics that are common to both the best and the worst employees in a function, you will begin to develop a profile that can eventually be used for selection, performance management, and development. These characteristics could be traits such as willingness to compromise, an open attitude toward new ideas, or frugality in business dealings. Or they could be competencies such as the ability to create spreadsheets in a certain time, or the capability of editing complex documents. And they can also include a level of knowledge such as expert-level knowledge of Unix or of a manufacturing process.

Most likely any definitions of quality would include elements from each of these categories. Notice that these are all output-based measures — in other words, measures that can be seen or demonstrated in the work an employee does. They are the opposite of input-based measures such as length of experience or level of education. These types of measures tell you very little about the quality of a person’s performance.

You may need to partner with your internal organizational development group or with your training department to do this. It does take time and it takes willing managers to partner with you in the process. The result, though, will be a much clearer understanding of what kinds of people need to be sourced and hired.

Number 2: Educate hiring managers

Very few hiring managers know much about selection or about what it takes to assess a candidate. Even though you may have put all the managers though some sort of interview training, I am sure they have forgotten most of it and have used it less. Most of us are not disciplined nor can we expect the typical manager to become expert with these techniques. One area where recruiters can add value is to pre-screen and evaluate candidates against the criteria that you developed above. These criteria, remember, should have been determined in partnership with the managers. Each of you can use lists of these and behavioral interview questions or a variety of tests can be developed and used to measure these traits, competencies, and knowledge. Managers can help you determine how to weight the criteria, and they should be well aware of the consequences of using the criteria.

You can spend small amounts of time over a few weeks presenting bits of this information and moving the managers to understanding and acceptance. If you can, you could also hold seminars and use case studies and examples from your own organization to help managers understand how important it is to select people with the right skills and the right organizational fit and attitude.

Number 3: Investigate and experiment with new tools for screening and selection

It is still a bit surprising to me that very few firms are taking advantage of the many online tools that are emerging to help screen candidates before investing a large amount of time in interviews. By using the Internet and your corporate website, you can ask candidates to engage in a dialogue and mutual assessment process. While you are looking at their skills and fit, they can be looking at your organization and can make decisions on whether or not they like what they see. Many people I have spoken with have seen one side of an organization while interviewing, and another less attractive one after they are hired. There is still value in letting candidates email other employees for information about the company and work-life. There is a need for job previews and better job descriptions that are based on reality, not what we wish were true.

By defining up front what constitutes a quality candidate, you can remove much of the present frustration candidates have over why they were not chosen for an interview, and you can also reduce the number of unqualified candidates who apply. Many do so because they do not know or understand your definition of quality.

By working with hiring managers, getting them to write down and define for you the competencies and traits of successful employees, and by putting those to use in your screening and interviewing processes, you can improve candidate quality in a measurable way.

There was the “CIO” position calling for a high school diploma and two to three years of experience. He actually emailed the company and found out it was a startup with fewer than six employees. They were really looking for a network admin and thought a flashy title would attract someone entrepreneurial. OK, this is obviously an amateurish company that has no clue how to write a job description to save their lives.

But what about the global telecom company that was looking for a software manager who had a requirement of “5-7 years experience using .NET 2.0 or above.” In Seattle, I can tell you exactly when .NET became “the platform.” In 2004. My friend spoke to the recruiter, and she told him that he didn’t have enough .NET 3.0 experience; the hiring manager wanted someone with at least five years of experience with .NET 3.0. But 3.0 has only been around for three years or so. We are only on version 3.5 now. My friend tried to explain that to the recruiter, but she obviously had no understanding of the technology she was recruiting for.

As a recruiter, I have friends and colleagues constantly asking me “why do companies do this?”

It ranges from the whole lack of follow-through when it comes to the candidate experience to hyping job descriptions way out of proportion (sheer hypocrisy, IMHO, when we complain about exaggerated resumes!) How many times can I say to my professional network that hiring managers generally write job descriptions, and unless a recruiter is really knowledgeable about the industry and the job, s/he has no idea why two “requirements” may be mutually exclusive, or that sometimes a company will use a generic description to build a pipeline, or that perhaps the organization has an internal candidate lined up but for legal reasons has to post the job externally? It’s getting really old, really fast.

And in my own search for a position in the last several months I am appalled at the lack of what I see as “professional courtesy.” If I have a phone screen or in-person interviews with a member of an organization for a recruiting position, and you don’t give me the courtesy of answering my email or phone call a week later to follow up on my candidacy, why on earth would I consider working for you? Obviously you don’t value the candidate experience.

Yes, we are swamped with resumes and our sourcing may be falling by the wayside. Yes, our hiring managers are being incredibly slow to respond to us and candidates are getting desperate. Yes, we may even be concerned about riding out this economy. But many of the pains the candidates are feeling are not new, they are not unique, and as a profession we are giving ourselves a bad reputation, worse than even it was before. My own rule of thumb is that if a candidate has spoken with anyone from my organization (phone screen, for example) they deserve a politely worded email or phone call to let them know they are no longer a candidate for the position.

If organizations are laying off their seasoned recruiters in an effort to save money, they are doing themselves a huge injustice when job descriptions and situations like the ones outlined above become more commonplace than not. Recruiters should be some of the most valuable gatekeepers any organization — be it corporate, non-profit, or agency environments — has in their arsenal. And part of that gatekeeping responsibility lies with the recruiter to push back on badly written job descriptions. It goes to the “account management” portion of our profession. We are the experts at what we do, and our hiring managers should respect that knowledge and work in partnership with us.

The basic premise is that circumstances are far more critical to ultimate success than any other factor. For example, he cites the fact that Gates, Jobs, and comparable computer all-stars were born in the mid-1950s as being a critical factor leading to their industry success. When the PC revolution started they were just the right age — old enough to participate, but not yet established on a career path that prevented them from taking risks.

For another example, Gladwell points out that most professional athletic stars are born in the first quarter of the year they were first allowed to participate in their sport. The idea here is that whether it’s youth hockey, baseball, or any sport for that matter, the best players at this early age are more mature since they’re 3-9 months older than their competition. This difference means a lot when you’re five or six. The chosen ones are then given more opportunities to be trained and play more often. Overall, the best of this group put in thousands of hours more honing their skills, in comparison to those of equal talent who didn’t make the team just because they were too young at the time.

Of course, opportunity is just one factor involved in success. Talent is still critical and essential, but according to Gladwell, not as important as hard work. This is where the extra thousands of hours of effort comes into play.

To become a master at any craft requires plenty of hard work, at least 10,000 hours, according to Gladwell. As an example, he cites Mozart who didn’t write any worthwhile music until he was in his mid-20s, after about 10,000 hours. The Beatles are another example cited, who worked 10 long years perfecting their craft at all-night clubs in Germany.

Now what does all of this have to do with recruiting and hiring top talent? The answer started back in 1978 when I first became a third-party recruiter.

After a few years of dealing with top people, it became clear that the best of the bunch had a number of core traits in common, specifically talent, hard work, and strong team skills.

This eventually became the Formula for Hiring Success described in my book, Hire With Your Head (Wiley, 2007, 3rd edition).

Here’s the abbreviated formula for hiring success:

Adler’s Formula for Hiring Success = Talent X Energy2 plus Team Skills

Translation: Enough talent to do the work times motivation to do the work squared plus comparable team skills.

The reason motivation to do the work is squared is because it’s the driving force behind talent, and without it, strong team skills don’t really matter. This pretty much parallels Gladwell’s observations.

The point is that circumstances and talent can take you only so far, but without hard work, 10,000 hours in Gladwell’s assessment, you won’t go too far. Of course, without the right set of circumstances, you won’t go as far as possible, even if you work extremely hard.

With the Gladwell insight, I’ve modified the success formula slightly, as shown below:

The Adler/Gladwell Formula for Hiring Success = Appropriate Job Circumstances plus Talent X Energy2 plus Team Skills

Although I didn’t use this exact formula, the simple concept allowed me to become a more effective recruiter. You might find it useful as well, whether you are a recruiter or a hiring manager facing a tough selection decision.

Here’s how:

Consider the formula from two perspectives, one from an assessment standpoint and the other from a career-counseling point of view.

Obviously, whether you’re a recruiter or hiring manager you only want to hire people who are highly motivated to do the actual work required and have the appropriate level of talent and team skills. On the flip side, if the job can be clearly presented as a worthy career move, the candidate will value it more highly than a job of lesser opportunity, even one paying more.

None of this matters much if you don’t define the actual work required. This is the core problem with vague or generic job descriptions. They don’t define the work in enough depth to allow the interviewer to accurately assess motivation to do it. Instead, motivation to get the job and the degree of extroversion is used to assess motivation to do the work. Making matters worse is the use of generic skills and competencies to assess talent and the degree of affability used to assess team skills.

The result? Once the probation period ends, many new employees settle in to a routine of average effort, average performance, and satisfactory team skills, despite so much promise during the interview.

Recruiting and closing are made more difficult without a meaningful job description, since it’s more difficult to prove that vagueness and an employer brand represent career opportunity. Under this situation, every job looks like every other one, with compensation the only differentiator.

If compensation is the primary reason a candidate is taking one job over another, the job shouldn’t be offered or taken. This results in the worst of all possible situations — a person who is overpaid while not learning or growing.

This is a pretty powerful case for the idea that job descriptions need to be defined in enough detail to more accurately assess motivation and better present the true career opportunity. In our company, we use performance profiles to describe actual job needs.

Here’s the quick description from Hire With Your Head:

“A performance profile describes the six to eight performance objectives a person taking the job needs to do in order to be considered successful. It differs from a job description in that it doesn’t describe skills or traits, but rather what the person needs to accomplish with his or her skills and traits.”

For example, rather than say a software developer must have 3-5 years of C++ and Java background, it’s more relevant to say the person will lead the development of a robust online search query system for a new eCommerce site.

This type of clarity allows an interviewer to determine direct competency and motivation by getting examples of recent accomplishments doing comparable work. (Here’s an article on using just one question demonstrating how to do this.)

From a recruiting standpoint, it’s also easier to position your opening as a good career move if the candidate finds the work itself meaningful while providing a strong learning opportunity.

The right circumstances lay the foundation for personal success. Of course, it takes enough talent to take advantage of the situation and strong degree of self-motivation to maximize the opportunity.

Whether you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, you’ll need to convert your job descriptions into challenges, projects, and performance expectations. Then use the interview to determine whether these represent a growth and learning opportunity for the candidate. During the interview, find six or more examples of where the candidate exceeded expectations or pushed herself to excel.

If these are comparable to the work you need done, you have found a star, and your star has found a true opportunity to take advantage of her talent.

Senior Financial Analyst-DARIEN, CT

Sr Financial Analyst. Salary 60-70K plus 6% bonus.

They are looking for 5 + yrs exp. Do not want candidates who are overqualified who will settle for les money. They are NOT seeking resumes of Wall Street Brokers and others candidates who are willing to settle for less. There is a train station 3 blocks away and 50 minutes from Grand central. Ideal candidates come out of Manufacturing with hands on Accounting exp.

From email to caller ID to voice mail, recruiters can now employ and hide behind electronic shields that are virtually impenetrable by ordinary candidates. Job boards have promised exposure to more potential employers and an easy one-stop experience for job hunting. What candidates actually get, especially in a depressed job market, is inclusion among thousands of others who have similar backgrounds or job aspirations. Rather than gain exposure, their resumes become buried.

Email makes submitting a resume and communicating with a recruiter or hiring manager easier than ever, but in reality the huge volume of email most recruiters receive causes them to ignore and neglect candidates more than ever. Voice mail has become primarily a way of avoiding speaking directly to candidates.

So much of the technology that aids recruiters has actually increased candidate frustration and disenchantment with the corporate recruiting process. Mistreated, ignored, and often frustrated candidates are not likely to say good things about us or our organizations. They may be easy to hire, but they will be hard to retain.

It would be in our own self-interest if we developed and promoted a candidates’ bill of rights that spells out how they should be treated and what they should expect in their search for a new position. There have been attempts to create these in the past, but none have gained much interest. In good times, unfortunately, neither candidates nor recruiters have much motivation to create such a document. Perhaps in this period of uncertainty and frustration such a document can flourish. If there is no collective effort to create a bill of rights, it would be a competitive advantage for any company to create its own such document and use it on their career site and in their promotion to candidates.

The level of frustration is growing. The longer the recession continues, the deeper this will become. Candidates are not asking for a lot — just basic guidelines and an understanding of how we make interview and hiring decisions. They are seeking some understanding of what the process and timelines are for a position and how your organization goes about its hiring. This is not a lot to ask, but I have not seen a single corporation that spells this out at any level.

Using ideas from RPOs, Accolo, and the American Staffing Association, below I have suggested several possible categories where candidates’ rights could be explained and guaranteed. Your organization may not choose to use all of the categories, but providing information or guidelines for any of them would be a huge step forward.

Honesty and Authenticity

The first category would focus on ensuring that the status of a position was honestly stated. It would ensure that all advertised positions were really open and available to job seekers, and would indicate how committed the hiring organization was to filling the open position with external candidates. It would clearly state if the positions would be open in the future or if internal candidates were being considered first.

Accuracy

The second category would focus on accuracy in describing the position. It would list the competencies, skills, or other specific attributes that will be key in making a hiring decision. It would be clear about whether or not the position requires relocation or whether it can be performed virtually. Ideally it would also contain some indication of how success will be measured.

Complete Information

An additional category would guarantee that candidates will be fully briefed on the organization, hiring manager, and position prior to any interview. They will be provided with links to appropriate websites or other information useful in preparing them for an interview.

Process

A fourth category would provide some indication to the candidate as to how the interview and hiring decision will be made, who will make it, and approximately when it will be decided. It could indicate the selection criteria or the process by which the position will be filled. It could explain the interview or selection process.

Status

The fifth level would inform applicants about the status of their application and where in the process they are, and would provide them with a guarantee that they will be given a reason as to why they were not being considered. It would let them know how soon after an interview they will be notified of the result and what that notification will contain.

Confidentiality

A final category would outline the type and level of confidentiality. Ideally it would entitle candidates to security and confidentiality of their personal and professional background and data. It would require a candidate to give permission for that data to be shared with anyone outside the organization.

While I am a believer that as an industry we should adopt such a document, I urge you to consider doing so as a way to differentiate yourself from the completion and as a powerful way to build candidate loyalty and your employment brand.

A comparable situation exists in how most corporations have designed their hiring processes.

In this analogy, this means the needs of top candidates must drive every aspect of a company’s hiring processes, not the ego of managers, nor the bureaucrats in legal and HR. Your company falls into this category if you worry more about preventing average people from applying instead of figuring out how to attract more top performers. You’re equally culpable if hiring managers won’t see someone without all of the skills listed on the job description, if these same managers think they’re great interviewers, if they won’t spend time discussing real job needs with their recruiting team, or if they expect candidates to be enthused during the first interview.

I neither like nor dislike unions, but I do believe that they can make companies uncompetitive if they restrict management’s hand in optimizing business performance. However, I also believe that employees, whether unionized or not, need to be given a certain set of rights to protect their collective interests. Too much power in the hands of anyone unlevels the playing field. As a result, some regulation is required to preserve an appropriate balance of power. Finding this equal balance is pretty tricky, and history doesn’t offer many good solutions.

Now what does this all have to do with sourcing and hiring more top performers?

The idea behind all of this is something called sub-optimization. Sub-optimization occurs when the rights of a sub-group override what’s best for the primary group. In essence, the sub-group can’t see beyond its own self-interests. I’d suggest lawyers, government regulators, corporate bureaucrats, and academicians prevent companies from hiring the best people because they don’t see the bigger picture. Include here untrained interviewers, managers who rely on the gut, and recruiters who act more like vendors and car salesmen, than consultants.

In sourcing, a top candidate perspective is necessary when designing hiring processes, not some power grabbing bureaucrat or unsophisticated neophyte. Some examples will help clarify this cynical viewpoint:

1. Requiring candidates to complete an application before they can search for jobs or be seriously considered. This scares the best people off who early in a search for a new job are just comparison shopping and have little time to complete an application.
2. Requiring excessive reporting because someone applied for a job. There are a number of better ways to ensure equal opportunity rather than adding burdensome reporting requirements to an already over-taxed system.
3. Including skills and experience requirements in a job posting. By default, job ads really describe average people, not the best people. The best performers by definition always have less than the requirements listed. That’s what makes them all top performers. (Here’s an article on banning job descriptions you’ll find uplifting.)
4. Using competency models to select candidates. Competencies are not transferrable to different jobs, so just because a person has them doesn’t mean the person will use them in a different job. For example, being an aggressive hunter doesn’t mean the person will be an aggressive farmer, even if the person is selling the exact same product.
5. Not using the latest advertising and marketing ideas to find and attract top performers. Since the purpose of a job posting is to attract the attention of a top person and compel the person to apply, it seems odd that most companies write boring ads that no one can find. (Here are some ideas on how to test this idea out.)
6. Managers who expect candidates to be excited about the job before they even know what it is. This is idiot-think. The only people who could be excited about a job without knowing much about it are those more interested in the paycheck than the work. (How to tame your hiring manager clients.)
7. Setting up processes to prevent unqualified people from being seen or applying. I’m still dumbfounded when people say they don’t want to post creative ads because they’ll attract too many unqualified people. Commonsense and technology can separate the good from the bad. Every aspect of the hiring process from A to Z needs to be examined from the perspective of attracting more top performers as the primary objective. A subset of this is how to separate the good from the bad.
8. The use of subjective data to screen candidates. When are skills, experiences, competencies, and behaviors objective? This is subjective data. The only objective data is a set of realistic performance objectives for the job with people being selected based on their demonstrated ability and desire to meet these objectives. As long as they can successfully do the work, this opens up the pool to anyone who is qualified regardless of their educational background, ethnicity, marital status, age, or physical capability.
9. The idea of building processes to hire average people, and being surprised that top performers are not applying. Collectively, this is the biggest bureaucratic puzzle of them all. In an attempt to abide by every legal pronouncement, to appease every ego, and to not rock the boat, companies have created hiring processes that don’t work. To be effective a hiring process needs to be designed based on the needs of the target audience — in this case, top performers. Balance of power can then be shared as long as no one loses sight of this primary objective.

An optimal hiring decision involves the hiring manager, the recruiter, and the candidate being in agreement with respect to current job needs and performance expectations. Based on this, candidates need a good understanding of growth opportunities based on them successfully achieving these targets. This discussion initially needs to take place with few restraints and preconditions. Unfortunately too many promising hiring opportunities never get to this point for the reasons cited above.

A strong recruiter can offset some of these problems by acting as a go-between in these early stages, but this is not a sustainable model in an environment where bureaucracy and ego prevails. This is comparable to Detroit’s problem with the UAW. The obvious solution to the hiring problem is similar to Detroit’s as well — a declaration of bankruptcy and a complete restructuring. This means that every process, from writing an ad to making an offer, is based on the idea the best people are different than the rest. It’s the same as designing cars that people want and letting them look at them without requiring a credit app first.

Instead, consider successful recruiting more like a well-planned football drive, where time of possession is key. If you’re not into football analogies, the idea here is that top people don’t make critical career decisions on the first call or after the first interview. And if you try to push too hard to get a commitment you’ll drive the best away. This is equivalent to a turnover.

With a great football weekend ahead, here’s what it takes to turn a successful drive into a touchdown:

1. Don’t fumble the kickoff. On the recruiting playing field this is equivalent to the candidate asking about the compensation first, or telling you she’s not interested. It’s also forcing a candidate to apply for the job before she can talk to someone about it, to get a better idea if the job is even worthwhile considering. For better kickoff returns, add a chat feature today to your career website and let your candidates IM a recruiter. Or add a series of FAQs about each job. When calling a candidate on the phone for the first time, whether the person’s active or passive, you must not discuss compensation under any circumstances for at least the first 10-15 minutes! The goal of the first encounter is to switch the conversation to career opportunity and away from compensation, or any other form of “not interested.” (Here’s an article with more on this critical step.) Rather than sell the job, your goal is to sell the next step. In this case, it’s a 10- minute conversation just to figure out if the job is worth getting serious about. A good kickoff return will give you great field position, and this is just as critical in football as it is in recruiting.
2. Get lots of first downs. While you might have a big 30- or 40-yard play now and then, this should be the exception, not the rule. If you’re relying on big plays to score, you’ll lose a lot of candidates who need to move slowly to digest what you’re offering. Force-feeding information at hyper-speed won’t work. A career move requires time for the person to digest the information. Nurturing the candidate along, suggesting another interview or discussion is how this information is best presented in order to be absorbed properly. This is why selling the next step is so important, rather than forcing the candidate to consider the job, the comp, and the location during the first call.
3. Prevent turnovers. Once you begin a drive downfield, don’t do dumb things that cause the deal to instantly fall apart. Recruiters who don’t know the job and managers who over-talk and sell too soon are two examples of recruiting turnovers. Managers who expect top performers to be excited about the job before they know anything about it are the most turnover prone. Turnovers can also be caused when members of the hiring team ask superficial question or are equally clueless about real jobs needs. Lack of professionalism at any step in the hiring process can result in unnecessary turnovers and the loss of some great candidates.
4. Convert your third-downs. Once in awhile you’ll only have one shot to keep the deal alive. For example, if the candidate says she doesn’t like the manager or the job isn’t big enough and wants to withdraw her name from consideration, you’ll have to come up with a big third-down play. In this case, ask the candidate if she’d reconsider if you made the job bigger, or if you could demonstrate that the style the manager used during the interview isn’t the same as his on-the-job persona. Of course, you then have to prove it if the candidate agrees to go forward, but that’s how you convert third-downs and keep the drive alive.
5. Keep the defense honest. Don’t tip your hand too soon. Overselling the candidate, over-talking, and under-listening are equivalent to telling the defense you’re going to pass on every play. This is no way to win a ball game or hire a top performer. Keep the candidate guessing, mention other top candidates, question the candidate’s breadth of experience, and excite the candidate with projects bigger than he’s handled in the past. This is how you keep the person interested throughout the assessment and recruiting process.
6. Time of possession is key. Don’t rush to close. Not only does the candidate need time to evaluate what you’re offering, you’ll increase your close rate by getting the person to invest more time in evaluating your opportunity rather than the competition’s. I suggest more interviews spread over a few days or weeks, rather than pushing them all into one day. Also add a take-home case study and a Profiles International online evaluation for all your candidates once you get serious. (Email info@adlerconcepts.com for information about the Profiles International online evaluation.) The case study allows the candidate a day or two to evaluate a problem likely to be faced on the job with the results presented in a formal give-and-take panel interview. The Profiles is a one-hour cognitive and behavioral style assessment and provides invaluable insight into the candidate. Not only are the results useful, but when candidates agree to participate in these time-consuming tasks, they’re expressing serious interest and increasing their commitment to you.
7. Know your competition. One size doesn’t fit all. Some candidates are interested in security, others want challenging projects, and some want career growth. Customize your approach depending on the candidate’s needs. We suggest a multi-factor close where the candidate rank orders his job requirements. Some of the items to be considered include work content, job stretch, job challenges, growth opportunities, company culture, compensation, security, the hiring manager, and team. (Send us an email, info@adlerconcepts.com, if you’d like to see the whole list.) With this custom playbook you can change your play calling at the line of scrimmage to ensure your candidate gets the information required to make a well thought-out final decision. Of course, evaluate the candidate across multiple factors as well, so stop the traditional series of one-on-one interviews that are both duplicative and exhausting. Instead, consider tours with debriefing sessions, group interviews, some intense one-on-ones, a take-home project, and a business lunch. Then formally debrief using a broad-based selection criteria. (Here’s the 10-factor candidate assessment form we suggest for this.)
8. Maintain a competitive edge throughout the drive. The key to effective recruiting is applicant control. This means staying the buyer from first contact through offer acceptance and final close. As part of applicant control, your job is not only to advance downfield, but recognize that first downs are earned by getting the candidate to agree to something significant at each step in the process. For example, don’t arrange the first interview with the hiring manager unless you get agreement from the candidate that she’ll be looking at the job as a career move with a modest increase in salary. Use the second round of interviews to gain more concessions, like a possible start date and informal agreement on the benefits package. Set the final offer meeting with the candidate agreeing to formally accepting within 24 hours. This is applicant control, and it essential for closing the best entry-level candidates as well as senior executives.
9. Don’t fumble in the red zone. You must score when you’re within sight of the goal line. Make sure you know where you stand compared to the competition on all critical decision factors the candidate is likely to consider. Giving the candidate the multi-factor decision form mentioned above ensures the candidate is looking at the job broadly, and you’re not surprised by their order of importance. This way during the drive to close you can use each subsequent interview step to cover each of these factors. Caution: don’t present the offer too soon or reveal your hand. You haven’t scored yet.
10. Score. Everything has been a waste of time if a candidate says she’s not interested or accepts another offer or counter-offer. Scoring in the game of recruiting means the candidate has accepted your offer on fair terms and shows up on the start date. The best way to score more often is to test every aspect of the offer before you make it. While it’s important not to fumble the kickoff, it’s more important not to fumble on the one-yard line. Before making the offer formal, review the terms in detail and ask the candidate if she’ll accept it on these terms if it’s formally presented without hesitation. If you sense hesitation, side-step the forward progression and find out the concerns. Then ask the person if she’d accept the offer if the concerns were satisfactorily addressed. Uncovering the candidate’s concerns before you make the offer is essential if you want to make more placements. Of course you’ll need to address the concerns to close the deal, but rushing the offer without knowing if the person will accept is naïve at best, and one sure way to lose more candidates than necessary.

Slow down and make more placements. While you want to move as fast as possible, the best people will not move faster than they can absorb the information. They’ll opt-out otherwise. It’s just like being pushed into buying anything that requires some significant degree of comparison shopping and evaluation. Build this slow and steady process into every phase of your recruiting efforts and watch your placement rate soar.

Fumbles, turnovers, incomplete passes, sacks, and failed third-down conversions are all caused by going too fast. Don’t sell the job, sell the next step.

On September 16, 2008, Carly Fiorina (the former CEO of HP and McCain supporter) made the statement that none of the president or VP candidates had the experience to be the CEO of a major corporation. The McCain team wasn’t too pleased with her remarks, and she’s been taken off the tour.

However, her dilemma raises an important question: Are the skills and abilities to run an international, multi-unit corporation comparable to those needed to run the U.S. government?

The answer to this becomes quite clear once you prepare a performance profile for each job.

For background, a performance profile is not a job description listing skills, abilities, and experience requirements. Instead, it describes the performance expectations for the job, describing what the person must do to be successful. It’s filled with action verbs like build, create, develop, initiate, solve, design, etc., not passive verbs and statements like “have” and “be responsible for.”

For example, a performance profile for a sales rep selling plumbing products in Peoria might state “achieve and sustain the monthly quota 90 days after successfully completing the sales training program.” The job description for this same job would state something like, “must have 3-5 years b-to-b plumbing parts industry experience.”

As I have ranted on these pages many times before, the continued use of traditional job descriptions is the primary reason companies can’t find enough top people to fill critical hiring needs. Everyone agrees that skills and experience don’t predict future performance. This is the core problem with job descriptions.

Past behavior doesn’t predict future performance, either, if the person is doing different work. This is the problem with behavioral interviewing. The use of behavioral interviewing in combination with traditional job descriptions only makes sense when the person is doing essentially the same work in the same culture with a similar supervisor.

A performance profile overcomes all of these impediments by emphasizing the performance expectations of the job and the environment, not the skills required to do it. The assessment involves comparing the candidate’s actual accomplishments to these requirements.

There are typically 6-8 key performance objectives for any job, whether it’s entry-level or executive management. Once completed, a performance profile can be turned into a compelling ad describing the projects, challenges, and opportunities.

As part of this, the requirements to apply are changed from having identical skills and experience to having achieved some type of comparable performance. This instantly opens up the candidate pool to more diverse candidates, more high-potential candidates, and more top performers who have achieved similar results in related industries and fields.

It takes about an hour discussion with a hiring manager to ferret out the key performance objectives for most jobs. To get a sense of this process, ask your hiring manager client the following questions when taking your next search assignment for a manager or executive position:

1. Why would a top person want this job? What makes it a good short- and long-term career move?
2. What are some of the big challenges the person taking this job is likely to face?
3. What are some of the specific projects the person will be working on?
4. What will success look like after six months? What about 12 months?
5. What are the big technical issues the person needs to address?
6. Describe the team and some of the challenges the person might face in dealing with the team or rebuilding it.
7. What are some of the critical problems the person will face right away that need to be resolved?
8. Are there any process issues that need to be improved or redesigned?
9. Are there any long-term strategic issues that need to be addressed?
10. Describe the culture and environment of the organization. Does this need to be changed or modified in some way to put the organization on a long-term path to success?

The idea here is to develop a list of 6-8 performance objectives put in some type of priority order that describe on-the-job success. Candidates are then interviewed and assessed against this benchmark by asking them to describe a series of comparable accomplishments. (Note: if you use my two-question performance-based interview you’ll be able to accurately assess any candidate’s ability to accomplish these tasks.)

Now let’s get back to Carly’s dilemma regarding the presidential candidates’ ability to run a corporation. Let’s start by examining the following pretty high-level view of a performance profile for a CEO for a large multi-national firm.

1. Evaluate the current operating plans for all units and ensure they’re on track and that the reporting systems are in place to ensure real-time visibility into business performance.
2. Establish programs to determine if the executive teams at all units, including corporate and group headquarters, are fully able to handle the company’s current business opportunities and overall growth plans.
3. Ensure that the overall strategic path of each group/division is appropriate and established.
4. Identify critical weaknesses in every unit that could affect short- and long-term operating performance and implement immediate corrective actions.
5. Fully understand the company’s financial strengths and weaknesses and lead the establishment of programs and controls to meet government, legal, and investor needs.
6. Lead the negotiation of big buy/sell global mega-deals that affect company strategy and direction.
7. Lead the integration of disparate business units to achieve economies of scale.
8. Deal with the conflict between the need to balance short-term financial performance with long-term growth.

There are probably a lot more, but you get an idea of the complexities needed to be the CEO of a large publicly traded company that’s operating on an international scale. (As a separate task, you might want to rank your current CEO on these measures.)

From my perspective, it’s pretty clear that the current crop of Presidential candidates are not qualified to be CEOs; the jobs are just too different. In my opinion, Carly was 100% right on this point, and should not have been chastised for it. The media clearly doesn’t understand these differences in roles, either, since they’re the ones who misunderstood both the comments and the underlying issues.

A U.S. President isn’t directly involved in understanding markets, products, distribution, manufacturing, accounting, IT, performance reporting, and running a business for profit. The president might be tangentially involved in the budgeting, financing, trade, organizational management, tax, compliance, and some of the diplomatic issues involved in operating on a world stage, but it’s a stretch to think they’re the same.

One could argue that there are some other overlaps, but it seems to me the differences between a corporate CEO and the U.S. President are far greater than the similarities. Of course, a person qualified to be a corporate CEO wouldn’t necessarily be qualified to be the President, either. While the intellectual, organizational and the complexities of the problems faced are comparable, how decisions are made and executed are fundamentally different. (Here’s a companion article describing a performance profile for the U.S. President. You can judge for yourself which candidate is most qualified, and even if your current CEO could handle the job.)

Despite all of this, the idea of putting a performance profile together before interviewing candidates is one sure way to make better hiring decisions. This is true whether you’re hiring a U.S. President, corporate CEO, or entry-level accountant.

Preparing a performance profile, however, requires the active involvement of the hiring manager, often the biggest stumbling block of them all.

For some illogical reason, most fight the idea of clarifying job expectations before hiring someone using the “I don’t have the time” excuse. Yet they’ll spend hours after a hire is made over-managing their newest staff member hoping for average performance. Once you overcome this hurdle, don’t be surprised that you’re finding and hiring more top performers than you thought possible.

His company, ABC, needed some very specialized people and he couldn’t find them. For over two years, Paul had tried to fill some very specialized and always open positions by using Internet search and revamping the career site. He had even put his reputation on the line a few months back when he insisted that a central sourcing team would solve the perpetual lack of qualified candidates.

He had just finished a tough meeting with his sourcing team trying to figure out why there were no candidates in their talent pool. He had been certain that there would be several potential people from that pool; when the hiring managers had told him about their openings, he had assured them it wouldn’t take very long.

After all, the team had known about the competencies these positions required for months. Now it looked bleak.

What had gone wrong?

When he took his current position, he was aware that finding the highly specialized robotic engineers and technicians the firm needed was his number-one challenge.

Even though the organization was located in the heart of the academic world, with major research schools and labs everywhere, these robotics people remained a scare commodity and the few that he did find were happier remaining in academia.

He had worked with compensation to sweeten the incentives and he had spent time with a big-name advertising agency honing the recruiting messages and redoing the career site. They had won awards and been written about in ERE and in recruiting blogs. Paul had been given several awards. But he was failing.

The company was quite unique. It developed robots that mimicked the human hand. These mechanical hands were incredible. They could pick up an egg without breaking it and yet they could slice through a piece of steel like scissors through paper. They could manipulate, sew, pick up tiny parts, and insert them into circuit boards and they could perform some types of surgery, with assistance from a human doctor.

The demand was growing rapidly, yet the supply of people to design, improve, and manufacture them remained small. Not many schools turned out robotics engineers and not many students choose that as a career.

The engineering team had also placed tight competency requirements on candidates. Every candidate had to have degrees in at least two related disciplines, such as mechanical and electrical engineering, or computer science and mechanical engineering. Or, they had to have 5 or more years of experience and a single degree.

Hiring managers wanted prior experience in robotics, if possible, or experience in manufacturing or designing miniature components or nanotechnology. They wanted engineers capable of demonstrating these products to a global customer base. And each robot had to be installed and “tuned” for each customer, which frequently required foreign travel for a long period of time.

Even though Paul had pushed back on these tough requirements, he had not been able to change their opinions. And his sourcing team couldn’t find the right people.

So here he sat on a lovely afternoon, befuddled and at a loss. Should he quit? Did he admit defeat? Was there a way out? What strategies or tactics could he apply to this situation that might rescue him, and the organization?

I am hoping you can help Paul. What are your ideas and suggestions? I will summarize them and add my thoughts in a future column.

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

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

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

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

Handling Common Early Stage Objections

1. What’s the compensation? When someone asks, don’t tell! Say, “Before I tell you that, I’d like you to think about the best jobs you’ve ever held, those that gave you the most personal satisfaction. Were the reasons they were the best due to the amount of money you were making or due to the work you were doing?” (PAUSE and wait for an answer.) “Now, if the job I’m representing offered you a chance to maximize your personal satisfaction plus offered a competitive compensation, wouldn’t it make sense to at least discuss it for 5-10 minutes?” Most people will say yes.
2. First, tell me about the job. You must never tell the person about the job, even the actual title, until you have conducted a quick work history review. Start the conversation by asking your prospect if she’d be open to discuss an opportunity if it were clearly superior to what she’s doing now. Most people will say yes, then immediately say “Great. Could you please give me a quick overview of your background, and I’ll then give you a quick overview of the job. If it seems mutually interesting we can schedule some time to talk in-depth.” You have applicant control when the person says yes. You lose it if your job is less appealing than the one the person has now. By having the candidate talk first, you can look for potential areas where your job is bigger. If not, you’ll have developed a relationship with the candidate that will allow you to ask for referrals.
3. I’m not interested. If anyone says this, you’ve violated a fundamental law of recruiting – the candidate must tell you about their background before you tell them about the job (see Point 2). To recover from this faux pas, say, “That’s exactly why you should consider this job.” Just the fact that it’s illogical helps gain the person’s attention. Follow up by asking, “Are you aware that you just made a major career decision using minor information?” Describe a few strategic nuggets about your job that make it worthy of a short discussion. Something like your company has just invested in a start-up to exploit a new market opportunity, so growth should skyrocket over the next few years, would be a good example of how to get someone to talk a few minutes. Here’s a YouTube video podcast describing my “Magic Bus Theory of Recruiting” which will provide you some insight on how to better handle the “I’m not interested” objection.
4. I don’t like the company. If your company is struggling, or has received some bad press, you’ll need to conduct some preventive PR to offset the recruiting damage. Describe the impact the person could have in restoring the company’s image. It’s also possible the company’s reputation is based on old info, and a turn-around has begun. In this case, make sure you have some real evidence you can use to offset the negative beliefs. As you begin these damage-control efforts, make sure you understand the candidate’s concern and then ask, “If we can demonstrate that your concerns while true in the past have been rectified, would you be open to explore an opportunity with our company?” Of course, then you have to prove your case, but at least you’re moving the process forward.
5. I don’t have time to talk. Calmly say, “Let me rephrase my question then. If the job opportunity I’m representing is clearly superior to what you’re doing today, would you have some time later today to discuss it on a very exploratory basis?” (This is an example, of the “close upon a concern” solution selling technique.) If the person says “no” to your suggestion, something else is really the issue, not lack of time. It could be you gave away too much information when you initially described your reason for calling.
6. I’m happy where I am. When confronted with a happy camper, say something like, “That’s great. You’re the first person I spoke with this week who actually said that to me. Most people nowadays are just hanging around due to the bad economy. Is this really the situation for you?” Then dialogue with the person a bit to understand if she is really happy, or if it was just a brush-off. Then ask, “Under the possibility that if the situation I’m representing is clearly superior to your current job on (causes of happiness), would you at least be open to explore it for a 5-10 minutes.” Then conduct a mini-work history review as part of the phone screen.

You can’t afford to accept these negative responses without a formal rebuttal. This is the only way you’ll be able to find enough candidates to fill your requirements. All good candidates have concerns. It’s the recruiter’s job to ferret them out and address them properly.

While you won’t overcome them all, you’ll probably recover at least 50% of the candidates you would have formerly lost. And if the techniques are done properly you’ll probably wind up with some great candidates for future assignments and plenty of referrals for your current ones.

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

Recruiters are quick to remind management that they present, but do not select, candidates for hire, and that most employees who leave a position do so because of other issues such as training, compensation, work schedule, promotional opportunity, etc. Recruiting and line managers need to acknowledge a shared responsibility for employee retention, and a shared success when good employees elect to stay and grow with the company.

In the spirit of developing good metrics, here are a few specific questions to help assess how successful a recruiter has been in contributing to retention

Did the recruiter submit a diverse slate of candidates?

One of the best ways recruiters can influence retention early in the hiring process is by presenting a diverse slate of candidates, thereby offering management significant choice when it comes to who they would like to hire. Employee referral programs, while often highly successful, sometimes have the unintended consequence of creating homogenous employee populations with a tendency to leave or switch employers in groups. Diverse employee populations aid in retention by offering a richer employment experience to new hires, simultaneously encouraging a culture of inclusion and innovation through broader perspectives.

Did the candidates submitted fit the job description as it was posted? Did the job posting accurately portray the requirements and qualifications sought in successful candidates?

Both internal and third party recruiters are subject to EEOC regulations and should present the most qualified candidates for an open position, regardless of age, race, gender, etc. So even if a particular hiring manager only wants to see candidates who are Cowboys fans, recruiters must use criteria from job postings when assessing candidate qualifications. Further, most new hires framed their understanding of a particular position based on the job description — and if they start with a flawed premise, it’s often hard to recover. This is especially true if career path, training, or other promises fail to deliver.

Did the recruiter explain the job description, work schedule, general compensation structure, and benefits information to the candidates?

If a telephone screening or recruiter interview is a part of your hiring process, good recruiters will use this time not only to evaluate the candidate, but also to go over the most important details about the position and company. Other recruiters will ask a candidate to prepare before a screening by conducting some research about the company, and then more effectively use their time by filling in the gaps with all of the information about the position that isn’t available online.

For call center positions or those with unique work schedules, candidates sometimes fail to fully grasp requirements such as evening or weekend work, mandatory attendance for training, or lack of flexibility in scheduling (which is sometimes required due to childcare or class schedules for those continuing their education). The more clearly these things are explained on the front side of the hiring process, the better your retention will be because there will be no surprises for your new hires.

Did the recruiter set appropriate expectations with the candidate about the interview, hiring, and onboarding process?

This is a partnership, and recruiters can only give candidates information that they have. Management and recruiters need to communicate closely when there are process or procedural changes that will affect new hires. Interviewing and orientation are highly influential parts of the process as they set the tone for new hires who are still forming their first impressions of your company. Missteps here are often magnified, and gross errors can give the impression that a company doesn’t care, toils under bureaucracy, or is generally ineffectual.

Did the recruiter make himself/herself available to the candidate during the hiring process for any questions or concerns?

In large corporations, often there are teams of individuals who handle pieces of the process such as relocation, employee orientation, benefits, etc. Recruiters and line managers are equally responsible for redirecting candidates to the correct point of contact so that new hires receive necessary information. Entry-level candidates, in particular, often have difficulties navigating through the various departments responsible for ensuring a smooth onboarding experience. The best recruiters will always offer to help and provide resources, recognizing how a good start can contribute to better retention.

Did the recruiter check-in with the candidate after the start date? (This is not always feasible in volume hiring situations, but is a great best practice where possible.)

The biggest employee retention issues often surface within the first couple weeks of employment. Candidates sometimes have not taken down their resumes from job boards or formally ceased their job-seeking activities. Introductions to coworkers, management, and staff begin to uncover personality clashes or stylistic differences. Commutes that seemed like a great idea now become unbearable. While candidate check-ins can’t erase these issues, they can at least help recruiters proactively identify these things in case there is anything management needs to do to prepare for or address.

Human resources and line of business management share responsibility for the successful recruitment and retention of employees. Recruiting functions must educate management as to the role they can play in retention, and must also draw clear lines as to what they cannot impact in results. The better this responsibility can be delineated and shared, the stronger your retention results will be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some slightly out-of-the-box thoughts on how you can create a learning environment and stimulate discussion and change by challenging the traditional and by boldly acting differently:

1. Hire people from the same spectrum of countries you purchase raw materials from or where you sell your products. Whatever else these employees are doing for your organization, they are also eyes and ears for product development and for sales growth. They may have fresh ideas about uses for products or have ideas for new services you can offer. And, given the talent shortages, it may be easier to find certain skills in those countries than in your own. To make this work, develop a sourcing strategy that works in multiple countries and a career site that is in multiple languages and has different recruiting messages for different countries. Encourage leadership to embrace virtual employment and let employees work in their native countries.
2. Hire people from parallel occupations. Try and expand your hiring managers to think more broadly than they do now about the kinds of people they want to hire.  Too often I find job requirements that are narrow and way too specific. These descriptions often list very specific competencies and precise skills that a candidate must have, along with a certain level of experience, to qualify for a job. In a few cases this kind of specificity may be necessary, but for the most part it is wasteful and not creative. By encouraging hiring managers to think out the box (for example, hiring music majors and training them to be programmers as Cisco and IBM have done) expands your talent pool, can lower starting salaries, and makes it more likely that some creative new concept will emerge because these people have not been trained that something cannot be done. The time to productivity curve may be longer, but the quality of thought and the morale of employees will be higher.
3. Rehire retirees or retain baby boomers. Many organizations could realize gains in product development, time-to-market, and other areas by bringing back experienced ex-employees who have retired or by hanging on to experienced boomers who are thinking about retiring. Transferring knowledge to younger workers is a major undertaking for many organizations and the best way to do this is to utilize the older worker’s experience as mentors or coaches for younger workers. By putting a few experienced employees on a project with younger workers, learning happens automatically. No time is used in classrooms or seminars. Work remains the focus with learning a significant byproduct.
4. Get rid of job titles and levels. Put people into project teams with only broad titles such as engineer, planner, statistician, marketer, and so forth. Let the team collaboratively decide who does what based on the team’s goals and desired outcomes. Hire people with broad skills and experience or with only a little experience (e.g., new college graduates). Creativity and change most often come about when there is a significant contrast or gap between people, ideas, or needs.

If you are looking for greater satisfaction and commitment to your profession, be open to learning and actively practicing it.

You practice learning by taking chances, experimenting, measuring the results against a standard, and trying again. Being open to learning and making changes is what differentiates the movers and shakers from everyone else.

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

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

People make decisions every day based on their desired and required aspects. There are some aspects on which people can compromise and others where they cannot. This challenge hits employers when they are trying to attract sales talent to apply for their open positions. Instead of creating ads on job boards that invite folks to apply, they tightly close the spigot.

I regularly look at the job boards to see how companies are attempting to attract great sales talent. What I find is interesting. Companies place an ad listing the required attributes of the candidate. However, when I speak to companies about their ad, I find that many of the items on their list fall more in the desired category.

I’ve also talked with sales people about their perceptions of a job advertisement that lists requirements. “I look at the list of requirements in the posting and if I don’t have 100% of the background, I don’t submit my resume,” said a sales person actively looking for a new role. When I ask employers about their biggest challenges, finding great candidates ranks high on their list. “It just seems that we place an ad on a job board and we get few candidates to respond,” said one employer.

Ads Can Choke the Entire Process

Here is the disconnect. Employers publish job advertisements to lure sales candidates to apply. Yet that same tool is choking the entire process. In essence, instead of enticing candidates to apply, they are convincing them that they won’t be considered.

Here is an example of the requirements section from a job board advertisement:

The successful candidate must have:

• BA/BS with a focus on business or life science
• An MBA from a well-respected institution
• 10 years’ sales management experience
• 10+ years’ business-to-business sales experience to the Fortune 1000
• Broad knowledge of principles and methods in a recognized professional field, or working knowledge of multiple fields
• Well-versed in using CRM tools
• Experience selling in disciplined, formal sales methodology is essential
• Must be good at developing and articulating ROI to C-Level executives
• Telecommunications experience is a must

How many people meet this list of criteria? Very, very few.

Would this company really not consider a candidate who met the most critical elements of their criteria, but was missing an element or two? Well, by publishing an ad that is so restrictive, those candidates won’t apply. The company misses out on those potential superstars.

I’m a huge proponent of formulating a profile of a company’s ideal sales candidate. Yet, if that profile is so restrictive that only one person in the world matches it, how will this company ever hire anyone? I’m not suggesting that companies reduce their standards or that they hire subpar performers. No one wins in those instances. However, there are two follow-on steps of the process.

Let’s say you have come up with 20 items for your ideal sales candidate profile. The next thing to do is to rank them in importance so that each item is ranked one through 20. The first one on the list is the one deemed most important. In essence, you are prioritizing the importance of the criteria. Not much different than what people subconsciously do when searching for a mate.

Once that is done, the next step is to categorize each as either required or desired. I won’t insult your intelligence by defining those. Start with number 20 (least important from the prior exercise) and work your way down to number one. If this exercise was done correctly, the lion share of the items become “desired” while the finite few at the top become required. It is the few items that are deemed critical to one’s success in the job that should be listed as required in an ad.

This is a challenging set of exercises, no doubt. That’s the whole point. You want to make sure you encourage the right candidates to apply versus discouraging them.

Thinking back to the company with the laborious list of requirements, would they really not hire a really bright individual who lacks the MBA component of the profile? If the answer is no, they shouldn’t list that in their ad, as it discourages potentially strong candidates from applying.

Did they put the requirement of a telecommunications background in the ad because they prefer not to teach the industry? If the answer is yes, then they wouldn’t want to put that in the ad because they could miss out on a superstar sales person who needs a little assistance learning the business.

This issue isn’t limited to candidates and employers. Recruiters are frustrated too. The company provides them with such restrictions that they feel handcuffed in their ability to find the right candidates.

“I really want to help my client, but I feel like I’m searching for a needle in a haystack. I don’t dare send any candidates unless I find an exact match to what they’ve given me,” says one recruiter. Continuing on, “I don’t think they intend to be so restrictive, but that’s what they have given me to work with.”

Attracting candidates is very difficult to do. Make sure your communication tools, to attract candidates, are formulated to truly represent what you intend. It’s one of the important steps in formulating long-term, prosperous sales marriages.

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

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

Candidates, on the other side of the fence, say, “Now, as a candidate going through a very bad dry spell in finding recruiting work, I rarely experience this common courtesy among recruiters who post jobs that don’t exist and fail to follow simple due diligence.” And this: “I’m a downsized corporate executive who has been repeatedly appalled by the way companies and recruiters are treating candidates.”

We all, I believe, want to provide candidates with great service, and we all know that those who have been ignored, dismissed as not qualified, and otherwise treated with discourtesy will not forget and may never recommend our firm to friends or apply again, even when they may be excellent choices.

Every act of discourtesy will eventually be incorporated into the overall reputation that our firms have about people and how they are treated. As they say in the customer satisfaction business, for every customer that tells you they are satisfied, there are at least 3 dissatisfied customers who have said nothing. The same applies for candidates.

So, what does the overworked, overwhelmed recruiter do? How can you provide responsive service in the face of huge numbers of resumes? Here are three tips:

Don’t Post Job Descriptions, But If You Do, Make Them Precise and Specific

I have taken an excerpt from a job description I found on a website that is representative of many I see every day. The question I ask is who, with even a modicum of technical ability and a dash of experience, will not feel qualified for this job? There are no specifics, no details, and no firm requirements. I almost feel that I could apply for this and justify why if asked.

You’re looking for more than just a job in Information Technology. You want a career that challenges your IT experience while giving you the freedom and support to succeed. Look no further than [company name]. Our Professional Services offerings span the entire application life cycle, giving our customers a complete solution and our employees the opportunity to excel on all platforms.

With our technical focus and emphasis on delivery, we strive to hire experienced Information Technology professionals with broad skill sets and the desire and versatility to learn new businesses and skills. We are selective in hiring and serious about retaining those we do hire.

We are looking for candidates with the following attributes:

• Oracle Financials experience
• Oracle 11i application development experience
• Strong PL/SQL

I am sure that this has generated many hundreds of unqualified resumes. Unfortunately, most job descriptions are written this way deliberately so that they will generate a large number of responses. When we lacked technology and reach, this was a marginally acceptable approach. But today, it creates big problems. Most candidates are very concerned with applying for an appropriate job, but how can they really tell from the way descriptions are written? Are the specific requirements spelled out? Are you using technology to screen for these?

We need to focus on a building a new mindset. We do not need mass marketing for most positions, we do not need to generate hundreds of responses to make sure we’ve “covered the field,” and we can’t ignore hundreds of applicants because of our own inadequacies. Many of us have attitudes that would be similar to those of a store clerk who, when overwhelmed with customers, simply walks off and leaves them.

We Need to Use Technology, and Use it Better

The new recruiting tools and systems have built-in tools for communicating, screening, and maintaining relationships with candidates. These candidate relationship management tools are not magical, but they ease the burden and automate a portion of the task. However, the sad fact is that after these systems are purchased, only a fraction of recruiters utilize their powerful communication and screening features. Most recruiters are still focused on the zero value-added backend “administrivia” and don’t see as clear a connection between the candidate experience and the type of response they get from recruiters.

Salesforce.com and all the larger Applicant Tracking Systems can automate the responses candidates get to various actions they take on the website. They can periodically send e-mails and newsletters, and they can be better programmed to send intelligent responses to candidates’ questions.

The bottom line is that all recruiters need to do a better job letting candidates know where they stand in the recruiting process by sending regular updates and letting them know as soon as possible that they are no longer being considered. Even automatic bounce-back responses can be more intelligently written and distributed.

Relationships and Referrals Are Keys to Your Success

I am more and more convinced that posting job descriptions is an archaic process. While I have no doubt that the practice will live on for a long time, it is not the best, cheapest, or faster way to find good people.

Using technology to develop relationships and to communicate regularly with a selected and screened pool of candidates is the key to your real success. By developing and using tools that allow candidates and hiring managers to co-create requirements and refine requirements as needed, more good people will find jobs that fit them better. Posting jobs on job boards and pushing descriptions that seem to have been written by a PR firm out to wary candidates is no longer effective.

Recruiters have to use social networks, referrals, Internet search, and face-to-face conversation to build trust and establish a relationship with candidates that can be leveraged whenever needed. Unfortunately, face-to-face relationship building is slow, expensive, and clumsy. Social networks allow you do this with much greater ease and gracefulness at a lower cost in time and money.

Base your recruiting on the customer service mindset, go for quality (not volume), and do that by building relationships and asking for referrals. If you are generating hundreds of responses to a job posting, you are doing something terribly wrong.

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

• Cnslt Sys Eng
• Tech Del Mgr
• Occ Ther Asst
• Phys Med Supv
• P2 Fld Comp Sup
• PA-III

While most of us in recruiting might be able to translate some of these abbreviations into actual job titles, the reality is that most candidates would be completely confused by what role we’re trying to communicate. They would definitely never search for these kinds of keywords within the major job boards or search engines when seeking opportunities.

The primary cause of most job-title abbreviations is corporate payroll/HRMS and ATS systems, which have short character limitations for the job-title field. In addition, their internal language for job titles may cause them to truncate all their job titles. Finally, our corporate desire to create acronyms for our job titles, which seems to help save space on organizational charts, carries over to our external advertising where it may hurt our recruiting efforts.

One of my current tasks is to help companies convert their job titles to “Google speak” so that the candidate marketplace can have a shot at understanding what companies really mean by these job titles. In addition, this enables companies to use candidate and marketplace terminology to help them get the most success when advertising their positions online.

Maximize Job Descriptions with the Right Keywords

Recruiters definitely need to know how to use the appropriate keywords in their job titles. However, don’t stop there. Make sure to have the right keywords within your job descriptions as well.

Getting the job function/title right is a great start and could double the response rate of applicants for any job. But including the skill names (multiple times if possible) and location names is also important in order to ensure the maximum response.

For example, if you are seeking an Oracle Database Analyst in San Mateo, California, include “DBA” (Database Analyst) in the title, as well as the locations near San Mateo, which could include “San Francisco,” “Bay Area,” “Silicon Valley,” and the related ZIP codes for that area to ensure that candidates searching online will find your positions.

Learning how to integrate all these keywords into your jobs is simple. By adding a “Similar Functions:” area and a “Nearby Locations:” area within your job description, you will optimize your chances that your job is found.

For example, if you’re seeking an “Account Manager” who might actually be more like an Inside Sales Representative, you might include “Similar Positions: Inside Sales Rep, Telesales Rep, and Account Executive” in your job description just to catch anyone searching for similar types of positions.

A best practice in building any job listing is to make sure the following data points are in the job title or description:

1. The job title + any acronyms associated + similar or affiliated job titles.
2. The job location + any similar location names + the ZIP code of the job.
3. The skills required and/or desired.

Polluted Job Boards Compound the Problem

The reason writing clear job titles and descriptions is becoming more important is that many of the major job boards are over-polluted with jobs that aren’t relevant to what the candidate is seeking.

For example, if you were a Peoplesoft Developer and do a search for Peoplesoft online, you might find accounting jobs that require the use of Peoplesoft, or sales positions where they are selling Peoplesoft-compatible software, or recruiting jobs that specialize in finding Peoplesoft candidates.

As a result, many of the boards and classified search engines have implemented a “Search in Title Only” feature, and/or have only indexed the job title content. This means that if your keywords aren’t embedded into your job titles, you could be missing out on 50% or more of your potential online job seekers.

This could spell real trouble for companies that do batch exports of their jobs from their ATS systems, because there is no way for you to change your job titles prior to pushing them out to the online job boards. However, you may be able to gain access to your account and can fine-tune titles after they’ve been imported into the sites that you’re advertising on.

Beware, however: you might invest an entire day updating all the titles on your job board location, only to find out that your daily import wipes out all your changes the next business day. Find out ahead of time if this is the case so you don’t lose a day’s work.

Here is a short list of examples with alternate titles that everyone should include in their job descriptions:

• Project Manager = PM, P/M
• Programmer = Developer, P/A
• Quality Assurance Tester = QA, Q/A
• Chief Information Officer = CIO, IT Executive
• Nurse Practitioner = NP
• Registered Nurse = RN
• Licensed Practical Nurse = LPN

Here’s a quick example of how to bundle the title and acronyms: “Project Manager (PM, P/M)”

Invest Some Time in Learning Job Terminology

To learn your “Google speak” titles and acronyms for your job families, simply spend time on the major job boards, go to Wikipedia, and of course search Google to find out how other companies are describing the same jobs that you are promoting. Build up your own library of terms for future reference.

At a minimum, identify clearly abbreviated titles within your own position descriptions, and make the easy changes to your job titles. You’ll likely see some very quick results and a rapid increase in your applicants.

Measure the average number of job applicants prior to investing your time so you can show improvements and make a case for investing more time or effort into this important area of your recruiting strategy.

TTFN. Of course, that is ta-ta for now!

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

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

However, before we begin, we would like to take a quick opportunity to respond to several questions that arose following last week’s introduction of the concept.

Question One: Do you think the time will come when employees will ever be willing to “pay” for the opportunity to work for a specific company? Or are they doing that already?(Submitted by Maureen Sharib of the ERE community.)

This is a great question, and one that gets to the very distinction our previous article was trying to make. The answer is that we believe employees are already paying for the opportunity to work for a specific company, they are just doing so using a currency we often do not consider. If you look at employment opportunities as products, each with a unique set of features and you look at talent as consumers, it becomes clear that talent buys employment opportunities using a combination of currencies that include time, motivation/commitment, skill/knowledge application, etc.

Many organizations already demonstrate the flip-side of this mentality, viewing talent as the asset being acquired primarily because organizations use a more traditional currency to pay for it. In reality, a true barter system is a play. To make the most of such a system, we have to become as adept at marketing unique opportunities as talent does at packaging a unique combination of skills, knowledge, and abilities.

Prior to asking this question, Sharib indicated concern that the vast majority of the talent population do not have what it takes to respond to an employment opportunity and that until the masses stop manifesting the “soup to nuts” expectations they have of employers, they will not respond to the concept of product marketing.

While not phrased as a question, this point is a critical one. While product marketing would most certainly become an output of implementing a formal employment product management role, product management and product marketing is not the same thing. The role of the product manager would not be to position an existing set of employment products, but rather manage the development of new ones and the revision of existing ones using a defined methodology.

With regards to talent not being capable of responding to employment opportunities, our response is simply that the inability of them to do so is our fault. When a product fails to generate the demand and consumption by a target customer group, it is because:

• The product did not meet the perceived needs of the consumers.
• The product was not positioned appropriately.
• The product was not visible to consumers.
• The product was not priced so as to contribute to the perception of best value.
• The product sucked.

Sales professionals have long understood that to make a successful sale you must be able to align expectations. The HR profession has long practiced the art of inflating expectations, not setting realistic ones that can be delivered on. Nearly every piece of recruitment marketing that exists today communicates a bland, non-descript employment opportunity that does little to establish expectations among the talent population you hope will respond. We use terms like “employer of choice,” that lack a consistent definition, which enables the talent to develop their own definition, one rarely if ever communicated to the employer. When customers are permitted to establish their own expectations in secret, your chances of meeting them as an employer are slim to none.

Question Two: I can easily see how companies that can execute this concept would develop a true competitive advantage in the labor market, but how realistic do you think it is that HR would ever be given enough authority to formally manage employment opportunities given that a large portion of what defines an opportunity is controlled by line managers? (Submitted by Todd Kaufmann via e-mail)

This is, for lack of a better word, a phenomenal question. The human resource profession has historically (and continues to) position itself as an administrative function. While many human resource leaders were granted a seat at the table under the auspices that their functions could contribute strategically, in reality, few functions ever transitioned beyond the realm of transactions. Our current position can also partially be attributed to the lack of a standards organization to provide leadership to the function, but that is another topic. Luckily, organizations may be more ready for the employment product manager than many current HR professionals perceive.

Around the globe, traditional HR leaders are being tossed aside, replaced with professionals from operations, finance, marketing, and in some rare cases, engineering. This trend signifies that corporate leaders not only expect the development of business infrastructure within the human resource profession, they demand it and will supplant any human barrier that stands in the way. Could the role of an employment product manager be established in a traditional HR organization? Maybe. But it is much more likely to be established in a category-killing organization that demonstrates they value top talent as opposed to merely talking about it!

To everyone who commented online or via e-mail, we thank you for contributing to a concept that could change the profession. Now on to that prototype job description.

The Employment Product Manager Job Profile

As you know, we hate job descriptions but accept that they play a role in our profession. What follows is an overview and list of major responsibilities for the role of employment product manager and a review of the basic skills, knowledge, and abilities needed to perform the role. (If you would like to add to the profile, we welcome your insights.)

Position Overview

The employment product manager plays a leadership role in the employment opportunity development process.

Strategically, this position partners with senior corporate leaders and the human resource function to craft employment opportunities throughout the enterprise that are seen as viable career opportunities by the world’s most elite talent.

Tactically, the employment product manager develops comprehensive employment product definitions that define the employee experience required and outlines the characteristics of all systems, processes, and organizational interactions required to deliver the requisite experience to a predetermined level of measurable quality.

This role owns the entire employment product development life cycle, from conducting market research and developing employment product definitions to delivering the products to market and troubleshooting/resolving any systemic issues that arise.

Employment Product Manager Responsibilities

The role of the employment product manager is one that involves both strategic and tactical deliverables. Approximately 40% of the managers’ time should be dedicated to strategic deliverables, while 60% should be allocated to tactical delivery. The major responsibilities in both categories are outlined here:

Strategic responsibilities include:

• Participating in workforce feasibility discussions regarding all new business concepts and initiatives, and strategic plans for existing operations.
• Consulting business managers during the development of business plans and work allocation models.
• Ensuring that optimal labor allocation plans demonstrate significant value for target labor segments, including full-time labor, part-time labor, temporary labor, outsourced labor, offshored labor, strategic partner labor, acquired component labor, and workforce automation; and that said labor can be secured at a total cost point that would deliver an acceptable benefit to the organization.
• Ensuring all resources needed and organizational experiences required to secure top talent are defined to the extent that requisite systems to ensure delivery can be developed through the human resource function in partnership with line and corporate management.
• Supporting and consulting in build vs. buy analysis for talent.
• Creating proof-of-concept documents that validate proposed employment products will deliver on labor requirements.

Tactical responsibilities include:

• Creating the employment product requirements definition (EPRD). This document outlines the specifications/requirements of employment opportunities needed to satisfy the expectations of pre-determined talent pools.
• Working with various human resource departments and functional leaders to ensure that human capital management systems developed conform to the requirements stated in the EPRD.
• Facilitating human capital management system design review meetings.
• Facilitating resolution of systemic employment issues.
• Working with line management to provide support.
• Working with organizational quality management staff to develop robust test plans and talent acceptance test plans.
• Creating employment product delivery plans, including work assignments, key milestones, timelines, deliverables, and product evaluation analytics.
• Facilitating employee/candidate perception testing (market research) when applicable.
• Working with other business functions to coordinate interdependencies and resolve issues.
• Reporting to the executive committee on the positioning of the enterprise and its component groups as an employer.
• Collaborating with product marketing professionals to outline the employment brand development strategy and ensure developed communications conform to messaging requirement outlined in the EPRD.

Employment Product Manager Requirements

The employment product manager role is a complex strategic-level role. To adequately perform all of the responsibilities defined above, organizations should look for individuals with the following combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities:

• Prior experience with product development or in-depth understanding of product development methodologies, combined with demonstrated project-management expertise.
• Ability to perform and oversee multiple complex projects.
• Ability to manage several timetables successfully in collaborative cross-functional environments.
• Demonstrated ability to quickly understand complex issues in human relations.
• Demonstrated ability to understand the business, and the core product/service development life cycles that the labor force must execute.
• Must be comfortable speaking in front of large groups that consist of a cross-functional group of management and line managers.
• Must understand abstraction layers between the “big picture” and the detail-orientated, and be comfortable working in both arenas.
• Good at troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and remedy of systemic employment issues.
• Ability to effectively lead and influence cross-functional teams.
• Must be able to motivate others outside of direct reporting line.

Positioning the Employment Product Manager Role

Place this role within the enterprise such that it can wield a significant degree of organizational power and influence. Burying this role in the staffing department, or the human resource function, would all but kill the opportunity for this role to achieve its objectives.

It is clear based on past experience that for this role to succeed, it must exist as a leadership role within the executive operations rank. The optimal position for this role would be one directly reporting to a matrix of C-level executives including the CEO, CFO, and COO.

Conclusion

The time for change is now. The human resources function and the staffing departments cannot continue to exist as isolated, non-integrated units in service to the business. They must become part of the business. Look at employment opportunities as products, and formally manage their development and delivery across the enterprise using a methodology and infrastructure consistent with that which drives the development and delivery of the organization’s core products and services. Are you ready?

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

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

Employees of Coca-Cola learn to disdain PepsiCo employees and vice versa. Most “Googlers” learn to disdain Yahoo! and Microsoft not just for what they do, but how they do it. This mentality can be found in every industry, in every size company, and in every country around the globe; it’s universally accepted that business is a competitive activity.

Advertisements that position one company’s product against another’s are common. Websites that go into detail about the strengths of a product compared to its competition are also common. Throughout the business world there exists an endless supply of examples that demonstrate sales strategies that directly position one entity against another and attempt to persuade customers to switch loyalty.

As the world becomes more and more flat it is abundantly clear that nations and states and municipalities also compete against one another everyday to secure a finite supply of resources. There is, however, one hold within the business world that has yet to accept the realities of business and adopt strategies that reflect it. This holdout is the talent-acquisition function.

Almost without exception, recruiting organizations live in a “bubble” of isolation. Yes, they accept that their company competes for candidates in the labor marketplace, but 95% live in a world of their own, devoid of a competitive spirit and without a plan to make recruiting a competitive advantage for their firm.

Because recruiters don’t view what they do as a zero-sum game, they are frequently shocked when new leadership requests they do a competitive analysis of the recruiting functions at each of the major competitor firms. Once they get over the initial trepidation, most recruiters realize that in order to “beat” an enemy you have to know what they are doing and what they’re planning for the future.

Competitive-advantage recruiting is a process of gathering information about the strengths and weaknesses of the competition and leveraging that knowledge to devise strategies and action plans that enable you to leapfrog their efforts.

A Lack of Concern For the Enemy

I look at business as being very similar to baseball. When a team announces its starting pitcher, you counter with a pitcher who matches or exceeds their skills. Managers put in left-handed hitters to get an advantage over a right-handed pitcher. It’s a continuous process of understanding their approach and then countering it to gain a competitive advantage.

The typical approach of recruiting managers is quite different. They seldom know the players on the opposing team, their strategy, or approaches. If you don’t believe me, see whether you can answer these questions about your direct talent competitor’s recruiting function:

• What is the name of their recruiting strategy?
• Who is their head of recruiting?
• Who is their very best recruiter?
• What is their most effective recruiting or sourcing tool?
• What is their biggest weakness? Strength?
• Which of their key jobs do they have difficulty filling?
• What times during the year do they do little or no hiring?
• When they beat you in a “head-to-head” competition for a top candidate, what is the primary reason that they win?

In baseball for example, this would be a no-brainer. Everyone on the team would know who their counterpart was, as well as what their strengths and weaknesses were. The same should be true for recruiting, but it isn’t.

The fact is, most recruiting functions do what they do without paying much attention to their talent competitors or the labor market in general. There is little attempt to identify and counter what the competitor is doing. I call this approach “living in a bubble.” Yes, recruiting the way you have always done it is easy and quite common, but it still hurts your firm and is probably one of the prime reasons why you can’t find and land top talent.

Competitive Analysis V. Benchmarking

Many recruiting functions participate in benchmarking studies, where researchers seek out best practices from other firms. Although benchmarking is important, it’s not the same as the competitive analysis required to build a competitive advantage. This is because benchmarking finds out what the “best” firms are doing, but does not necessarily find out what your direct competitors are doing.

Because a firm might only compete in a limited geographic area or in specialized jobs, it might be more beneficial to know precisely what your direct talent competitors are doing.

Competitive analysis is a side-by-side comparison between your firm and your direct talent competition in each of the critical talent-management areas. Competitive analysis focuses on both comparing recruiting and talent-management performance results as well as identifying best practices, strategies, and weaknesses.

Best practices information might indeed help your firm improve your performance at some point, but first you must identify whether there are any performance differences between your firm and its competition.

The Art of War

The best recruiter I know has achieved his level of excellence by viewing recruiting as a competitive battle. Not only does he track what the competitors are doing but he has also held quarterly recruiting roundtables where he invites all of the best recruiters in the geographic area to share ideas and best practices.

Why does he do this? He does this because he thinks one of the best ways to beat an enemy is to know them and keep them close. By talking to them on a regular basis, he is able to judge what the best are doing and then use that information to keep one step ahead.

Learn From Other Competitors

It’s hard to learn about competition from HR people because, almost without exception, they don’t view HR as a competitive function. However, within every company there are fierce competitors that you can learn from.

The best place to start is in sales. Talk to sales managers and you’ll learn very quickly how to develop and maintain a competitive advantage. The sales departments’ approaches will invariably seem too aggressive at first, but over time, you learn that you have to be aggressive to win a “head-to-head” competition.

Other highly competitive types that you might learn from include advertising, product development, and product branding professionals. In my experience, the tools, strategies, and approaches are almost always directly transferable to the talent-management function.

The War For Talent: Counter Your Enemy’s Actions

If you’re a fierce competitor and you want to practice competitive advantage recruiting, here are some action steps you can take to identify and then counter your competitors’ recruiting actions:

1. Countercyclical hiring. The key here is to hire right before the competition begins a major hiring cycle. For example, if they do most of their recruiting on campus in February, do your recruiting in January, during the fall, or even during the summer.

If they do the bulk of their hiring right after their new budget cycle, you should begin hiring right before it or right after it. If they don’t hire during a recession or downturn, beef up your hiring to take advantage of this “off-market” time.

2. Hire when they’re not hiring. Identify when your competitor is not hiring and focus your hiring when the competition is minimal. Start by identifying from their website when they have gaps with few or no jobs listed. This might be just before their new budget cycle, during the holidays, or when they’re shut down between Christmas and New Year’s.

If they’ve just gone through a major merger or acquisition, take advantage of their inevitable confusion to ramp up your hiring before they get their act together. And of course, whenever they put on a hiring freeze, go to town.

3. Job descriptions. Most job descriptions are written in isolation and, as a result, they don’t provide competitive advantage. Most hiring managers make them up in isolation and then see them watered down by the job-analysis people in compensation.

As a result, I suggest that before you begin hiring for a position, visit your competitor’s website and see how your job description is superior or inferior. Talk to the hiring manager and show them how the content of jobs could be improved, so that when a candidate compares the two, they’ll see how your jobs are obviously more exciting and challenging. This also means doing some wordsmithing and testing so that in a side-by-side comparison, your jobs win out each time.

Next week: Part 2 in this series will introduce 14 more action steps for building a competitive advantage in recruiting.

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

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

• Our surveys indicate the quantity and quality of candidates applying to job boards is declining.
• At Alexa.com you can see for yourself that the traffic at the major job boards declined by more than 35% this past year, on a month-to-month basis.
• Our research indicates that the rate at which candidates are rejecting offers, accepting other offers or accepting counter-offers is increasing.
• Labor Department demographic trends indicate the overall supply of talent is declining while the demand is increasing. The widespread gap in engineering graduates between the U.S., India and China is probably not as bad as originally thought, but it’s still an issue that needs to be addressed.
• Our recent Hiring and Recruiting Challenges 2006 survey indicated that only 23% of users are quite satisfied with their investment in their candidate tracking systems.
• This same survey indicated that two-thirds of corporate recruiters find serious problems with their clients’ ability to accurately assess and effectively recruit top people. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of hiring managers are not satisfied with the quality of candidates presented by their recruiters, or how fast they do it.

With a crisis mentality in mind, why not start with a blank sheet of paper and totally rebuild the corporate recruiting department from scratch? Here are some ideas to start with. Send me yours if you’d like to discuss them in an upcoming conference call.

1. Have the recruiting department report to the CEO. HR is a support department, not a sales or line function, so reporting to the CEO is a better fit. Shaking things up with this type of major re-org could be the catalyst required to making hiring top talent a serious business agenda item. This type of realignment is not without precedent. In the early 1980s, IT was an overhead department reporting to the CFO. It became more business-savvy and effective after the reporting was realigned.
2. Make hiring managers responsible for hiring top people, not recruiters. If hiring top talent is #1, it should be #1 on the manager’s performance review. Here’s a quick way to get started: have managers rank each team member on a 1-10 scale. Then grade managers on the overall quality of their team members, their turnover rates, and the quality of the personal development plan they have for each team member. Then give managers full responsibility for hiring, including a budget, and allow them to select the recruiter they want to use for help, even if the recruiter is outside the company. This change is probably more important then changing the recruiting department reporting structure.
3. Disenfranchise your managers. The right to vote on candidate competency should only be given to those managers who have demonstrated that they are both accurate and unbiased. Even better, implement a two-step selection process using the interview as the data collection step only. Have the actual voting take place later in a separate meeting, with the team sharing information and reaching consensus across all job factors. This type of evidence-based decision-making process is how most other business decisions are made. Why should hiring be any different?
4. Don’t post your internal job descriptions. If top performers aren’t wowed by your online job descriptions, you’re not going to hire any. Consider how many top people you now turn off and lose with your current descriptions. To solve this problem, make your hiring managers responsible for describing the compelling reasons why top people should consider these openings. Lead with this information, add the challenges, then put the skills required and the requisition number at the bottom. And don’t quantify the skills (years, etc.). You want just enough experience to do the work required. This will excite the high-potential employees.
5. Change the compensation structure for corporate recruiters. Recruiting is not about posting ads or generating names or sending resumes to hiring managers. It’s about getting top people hired. Recruiters should be compensated on results, not activity. A small base, around $35,000 a year, is more than sufficient if it’s combined with a realistic commission that gives the person a chance to earn at least $125,000 based on the quality of their hires and the number of placements made.
6. Don’t hire agency recruiters for corporate recruiting positions. Here’s why: first, top agency recruiters won’t take corporate jobs because the pay is not enough. From what I’ve seen, most of those who take these jobs don’t want the pressure of making placements. Second, corporate recruiting is not the same as agency recruiting. The best agency recruiters are an independent breed, and it’s hard to force these types into a corporate model with different tools and resources and more requisitions to handle. It seems far better to take some aggressive, trainable sales-type people who are excited about doing recruiting your way, in your culture, with your resources, and meeting your needs.
7. Throw away your applicant tracking system and start over. If your applicant tracking system isn’t improving your efficiency or the quality of your candidates, you need to completely overhaul your recruiting and hiring processes. Drive this process reengineering effort based on what it takes to consistently hire top people, not what it takes to manage data. Then validate the process before you automate it. Automating bad processes (doing bad things faster) was the first costly “no-no” learned when computers were first introduced into business in the 1950s. Somehow, HR missed this class.
8. Don’t listen to anyone who is a PhD unless it’s in chemical engineering. The reason I like chemical engineers is that most are trained in stage-gate methodology. This requires them to look at any new solutions across all dimensions of success, including the financial and business ones, in a logical and sequential fashion. Too many PhDs are so engaged in their defined field of expertise that they overlook downstream and secondary consequences. This is an example of the “Can’t see the forest for the trees” problem.
9. Everybody can’t hire the top 10%, so stop taking the advice of the so-called experts, especially us ERE columnists. The reason I have a problem with our advice is that some of it is downright wrong. But worse, even if everyone followed the right stuff, all you would get is average results. Doing exactly the opposite of what we suggest actually might give you a competitive edge. But then you can’t tell anyone. The moral here is become an early adopter. Try everything, get good at it, track your progress, and as soon as diminishing returns set in, start doing something different. You’ll never become a market leader if you’re doing what everyone else is doing.
10. Stop using behavioral interviewing and competency models. I can’t find any evidence that these tools have helped companies hire better people. I’m not sure they’ve even eliminated hiring mistakes. For example, if you Google “behavioral interviewing,” you get 15.4 million responses ? and 90% of the first 100 or so are articles showing candidates how to prepare for a behavioral interview. Why not ask the proponents of these tools to justify them on an ROI basis using actual cost savings and the actual number of better hires made as the basis for the impact analysis? Now when they do this study, make sure they take into account the number of top candidates driven away because they felt the interview was clinical. Also, take into account the fact that more managers use the behavioral interview to eliminate the people they don’t like but use their own standards to hire people they do like. Then also consider why so many competency models for different companies and different positions are exactly the same. The real problem with these tools is that they were developed pre-Internet with the underlying assumption that candidate supply exceeds demand. Even if they were effective under this assumption, they are now easily gamed by astute candidates and the supply of top candidates was never enough.

The U.S. is losing its competitive position in the world economy. One way to counter this is to convert the recruiting function into a performance-driven line operation. Incremental changes won’t cut it. These are just stopgap measures at best. A major overhaul is required. Based on progress over the past 10 years, it’s clear that the recruiting function has not kept up with the times or the technology available. One small example: if you don’t have the reporting in place now to know how well or badly you’re performing today, you’re guaranteed to have bigger problems tomorrow.

Boom.

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

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

The volume of unqualified candidates has been an issue for years now. The Internet opened a door that made it easy for candidates to apply, whether they were remotely qualified or not. This volume has forced us to ignore candidates and has created the frustration these recruiters express. We all want to provide candidates with great service and we all know that those who have been ignored, dismissed as not qualified, and otherwise treated with discourtesy will not forget and may never recommend our firm to friends or apply again ? even when they may be an excellent choice.

Every act of discourtesy will eventually be incorporated into our recruiting brand and affect the overall reputation of our firms. As they say in the customer-satisfaction business, for every customer that tells you they are satisfied, there are at least three dissatisfied customers who have said nothing to you but will spread their dissatisfaction. The same applies for candidates.

Can this volume of unqualified resumes be reduced? What does the overworked, overwhelmed recruiter do? How do you work more effectively and not anger or ignore good candidates? Here are my thoughts.

#1: Use your marketing and branding to appeal to the types of candidates you want

Don’t try to appeal to everyone. The best marketing is always targeted to a specific audience, and discourages ? although subtly ? those who don’t fit the target. This is done partly through words and pictures and partly by placing the information where targeted people are most likely to see it.

Mercedes, for example, advertises on television at the times and on programs where their research shows that highly successful and well-off people watch. It places print advertisements in magazines that these types of people read. It does not advertise on the Super Bowl nor does it advertise in Reader’s Digest.

Wording is also key; what you say makes all the difference. If you say and imply that you are seeking only those with very specific backgrounds and qualifications, you’ll reduce the numbers who apply, and improve quality. Even your recruiting website needs to be worded in a way that is attractive to those you are most anxious to have apply. Cisco Systems has a web site that is appealing to technical professionals but less so to others. Enterprise Rent-a-Car’s site is a prime example of one designed for a particular type of candidate and appealing primarily to them.

Targeted marketing requires research, focus, carefully thought-out graphics, and tested writing.

#2: Don’t post job descriptions, but if you do, make them precise and specific

I have taken an excerpt from a job description I found on a website that is representative of many I see every day. The question I ask is who, with even a modicum of technical ability and a dash of experience, will not feel qualified for this job? There are no specifics, no details, and no firm requirements. I almost feel that I could apply for this job, and that I could justify why I’m qualified, if asked.

“You’re looking for more than just a job in Information Technology. You want a career that challenges your IT experience while giving you the freedom and support to succeed. Look no further than Xxxx. Our Professional Services offerings span the entire application life cycle, giving our customers a complete solution and our employees the opportunity to excel on all platforms.

With our technical focus and emphasis on delivery, we strive to hire experienced information technology professionals with broad skill sets and the desire and versatility to learn new businesses and skills. We are selective in hiring and serious about retaining those we do hire. We are looking for candidates with the following attributes:

Oracle Financials experience

Oracle 11i application development experience

Strong PL/SQL”

I am sure that this has generated many hundreds of unqualified resumes. Unfortunately, most job descriptions are written this way deliberately so that they will generate a large number of responses. When we lacked technology and reach, this was a marginally acceptable approach, but today it creates big problems. Most candidates are very concerned with applying for an appropriate job, but how can they really tell from the way descriptions are written? Are the specific requirements spelled out? Are you using technology to screen for these?

We need to focus on a building a new mindset. We do not need mass marketing for most positions. We do not need to generate hundreds of responses to make sure we’ve “covered the field,” and we can’t ignore hundreds of applicants because of our own inadequacies. Many of us have attitudes that would be similar to those of a store clerk who, when overwhelmed with customers, simply walks off and leaves them.

#3: We need to use technology ? and use it better

As always, I harp on using technology whenever you can. Talent management tools now offer tools for improving how you screen and communicate with candidates. However, the sad fact is that after these systems are purchased, only a fraction of recruiters actually use these communication and screening features.

Just asking candidates to provide some basic information about their interests and general background, rather than a resume, serves as a simple screen and can eliminate a large number of unqualified candidates. By asking for a resume you encourage the unqualified to apply because it is very easy to cut and paste a resume into a form without spending any time learning about the organization or the position.

There are countless email programs, newsletter distribution programs, and other free or inexpensive communications aids that recruiters can use to do a better job letting candidates know where they stand. Even automatic bounce-back responses can be more intelligently written and distributed. A follow-up email could follow the bounce-back and automatically provide the candidate with another touch point.

#4: Relationships and referrals are keys to your success

I am more and more convinced that posting job descriptions is an archaic process. While I have no doubt that the practice will live on for along time, it is not the best, cheapest, or faster way to find good people.

Using technology to develop relationships and to communicate regularly with a selected and screened pool of candidates is the key to your real success.

In general, you are not going to find the people you need by posting on Monster or any other job board. The most successful recruiters use their network, ask employees (and others) for referrals, and focus on building communities of potential candidates. This is what agencies and headhunters have been doing for decades and it’s why they have been successful.

Learn from product and service marketing how to do a better job. Watch how IBM or Deloitte advertise and market their professional services. Notice which products are advertised on which programs and at what time of day. Go for targeted messaging and quality, not volume. Begin to generate candidates from relationships your formed and by asking for referrals. Make it a rule of thumb that if you are generating hundreds of responses to a job posting, you are doing something terribly wrong.