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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The proliferation of recruiting videos since the advent of Web 2.0 has been staggering. Candidates can review an abundance of organizational information in videos that previous generations of job candidates did not have the opportunity to view. A job candidate needs only to peruse career pages on organizational websites or go to Career TV, Social Networks, and YouTube to find information in this format.

There is no question that in many instances a video for job candidates can convey a message to potential employees. What I do question is how effective the message is conveyed. Is the right message in the right video? The answer to this question is often unclear when viewing a real job preview video. Unfortunately, quite often the real job preview video will miss the mark in delivering a real job or position preview and instead incorporate the goals of the recruiting video. keep reading…

Over the past few months I’ve been describing a new approach for determining quality of hire, and using changes in this to justify any new expenditures on an ROI basis. While the methodology is pretty slick, the pushback is coming not from the process, but from the idea that HR/recruiting is responsible for quality of hire at all.

If not HR/recruiting, then who? keep reading…

What makes a good candidate different from a bad one? What defines a high quality candidate? I can’t count the conversations I have had with recruiters on these questions, and few have had answers.

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. keep reading…

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a senior manager/director-level IT professional who was recently laid off. He was moaning about poorly written job descriptions, and what he was telling me bothered me. A lot.

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?” keep reading…

For a number of reasons, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, is a good read for recruiters and managers, in fact, for anyone who wants to get ahead in life.

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.

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Thanks to Ron Katz for the tip about this search firm’s job ad. It’s one I’ll be passing along to my most mediocre friends — who won’t have to worry about misspellings on their cover letters.

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.

When times are tough, candidates are often treated with disrespect. Many recruiters see a surplus of candidates and start acting impersonally or begin ignoring them. At the same time, candidates, many of whom may be unemployed or very worried about their current positions, are super sensitive to how they are treated. I have heard from unemployed colleagues and from many other candidates about the poor customer service they are receiving as the volume of resumes grows and the number of positions decline. Perhaps some of this can be rationalized because many recruiters have been laid off and workloads have, of course, increased. On the other hand, we have never had more tools to help.

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.
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A top-down command-and-control structure leads to power grabbing, not power sharing. It prevents people from seeing the bigger picture as groups defend their turfs and fight off change at all costs. This sounds like Detroit, and until Detroit develops and implements a customer-driven strategy with a culture of success before self-interest, the bailout won’t work.

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:

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Too many recruiters rush the closing process, trying to push the candidate across the finish line before the race has even started. If you want to win the recruiting game, stop the Hail Mary’s.

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:

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Carly Simon did question the idea of using a performance profile as a means to determine competency in her hit song, You’re So Vain. However, in this case I’m referring to the other Carly.

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.

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It was the beginning of autumn in New England, and the leaves were turning orange, yellow, and red. It was a glorious afternoon, but Paul scarcely noticed. He was stuck.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

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

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

keep reading…