One suggestion: You might want to keep a glossary of acronyms handy. Those of you who can correctly identify ANSI, ATS, SaaS, and SMB — you are excused from the glossary requirement.

Freshening Stale Resumes

When a resume is stale, but the skills and experience are just what the hiring manager ordered, what do you do? You call, you email. You don’t hear back. Or if you do, you find out they’re perfectly happy in the new job they started six months ago.

There goes your time-to-fill right down the drain.

Of course, the bright move (watch what we did there) is to keep up with your prospects. BrightMove, the talent acquisition and staffing software vendor, thinks so, too. So just this week the company added a “Social Bar” to its toolkit. With a click of the ‘sync” button, BrightMove will pull in your prospect’s updated info from Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites.

Now you know without waiting for that callback that your prospect has a new job and a better title than what you’ve got to offer.

Sure, this is something you can do on your own. And, you will, the first time you pull up a resume. Once you tag it, the process is automatic. BrightMove’s COO Mike Brandt says everything could have been automated — no human touch required — but then no system is smart enough to know which of the hundreds of Michael Brandts on LinkedIn is the one in question.

It won’t make sense to make the effort for every resume you get. But for your hot, if not immediately placeable prospects, tagging them when you get them and letting BrightMove update them for you, is, well, a bright move.

Jobaline

Matching, as anyone who has ever dated or recruited can attest, is an imprecise art. Yet that doesn’t stop anyone from insisting there’s enough science about it to improve the odds.

For hiring, I won’t argue against it, which is why when I checked out Jobaline last year I admitted not knowing quite what to think. Besides the usual requirements matching and ranking, Jobaline introduced a “seriousness” quotient. On the theory that the more interested and committed a candidate is to a particular job, the more time they will spend filling in all the info the employer demands.

Whether there was any validity to a seriousness ranking, even the founder wasn’t prepared to say.

A year later and Jobaline, as they say, has gone in a different direction. Today’s Jobaline is a sort of job board servicer, where employers post jobs for free, then get to review the basic info about applying candidates. When you see what you like, you pay.

Founder and CEO Miki Mullor calls it “pay-to-pick.”

The Interviewer Who Fell Asleep

There’s nothing like explaining to an interviewer just what it is you can do for the company to make a difference — only to discover they’re sound asleep. That’s a pretty clear hint of what your job prospects are like.

Alas that happened to poor Irwin, who was on his first interview after graduating college. Turns out the interviewer was a narcoleptic who, after snoring away for a few minutes, awoke and resumed where he left off.

I don’t know if Irwin got the job, but he did win $100 from OneWire for telling the most memorable interview story in the firm’s contest. OneWire, as we noted in last week’s Roundup, is a sourcing, tracking and, most significantly, matching system for the financial industry.

Quick Hits

Unrabble, the un-resume, SaaS ATS for the SMB market (we are partial to acronyms here at ERE), has just introduced a free version. It doesn’t do a lot, but it will give you a taste of a world without resumes.

Looking for a way to measure your branding efforts, or the performance of your career sites (besides just counting apps), or your social media significance? Here’s a list of 20 free tools. The list is intended for marketers, but then, isn’t that what we’re all becoming?

SHRM’s latest ANSI standard proposal is available for comment. The draft proposal is on workforce planning.

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to:

1. State which metrics you are correlating together, and challenge yourself to see if you are hoping for a causal relationship, or if a causal relationship actually exists.
2. Prove that the causal relationship has validity and can be repeated time and time again.
3. Go back to your executive presentations and record where you did indicate that correlations and causal relationships exist. Remember that those statements are now out there, and it is possibly expected that the causal relationship will sustain.
4. As you create or refine goals for your recruiting teams or the hiring managers, be aware of these causal and non-causal correlations, as it will help you declare and meet expectations in the marketplace.

Happy metric-ing, and see you at the Spring ERE!

“HR still struggles to become a ‘strategic partner’ with the business, engaging employees and aligning integrated talent management initiatives with overall organizational goals,” write the authors of an Aberdeen Analyst Insight about developing a “Talent First” culture.

Drawing  from an upcoming Aberdeen report, analysts Madeline Laurano and Mollie Lombardi say HR’s day-to-day work and the lack of support and buy-in from other business leaders and senior management stand in the way of developing the strategic approach that HR leaders say must be a part of their skill set.

Yet there’s some sort of disconnect here. The analysts note that in Aberdeen’s Quarterly Business Review, the 1,300+ business leaders in the survey named workforce and talent concerns in half of their top 10 business challenges. However, 35 percent of the HR leaders participating in the forthcoming HR Executives Agenda 2012 complained of a lack of buy-in from their senior management.

Integrated talent management will help with this, say Laurano and Lombardi. “An integrated approach to talent management can help organizations carry out key talent initiatives that will benefit the business,” they write, citing evidence from “Best-In-Class” companies. These are the top 20 percent of scorers on three Aberdeen metrics: Employee engagement, bench strength, and hiring manage satisfaction.

This Best-in-Class group reported improved retention, high employee engagement, and achievement of key performance indicators. Overall, 70 percent of the group credited their integrated approach to talent management with achieving organizational goals.

As the authors note, “integrated talent management is not a new phenomenon.” Fine-tuning recruiting methods to the performance of workers three months, six months, even a year after hire has been going on for years. Projecting worker and skill needs into the future, based on company growth, workforce demographics, competition, and so on, and then using that intelligence to plan recruiting, is much more recent, yet hardly brand new.

These examples are part of the drive toward developing a unified approach to talent within a company. Many, note the authors, have “succeeded in breaking down traditional HR silos.”

“Without integration,” they add, “HR operates in one department, rather than spanning the entire organization.”

In many ways technology can hasten the integration. Besides shifting paperwork to managers or to the employee themselves, and thus freeing HR for more strategic work, it brings to line managers information once available only in HR.

Integrated talent management technology isn’t the determinant of a “Talent First” culture, but it does make big-picture viewing easier, and sometimes even possible. “Analytics matter,” say Laurano and Lombardi. Technology makes it simpler to access the data that leads to business insights.

“Organizations that integrate talent data with business data are three-and-a-half times as likely to achieve Best-in-Class as those that do not integrate data,” they write.

How should HR move forward in its quest for integration putting talent first? By first eliminating the silos and integrating management processes, while focusing on improving employee engagement. As the company becomes more sophisticated about talent management as a critical business strategy, the authors say talent management must be tied to business goals, progress has to be measured and success defined.

To reach Best-in-Class status, analytics have to be a priority. “An HR professional today must keep analytics as the backbone of any talent management strategy,” conclude Laurano and Lombardi. “Analytics will help HR gain support for integrated talent management, and improve the reputation of HR throughout the organization.”

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue.

Think it’s not possible? Here is a quick example to demonstrate the possibilities.

It’s obvious that average salespeople produce revenue and good salespeople produce more. So in an attempt to hire better salespeople, this technology firm analyzed its current sales hiring process and reengineered it, so that it measurably identified and hired better salespeople.

If the new process hired salespeople that sold on average 10% more (than those hired under the previous recruiting process), you could (with the CFO’s blessing), publicly state that this HR action had improved sales revenue by X dollars (i.e. the actual amount would be the 10% improvement in the average salesperson’s yearly sales revenue, multiplied by the number of new salespeople who were hired under the improved process).

Still skeptical? Here is another quick example of how HR can increase revenue.

The recruiting function at this Midwest bank realized it was losing significant revenue every day that a loan officer position was vacant. Obviously, with no one in the position, you can’t make or close any revenue-generating loans. In order to reduce the number of days that loan officer positions were vacant, it called on recruiting to apply its speed-hiring techniques on these positions.

By speeding up the requisition process, placing the best recruiters on these positions and identifying and eliminating “deadtime” throughout the hiring process, it cut the number of vacancy days nearly in half. At $5,000 per eliminated vacancy day, over dozens of requisitions, it increased the bank’s revenue by millions. Everyone from the CFO on down agreed that HR had substantially increased revenue. If these two brief examples are not enough for you, the next section contains the top 15 HR actions that can lead to increased corporate revenue.

The Top 15 Talent Management Actions With the Highest Impact on Revenue

Even if you’re not ready to implement an HR-wide coordinated “revenue impact strategy,” realize that there are many independent actions that the functions within talent management can take in order to increase organizational revenue. If you’re looking for some “low-hanging fruit” actions to take, here are some to consider (those with the potential for producing the most revenue impact listed first).

1. Prioritize revenue-generating business units, jobs, and employees — the highest impact and the lowest cost action is prioritization. HR needs to work with executives, the CFO, and risk management to identify and then prioritize the specific business units that generate the most revenue. You should also identify the highest revenue-generating jobs and employees. Next, you must also identify revenue “impact” jobs, which are jobs that don’t directly generate revenue but the actions of the employees in the jobs directly “influence” the likelihood of subsequent revenue generation. You should also identify revenue “impact” functions (note that product development and customer service are often the highest revenue-impact functions). Finally, you should identify and prioritize jobs where a major error would significantly decrease revenues or increase costs. Obviously after setting your priorities, you need to develop processes that ensure that the most HR resources and the best HR personnel are allocated to those priorities.
2. Targeted recruiting from competitors — recruiting talent away from your direct competitors has a high ROI, because if you are successful, your revenues will go up and theirs will go down. Start by “mapping” the revenue-generating talent at your competitors. Next, recruit away the top sales manager or exceptional salespeople from your competitors. Once you land a “magnet” individual, others are likely to follow. Other high-impact targets for your recruiting from competitors might include innovators, game-changers, pioneers, and individuals with expertise in monetizing products and services.
3. Retain revenue producers — retention has a high ROI because most of the factors that cause top revenue generators to leave are not related to their pay. Interview the most successful revenue producers and those who significantly impact revenue. During the interview, identify the factors that currently frustrate them, as well at the factors that would make their job a dream job. Put together a personalized retention plan to minimize the negatives and to increase the positives.
4. Hire revenue producers — external hiring brings in individuals with a proven track record for generating revenue. External hires also bring with them revenue-generating ideas. Focus your employer branding and recruiting processes on revenue-generating jobs. Reengineer the process so that it leads the industry in its ability to identify, attract, and hire individuals with a superior revenue-generating track record. For example, a major mobile phone network provider found that by adding an online testing component to its hiring process , the resulting call center rep that were hired produced over 10% more revenue than the untested hires.
5. Training on how to increase revenue — revenue generation and the related skills that support it must become a key corporate competency. The T&D function must target its offerings so that they cover all aspects of revenue generation. The quality of the offerings must also be improved, so that individuals show at least a 10% improvement in revenue generation after returning to their jobs after completing the T&D programs. In addition to targeting revenue-generating employees, revenue impact learning modules need to be developed so that every employee (regardless of their position) can understand the concept and subsequently improve their support of revenue-generating employees and business units. In this light, Wal-Mart routinely makes it a part of pre-shift store meetings to make all employees aware of which specific products produce the highest margins and revenue. This awareness allows employees to focus their sales and customer service efforts.
6. Identify barriers — HR must proactively use surveys, interviews, and metrics to forecast upcoming revenue-generating problems and opportunities. HR must also have a process for rapidly identifying current problems and the barriers that restrict revenue generation.
7. Create a fast-reaction team — HR must put together a team of specialists that can respond rapidly to the identified revenue problems that occur anywhere in your organization. Team members should excel at discovering HR related “root causes” and have the skills and experience necessary to solve sudden revenue generation problems.
8. Leadership development and succession must focus on revenue-related competencies – revenue generators also need to be effectively led and managed. So as a result, the leadership function needs to make revenue generation a key competency and development area for leaders. The ability to increase the revenue impact of their team should also be added as a key criterion for promoting managers and leaders.
9. Proactive internal movement — employees and contingent workers need to be proactively placed into the “right jobs” where they can have the highest possible revenue impact. The initial placement of top revenue producers needs to be regularly re-assessed so that key individuals (and even teams) are redeployed to the needed business areas. Seasonal and business cycle rotations may also be required to ensure that there is no excessive idleness among revenue generators.
10. Identify those who support revenue producers — once a year, survey your top revenue producers and ask them which individuals or support positions have directly helped/contributed to their revenue production. Make sure that these impactful support personnel are rewarded and recognized.
11. Release poor performers quickly – the performance management process must be redesigned so that it focuses on rapidly identifying, fixing, and releasing employees who fail to meet their revenue or revenue impact goals. The recruiting function should also continuously be on the lookout for top-performing talent that can be “swapped” with these lower-performing current employees.
12. Implement revenue-impact metrics and rewards – work with the COO, the CFO, and performance management to develop a process and a set of metrics that accurately assess an individual’s revenue generation and revenue impact. Rewards and recognition programs must also be focused and reengineered to better encourage revenue generation.
13. Onboarding — even the onboarding process can impact revenue generation if a weak process means that new-hires get up to speed slowly. As a result, the onboarding process must be reengineered so that new-hires on the first day clearly understand the importance of revenue generation, no matter what job they have. They also need to be informed about how their revenue generation/impact will be measured and rewarded. And finally they need to be educated as to where they can go to get help in this area.
14. Contingent workers and vendors must be included — because a significant percentage of the “workforce” are not technically employees, HR must also work to ensure that contingent workers are hired and evaluated based on their ability to impact revenue. HR should work with purchasing to ensure that vendors, contractors, and consultants are also all capable of increasing revenues.
15. Generate a direct profit — the least ambiguous of any HR action is directly generating revenue from external activities. Firms like Disney, HealthEast, Southwest, and Wachovia have generated revenue as a result of offering their HR services externally in areas including training, temp services, building a culture, and executive recruiting.

The Benchmark Firm to Copy

In addition to the 15 examples that were provided above, you should also know that the HR function at Google is the world’s leader in operationalizing a business-impact strategic approach. HR leaders at Google consistently use metrics and mathematical algorithms to scientifically improve business performance from programs like hiring, retention, and leadership. HR leaders can tell you the revenue impact of people management offerings like 20% time, free food, workspace design, and collaboration practices. They can also easily show you which business units (i.e. Adwords) have the most impact on revenue.

Understanding the five key components of a “revenue focused” HR strategy.

If you decide to implement this revenue-focus strategy, be aware that there are five key components that make a “revenue-focused” HR strategy successful.

Collaboration with the CFO — the first component is collaboration with the CFO. HR leadership must work directly with the CFO’s office (who is the undisputed “king” of measuring revenue). Together they must develop a credible process for proving when an action has a revenue impact and what the value of that impact actually is. Next, HR can provide the CFO’s office with a list of its intended actions and then finance can help to sort out any on the list that simply wouldn’t be credible no matter what the data said (i.e. an example of an action that might be sorting out as not credible could be the premise that hiring and retaining better janitors would increase revenues).

Make it an HR goal — the second component of the strategy is goal setting by making “impacting revenue” a major HR and talent management goal. As a major HR goal, it would need to be part of every HR function’s execution plan. The importance of the goal would be reinforced by adding revenue impact to the HR reward and metric structure. Together these actions would help to get everyone in HR to focus on this goal.

Prioritization — the third component is prioritization. If you start with the assumption that there will be no additional budget at least initially for this strategy,focus and concentrate your current HR budget and your best HR people on the business units, the jobs, and the employees that have the most impact on increasing revenue. Instead of equal treatment or first-come first-serve, high-priority jobs and employees would be serviced first. Resources would also be channeled toward the HR programs and processes which proved to have the most success on increasing revenue (i.e. usually they are hiring, retention, training, metrics, and rewards).

A process for identifying problems and barriers — the fourth component of the strategy involves identifying barriers to prohibit revenue from increasing. By applying benchmarking, research, and analyzing metrics, HR can determine which “people management problems” or barriers are having the most impact on reducing revenues. (Examples of problems include extended position vacancies in revenue-generating jobs, high turnover among top salespeople, salespeople unwilling to attend sales training etc.). The same effort should be put into identifying “positive people management opportunities” that when taken advantage of, directly increase revenues.

Best-practice sharing – the final strategy component is best-practice identification and sharing. Under this component, HR uses research, benchmarking, and metrics to proactively identify and then rapidly spread the implementation of the most effective revenue improving “people management practices” to all managers throughout the organization.

Final Thoughts

If you are still skeptical about this strategy and approach, ask your CEO whether they would prefer that you hire great clerks versus great salespeople. Also ask them if they would prefer that HR excel at low hiring costs, hiring without fewer legal issues, or would they instead prefer you to hire innovators and individuals who can increase revenues by 10 to 20%?

Although the initial concept might seem daunting, a number of advanced HR departments have been using a piecemeal approach to increasing corporate revenue for years. If you’re HR department were to adopt “revenue impact” as a primary HR strategy, the net impact for even a medium-sized firm would literally be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you implemented the strategy, not only would you “have a seat at the table” but you would be listened to and respected because you successfully made the transformation from “overhead function” to a strategic contributor. Your work would be noted in the annual report, so even the shareholders would become aware of the major contribution that HR made.

And incidentally, if you like this strategy, you should also consider related HR strategies. Where instead of focusing on revenue, the strategy would focus on increasing quality, speed/agility, customer service or innovation throughout the organization as a result of HR actions.

And one final question … Did this article succeed in expanding your thinking?

• Laura gets 30% of her hires from referrals, has used only one headhunter in the past six months, and has a 42-day average time to fill. She filled 11 jobs last month.
• Jerry gets 20% of his hires from referrals, uses headhunters regularly, and has a 65-day average time to fill. He filled eight jobs last month.

Is Laura better than Jerry? Does Jerry suck? 

Wait.

What if I told you Jerry has 300 more Twitter followers than Laura? Ha. Now who sucks, Laura!? :)

I love – love — to hear provocateurs speak at conferences. I love to hear opinionated people make a case for doing stuff better, pushing us to hire better, faster. But I get tired of the measuring sticks we use to decide if we’re nailing it.

I spent most of my career in corporate recruiting, as a recruiting director with Amazon and Expedia. And now as a consultant, I get to work with some great companies. As we work to help them with sourcing strategies, recruiting process and systems improvement, or even recruiter and hiring manager training, we learn a lot about how they do what they do. And what we find is that there are a bunch of recruiters out there that don’t suck, but who think they do suck. That’s a problem. People who think they suck don’t usually do great things. And we need as much “great” as we can get.

Our team gets asked, “How does our [time to fill, source of hires, recruiter productivity, employer brand, candidate experience] compare to other clients you work with?” And we can share averages and help them to see what they do better and not-as-well as others. I completely get why we all want to know this stuff. But can we really compare one company to another? One team of recruiters to another? Along some dimensions and some standards, sure, probably.

But as many before me have pointed out, comparing cost per hire, time to fill, recruiter productivity … it’s not silly to benchmark, but I’m not sure the results are really that helpful. Why?

Geez, just start to make a list of all the things that may be different between two companies or two recruiting teams. Here are several:

The type of people hired

• Entry level customer service vs. software engineers vs. outside sales people

The number of recruiters

• This usually drives req loads/recruiter, which can almost dictate what a recruiter can/can’t realistically do

Access to scheduling and sourcing support

• Some of you have teams supporting you, and some of you are one-person, ass-kickers with a phone, Outlook, Google, a free LinkedIn license, and Excel for your ATS

The role of the HR generalist

• Friend or foe? Manager (or maybe they think they’re your manager ☺) or peer partner?

The engagement level of the hiring managers

• Are they sourcing? Do they drive quick, quality hiring decisions? Do they help close?

Your brand

• Do you have a strong consumer brand? A strong employer brand? Or, do you have to spend 10 minutes of your sourcing calls just to explain what your company does?

Your location

• Do people want to work where you have jobs? (In the late 1990s, before everyone knew who Amazon was, 50% of our sales pitch to software engineers was focused on Seattle, since we ended up needing to relocate the majority of our hires — much harder for my recruiters to source people from sunny California than companies who hired locally.)
• Are you in Europe, with practices and laws that slow down your process, even though you’re ready to move fast?

Your compensation packages

• Do you pay 50% of market? Or, 70% percent of market? Do you offer equity?

Tools!

• Do you have — and use — Linkedin Recruiter, Avature CRM, Job posting distributors … even an ATS?

Even the basics of how things are measured vary wildly. Take time to fill …

• Does your clock start when the position was budgeted, when the incumbent quit, when the req was approved, when the req was posted, or when you led the strategy kickoff meeting? I’ve seen it so many ways.

It’s almost never apples to apples. Req loads in retail and healthcare are typically much higher than in tech and corporate functions, so comparing results across industries is hard. And even within the same industry — take retail — you may have a model with a lot of centralized sourcing support, or one with field HR generalists who own recruitment, or one with only foundational field support (where hiring managers are largely on their own, with support from their district managers and a three-ring binder from HR).

And I find the same to be true when I’ve interviewed recruiters, trying to compare them to each other. I’ve probably interviewed 50 recruiters from Microsoft in the past 15 years, for example, and it’s even hard to compare Microsoft recruiters to each other!

My point is that very few of us will get a lot of value from comparing our performance to other companies. We’d likely get more from comparing ourselves to our internal targets, to goals that make sense in our resource model, and to goals that come from our unique business and talent needs.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t benchmark externally. That can be key to making business cases, key to executive influence, and key to getting your raise. And don’t get me wrong — I want more from the folks at the Corporate Executive Board, Staffing.org, CareerXroads (great, transparent Source of Hire reports), not less. It’s very helpful. You just need to … Put. It. All. In. Context.

I want you to hear it from me first. You don’t suck.

• I’d love comments from those of you who have worked in multiple environments, to share with everyone what kind of differences really help — or hurt — you.
• I’d love to hear people share how they gather external benchmark data that really helps them.
• And I’d love to get a halleluiah from people who are kickin’ ass despite the fact that they have little budget, little support, unrealistic req loads, and systems that make their job harder, not easier.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago.

Employers, he said, “are anxious for a lot of information.” But there wasn’t much detailed bench-marking generally available. It wasn’t easy for employers to get answers to questions like: Are my recruiting costs in line with other companies? Am I spending my money effectively Am I getting the kind of results others are?

Now they can.

Some of the data — such as cost per hire, source of hire, time to fill — is widely available and in more detail.  The Society for Human Resource Management has data on a number of important recruiting metrics, including cost per hire and time to fill, the traditional recruiting effectiveness measures. The Prinzo Group offers a series of reports on talent acquisition metrics. Annually, CareerXroads publishes a source of hire survey, based on responses from the firm’s roster of mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Bersin’s factbook includes those types of metrics, but breaks down the responses by company size, and industry. In other areas, such as the report’s section on quality of hire metrics being used by employers, offers insights not readily available.

The report also draws conclusions and makes recommendations based on the data. Regarding job boards, for instance, authoir O’Leonard writes:

While the landscape is changing, job boards certainly are not dead. To the contrary, 81 percent of organizations say they will spend on job boards this year. However, we expect that organizations will use job boards more selectively, for certain types of positions and in certain geographies…

(Incidentally, CareerXroads found job boards accounted for 24.95 percent of new hires in 2010. Referrals represented 27.5 percent in the CareerXroads report. The data, however, is not directly comparable since the report separated new hires from internal transfers, while Bersin’s survey asked about how all open positions were filled.)

Some of the more telling points in the factbook deal with the use of social media. Despite all the chatter about social recruiting, most companies spend next to nothing on that strategy and, not surprisingly, make few hires from all their friends and fans and followers. “General social media,” as the factbook describes sites not principally intended for professional networking, produced 1 percent of hires. Only the largest employers hired more — 2 percent.

O’Leonard notes that the reason for the low spend — 1 percent of the recruiting budget — is that social media’s costs “are negligible”, and that when money is spent there it typically comes out of a centralized marketing budget. “Converting candidates reached on social media to hires,” O’Leonard writes, “can be a time consuming-process.”

On the other hand professional networking sites like LinkedIn account for 10 percent of the hires, but companies only spend 3 percent of their external recruiting budgets there.

With all the energy being put into social media, the results reported by the surveyed companies seems meager at best. “A lot more hype than reality,” is   Bersin’s assessment. However, when companies use sites like Facebook and Twitter as a marketing and brand building tool, they get results, he said. Social media, he says, “is being used effectively to build pipelines.” But when candidates decide to apply, they go to the company career site, he said.

One important, and oft-ignored area that the Bersin factbook to its credit takes a stab at addressing is quality of hire. More than a few companies attempt to close the loop and track the performance of new hires back to the source of their application, as well as the recruiter who presented them.

“Recruiting teams can look at a number of measurements to determine new-hire quality, including new-hire performance assessments, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and new-hire retention,” O’Leonard writes. However, more than 25 percent of companies do nothing, she adds.

This section of the report details the kind of measurements companies do use, though the data here is limited to just a few charts specifically regarding use of performance reviews and turnover data.  Still, it offers guidance to companies who want to become more data-driven, but aren’t sure what to measure or where they stand.

That’s exactly how Bersin hopes employers make use of the factbook. “First,” he says, “Are they in the right ballpark?” The data can be used to analyze their own spending, source of hire, and basic productivity measures.

Second, he says, the factbook can help recruiting leaders determine how to allocate their sourcing dollars.

“Really, Bersin, says, “what this is about is where do they fit. It gives them something to compare (to).”

Taking a broader look at the survey results, Bersin said, “It tells me that (recruiting) is expensive. It is not cheap to do it well.

“It tells me that companies are spending more right now… It may be even harder because there are so many candidates.

“It shows that there is a pretty substantial change in using social networks.

“It tells me that the recruiting industry is very complicated.”

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

In response, American Express increased job flexibility and created new job categories so agents could progress through four levels rather than remaining stuck in one. The company also changed its compensation plan, allowing agents to more easily earn bonuses based on customer service scores.

In addition, the company changed the job title from customer care representative to customer care professional. Agents got business cards for the first time.

These were more than symbolic gestures. Agents no longer merely recite company scripts, but use their discretion to figure out how American Express products can help customers solve problems. That’s made the job harder in a way. Agents like Teresa Tate, who works out of an American Express service center in Phoenix, now have to think on their feet. But Tate wouldn’t have it any other way. “We are getting more and more power to make the decisions at our level,” she says.

Tate, who used to run a restaurant, takes calls from AmEx cardholders who operate small businesses. She is now freer to share her wisdom and her concern for these customers. “I genuinely feel like I’m in this company’s finance department,” she says of her callers. “Having been in small business myself, you need that support.”

This sort of passion and compassion for customers translates into high levels of service, into reciprocal relationships.

American Express’s worthiness as an employer predates the Relationship Care program. The company has made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For 11 of the past 12 years.30 Going even farther back, American Express offered employees one of the first private-sector pension plans in 1875.

These days, Amex combines kindness with cleverness in its people management. It offers a 401(k) plan that’s in the top 15 percent when it comes to company generosity. And Amex has worked harder in recent years to help struggling employees succeed at the firm, rather than usher them out the door. At the same time, it employs workforce metrics to fortify worthiness as a seller. Agents’ performance and pay are determined to a large extent by how well they fare on customer feedback surveys. The results are exposed directly to agents, who can view their recent customer satisfaction results, their aggregate results, and how they stack up against peers.

Relying too heavily on financial incentives can backfire. And workplace measurements can be misguided. Look no further than the way American Express used to track the robotic repetition of customer names. But Amex designed its compensation system based partly on employee feedback. And the strong results of the Relationship Care program suggest the pay approach isn’t distracting employees or hurting service. What’s more, the continual customer feedback measurements act as a self-correcting mechanism for agents – and therefore help keep service quality high.

By blending employee autonomy and a supportive culture with smart metrics, American Express shows that worthiness as an employer works to make companies worthy sellers.

From the book Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, copyright 2011 by Laurie Bassi. Reprinted with permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

During my first corporate recruiting position I felt that my role was as a “service provider” to my managers, so when they said jump, I did. Looking back on that now I realize how many opportunities I missed to set myself up as an expert in my profession of recruiting because I lacked the confidence to command a meeting and initiate a true partnership during the beginning of that relationship.

During my time as a recruiter I have run across several different types of managers and most can be intimidating. Below are some of the most common personality types that I’ve run across and ways that you can forge strong relationships with them despite some of their traits.

The “unemployment rate is so high you must have candidates banging our door down” manager: This particular breed of manager needs to be better educated on what is really out there in the market. The unemployment rate rising doesn’t always result in a rise in the actual candidates who you need for a given opening. Websites like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Wanted Analytics are great starting points to use, and they’ll be able to arm you with some statistics on how many candidates for that job are actually out there. Be prepared for your first meeting with this manager by painting a realistic picture of the market from the very beginning of your search so that you set expectations correctly in the beginning.

The “I am an executive and feel I am better than you and want to hire an agency” manager: Oh my, this is my least-favorite manager, and there is always at least one in every company! Some managers no matter what your success rate is want to use an outside source just for the purpose of using an outside source. Try and compile a list of agencies that your company has worked with in the past and rate their success rate against your own, and how many hires have they made for your company vs. how many you’ve made. What has the success of those employees been in terms of tenure?

When I worked at Mike’s Hard Lemonade, I had an executive who just so happened to be best friends with a particular agency that he gave the exclusive to on everything. I wasn’t able to get him to stop using that firm on my first search, but I was able to see the candidates that agency was submitting and how easily they were finding them by pulling up the same candidates on Monster or LinkedIn. When you can illustrate that the 25-30% agency fee is only getting you a 10-minute Monster search, executives tend to listen a little more closely. With time I was able to convince that manager to allow me two weeks for a search before it went out to an agency. Over time my track record spoke for itself and I was able to gain trust and create a good partnership with this manager.

The “I don’t have time for hiring” manager: About half of my managers fall into the category of not having any time for recruitment, yet hiring and staffing their team is their No. 1 priority. These managers can be difficult to get any information out of, yet they assume you’re able to leave a five-minute meeting and produce a perfect candidate in a matter of days. The reality is managers need to be educated that the more information they provide to you and more information you get upfront, the less painful and slow the process of staffing for their team will be. I worked with a manager at Cobalt several years back, who was notorious for missing my meetings. So when I received a position from him I would do as much pre-work as possible, knowing from experience that I was only going to get yes and no answers from him, and that our first meeting about this position would most likely be our last.

Be prepared in that first meeting with candidate profiles. You most likely won’t get more than a job description from this manager, so use that to find some profiles and review them on the spot. Even hearing a yes or no on a profile can provide you with a sense of the type of candidate that they are looking for. Come prepared to the meeting with companies in your area that are hiring similar profiles so that you can provide the manager with a list of companies to pull from instead of expecting him to have that available for you. Ask if there is a lead or manager on their team who can assist with the candidate screening in an effort to save them time.

The “in an effort to look engaged I am going to ask for status updates on everything you do” manager: Some managers just like to micromanage the process and want to know everything you’re doing, including how many resumes you’ve seen, how many candidates you’ve rejected, etc. I try to be as proactive as possible with these ones and ask in the first meeting what kind of metrics they are looking for, and will create a weekly report for them. Most ATS’s have reporting functionality that you can use to build out custom reports without a lot of effort needed on your end. I use Jobvite, which has a custom report functionality that works great for this, and also allows for managers to go into the system and run their own reports at any given time.

The “even though I am a VP of _____ I am also an expert in your field and will tell you how to do your job” manager: You gotta love managers who know everyone in the industry, exactly where to find people, and how you should go about starting your search. While having a manager be networked and engaged is usually a blessing, sometimes it can go to the extreme and become a curse. Managers who know everyone in the industry and therefore start rejecting candidates based on rumors, hearsay, or reputation alone will really narrow down your pipeline. Use their knowledge to your benefit. If there are associations and groups that they’d like you to network in, ask if a member of their team can assist you as well so that you’ll have time to not only run your own search but also incorporate the ideas of your hiring manager without running yourself ragged.

Big data refers to the totality of information available. This includes data in emails, instant messages, in video, and in audio files — all data that might help create a more complete understanding about an issue or person or provide an answer to some question. All the spreadsheets and databases we are currently using are made up of structured data, data that can be organized into columns or rows and then added or otherwise analyzed.

And, while this type of data is incredibly useful, access to unstructured data would add dimensions and depths that only the CIA can currently realize.

Historically, the volume and unstructured nature of so-called “big data” prevented much in way of analysis. An individual had to listen to the audio, watch the videos, read all the material, and integrate and analyze to form a conclusion. This is obviously very time-consuming, and requires training and the ability to assimilate many kinds of media. But we now have computers that are close to being able to look at large amounts of this kind of data and draw inferences, make suggestions, and provide summaries. The CIA and other government agencies undoubtedly already are using these tools to analyze email, voice mail, and phone calls in search of terrorists.

But these capabilities are about to be available to everyone. In the past few months Oracle announced it had acquired Endeca, a company that does dataanalysis and is building a Big Data Appliance — a computer specially designed to handle the volume of information found in unstructured data. IBM developed Watson, the computer that played against humans and won at Jeopardy, as a big data analysis machine.

HP announced a few days ago that it is integrating Autonomy, which it purchased earlier this year, into a new hardware platform for data analysis, SAS has developed a number of big-data applications, and EMC recently acquired Greenplum, another data analysis firm. Each of these firms is looking to mine the potential of the massive amounts of data that exist and that are being created.

Imagine the power these tools will potentially give to marketing and advertising folks. They may be able to specifically target individuals with messages that, based on the analysis of what they are writing or talking about, will entice them to buy a product or choose a suppler. On the more positive side, this level of understanding will make it possible for computers to take over call centers, much of customer support, and other jobs where knowing a lot about the caller as well as the products will be most useful.

What This Means for Recruiters

For recruiters, this may change everything about what we do and how we do it.

The capability this analytic software has is scary and threatening. To thrive in the coming world of big-data analysis, we will all have to learn to adapt and to develop very different skills from the ones we now have.

Here is just a cursory sampling of what may be in store.

Job Descriptions

By analyzing what a department produces, what data is gathered and used, who people talk to and interact with in meetings or in social networks, these programs will be able to identify key characteristics of successful people and from that develop a list of competencies, skills, and attitudes that are most likely to be successful. They can match this against current requirements and suggest changes or skills that might improve or complement whatever exists. But a job description or analysis will be much more complete and accurate than they are today.

This capability will be here in a year or two.

Sourcing

By tapping into a larger data-set than we can access or analyze today, we can find more people and learn more about them than ever. We can perhaps get referrals from whoever a person calls, what they talk about, and who they refer to in the conversations.

These tools will also completely eliminate the need for Boolean search or experts in using the various forms of search that are popular today. These will all be automated to a great extent. Imagine a computer akin to the Hal 9000 in 2001:Space Odyssey that can understand human languages (similar to Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S) and conduct a search independently of a recruiter. They will be able to dig much deeper and make inferences based on data that would be impossible for a human.

I look for some of this capability within two to three years at the most.

Assessment

We have an increasing ability to learn more and more about people by gleaning bits of information about someone from scraping or extracting data from websites/public information/social networks and from information about the products or services someone buys or uses, and from their interests extracted from comments, Tweets, locations, and so forth.

This, combined with better analysis of the job as described above, will let us choose people with a higher probability of success than we can do today with all of our tools.

This is just around the corner and could probably be put into practice at some level today if the machines were available for commercial use (some are) and the costs were reasonable.

Metrics and Performance Analysis

With the power that these tools are already capable of, everything we do will be tracked and can be correlated to our performance.

We will be able to measure and track which calls resulted in the most candidates, what methods yielded the greatest returns, and how well our candidates performed once hired. Some of this capability is available today with tools incorporated into HRIS systems like SAP and Oracle.

Legal and Privacy Concerns are huge and will require another article to discuss.

What are your thoughts about all of this? Is this all just a pipe-dream or do you agree that it will happen?

Every recruiting leader wants top candidates, but the standard approach used by most recruiters simply doesn’t work. A more precise data-driven approach that leverages complete understanding of the attraction factors can give you a competitive edge. Market research can reveal:

1. What it would take for top talent to look at and consider your firm/jobs;
2. What are the best information channels influence to top talent;
3. What is required to “trigger them” to apply; and
4. What expectations have to be met before they will accept a job.

Implementing a Recruiting Market Research Effort

Building a market research function isn’t rocket science, but there are certain action steps you should consider when getting started, including:

1. Partner with existing market research and product marketing functions within the business to learn about their best practices and tools they may be able to grant you access to. (Don’t forget to inquire about ongoing coaching and advice as well.)
2. Recruiting someone with marketing research knowledge and experience to run the effort. This is one of those cases where training a subject matter expert the intricacies of recruiting would be less resource-exhausting than training a recruiter how to be a market research expert.
3. Put together a strong business case for additional program funding (it’s unlikely you have enough surplus in your existing budget). Work with the CFO’s office to ensure that the benefits targeted are credible and that your approach for proving ROI is airtight.
4. Decide what information you need to inform your efforts, and what types of data could be analyzed to provide that information.
5. Develop a long list of possible data sources that could provide the data needed to develop the information for each of the key talent segments your function must recruit for. Commonly overlooked sources include desirable individuals who would not consider your firm, current top prospects, current or past candidates, and new hires.
6. Test the accuracy, reliability, suitability of format and cost to obtain of each data source, prioritizing and selecting those providing the optimal mix.
7. Design a simple method to collect, collate, categorize, analyze, and tag the data that will power your effort.
8. Determine how you will make information actionable by identifying not only how the information produced from your analysis will be communicated, but also how it will be embedded in core processes.

The Top 10 Subjects on Which Information Is Needed

The job search process — you must understand how top talent goes about looking for an opportunity. Identify the specific steps they take and the timeline that they follow when considering a job change. Also identify who they consult with throughout the process.

Identify channels of influence/communication – use surveys or focus groups to identify specifically where top talent source their information from and spend a great deal of time. You should learn about how top prospects use:

• Social media — what social media sites do they frequent (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Yelp, Twitter, etc.) Would a jobs-related message there excite them or turn them off?
• Internet/Mobile — how they use the Internet, both from the desktop and from mobile devices. What online outposts do they visit most frequently? What blogs do they read and what RSS feeds do they subscribe to? Do they listen to podcasts? What electronic forums/chat rooms do they frequent?
• Media — what magazines, publications, journals or newspapers do they read, either the paper or online version? What radio or TV programs do they tune into? Would they read an ad or must a mention be within the narrative content?
• Message preference — what type of messages will they read, ignore, or reject (i.e. electronic e-mail, text, video, tweets, Facebook posts, voice or even snail mail)? Under what conditions would they return a direct message from an unknown recruiter?
• Job sites — what job feeds do they use and what job boards (if any) do they visit frequently looking for a job? On what sites do they post their resumes? What must a job post description contain to get them excited?
• Corporate career sites — what does it take to get them to visit a corporate career/ jobs site? What factors will cause them to drop out before applying?
• Professional association/trade events — what organizations do they join and what meetings do they attend (professional or social)? Would they ever attend a job fair?
• Employer rating sites — what employee rating or rant sites do they visit? Does the information change their job search? (Glassdoor, Jobitorial, etc.)
• Videos — where do they view videos (i.e. YouTube or Flickr)?
• Talent competitors — what firms do the target candidates consider during their job search? Which firms do they finally select?

Identify the message that is required to get their initial attention — use your research to identify what a message must look like and contain to ensure that a quick glance at it will get your target’s immediate attention. After developing some sample messages, use a focus group to pre-test them.

Identify what excites top prospects about a job or company — to refine your messaging you must identify what factors about an industry, company, or job excite your target audience enough to drive them to apply, i.e. high pay, job security, interesting work, a green environment, a great location, an opportunity to learn, etc.)

Identify possible “turnoffs” — in addition to understanding factors that excite, you must also identify the factors that are turnoffs. Because you cannot control the information available on the Internet, you must first find out what negatives about your firm and jobs are easy to find, and develop/test “countering messages” to make sure they successfully overcome published negatives.

For not-looking prospects, identify what it takes to get them to enter the job-search process — if you don’t know already, currently employed individuals who are “not active lookers” cannot be attracted using active approaches. If you are targeting individuals who are not actively seeking jobs, it is critical that you identify the specific “triggers” that would excite them enough to enter into job search mode.

Identify the factors that cause top prospects to take the time to apply — it takes a lot more to get a top prospect or a non-job-looker to take the time required to apply for a job. As a result, your research must identify the drivers or factors that will overcome their natural resistance to applying for a job. Once you identify those factors, prepare and pretest your messages to ensure that they drive candidates to take desirable recruiting actions like visiting your website, applying for a position, or making a call to a recruiter.

Identify the best ways to identify potential referrals — because employee referrals produce such a high volume and improved quality of candidate, use your market research tools to identify the best approaches for identifying and selling referrals. Provide that information to your employees so that they can target their referral efforts.

For active candidates, identify where they see job information — although it takes less work to get active candidates to apply, the very best actives have numerous firms in mind. As a result, use your research methods to identify the specific places and locations where your top “active prospects” would likely see and read an announcement of either an open position or a recruiting-related event. You should also consider putting an identifying code, phone number, or unique web address in each message in order to allow you to later identify which ones actually drew the most interest.

Don’t forget follow-up market research — in order to ensure that you “got it right” and to continually improve, gather follow-up source and influence information from a sample of applicants, candidates, and finalists. In addition, always ask new hires during onboarding what factors attracted them, caused them to say yes, and what factors almost caused them to say no. Use this information to refine both your market research and your recruiting process.

Final Thoughts

Recruiting leaders can learn a lot from competitive fishermen. You cannot even begin to be a mediocre competitive angler without fully understanding the interests, locations, habits and feeding routines of your target — i.e. the trophy fish. You can of course use intuition or luck, but the best competitive fishermen have long ago shifted to the scientific approach, which includes depth finders, temperature gauges, and electronic fish finders.

In the same light, recruiting must move away from traditional unstructured trial-and-error approaches and instead shift toward more scientific and data-driven research approaches. If you are among the majority of recruiting leaders who have hiring managers continually complaining that they are not seeing top candidates, your lack of market research and not “fully understanding your prospects/candidates” may be to blame. As the job-search process becomes more complex and global, you may soon find that there is no alternative other than adopting a market research model in the recruiting function. Don’t wait too long. There simply won’t be time to catch up.

• Market segmentation — an approach that separates top performers and innovators into a distinct segment, so that recruiting could distinguish between the unique expectations of top performers and the completely different expectations of average candidates.
• A scientific approach to get in front of their eyes — surveys or in-depth interviews with top prospects to determine the best location for them “to see” job postings or employer-brand-influencing content.
• A databased approach to identify decision-triggers — periodic focus groups asking top non-job lookers (i.e. passives) what factors about the job and company must be present in order to actually trigger them to consider your job, and in-depth behavioral profiles that reveal which factors lead to complete application/acceptance.

You Don’t Know Jack

What recruiters don’t know about candidates is extensive. For example, it is extremely rare for consumer-oriented companies to even make note that a candidate is a regular customer. Hiring managers interview candidates without realizing that even a mediocre candidate experience might drive them away from their brand as a consumer. Few companies have a formal process to identify the job acceptance criteria of top candidates.

Most recruiters believe they know “candidates,” but when you drill down into their knowledge in specific instances, you realize that the knowledge is limited to generalizations full of stereotyped assumptions. It’s not entirely the recruiters’ fault; few human resource leaders (possibly because few have spent time in recruiting) seem open to investing in market research to arm them with data. Recruiters have been forced to rely solely on ad-hoc information garnered from interviews, and informal conversations with candidates that often lack insight into day-to-day behavior outside the job search. It is my argument that if recruiting is to ever move from an art to a science and to prove its business impact, recruiting leaders must implement an in-depth market research practice.

Prospect market research is the process of systematically identifying and exploiting the job search approach and the decision-making criteria used by top prospects

Key Learnings

Other Business Functions Have Already Made the Transition — Almost every consumer-touching business function already leverages market research. Sales, marketing, brand management, customer service, and even product development long ago shifted to a data-based model. Other aspects of HR use tools like 360s, employee surveys, and exit interviews to better understand the internal audience, but external audience research is one of the most important but most-ignored aspects of the strategic recruiting process (along with quality-of-hire metrics and sales training).

I estimate that less than 10% of corporate recruiting functions have ever flirted with conducting real market research on their prospects. Most recruiters and recruiting leaders argue that they are simply too busy to do this research. Unfortunately, it’s quite possible that the high workload may in part be caused by their lack of a understanding of their target, which results in ineffective messaging and the poor placement of job announcements. If you’re getting a high volume of low-quality candidates who barely know your firm, a lack of market research may be the culprit.

Moving from one job to another is equivalent to buying a house — Most in recruiting severely underestimate the complexity of the decision to switch jobs, equating the job-search decision with the simple and unsophisticated purchase of a Starbucks coffee or a Diet Pepsi. However, if you expect to land top candidates and those who are currently employed, you need to realize that moving from one company to another is a life-changing decision.

As a recruiter, you are selling something that is the equivalent of buying a house or a car, because it’s a major decision that impacts everyone in the family. The cavalier attitude comes from an over-emphasis on “active candidates” who will go out of their way to find and apply for a job, but if you’re trying to attract a top prospect who already has a job and multiple career choices, you better “know them” and their decision criteria backward and forward or you will never see an application from them.

The job search process literally changes almost every day — Knowledge about candidate search behavior like most knowledge might become obsolete in less than six months. Take a step back and think about it: nearly every day the news features an announcement of a new technology or app related to communicating, making referrals, or finding a job. Do candidates use Foursquare? Do they want to apply for jobs using a mobile device? Do they find out about a company from their website or on Facebook or Twitter? Do they use Glassdoor, Quora, or LinkedIn to find out about an organization’s negatives? Does this generation search for jobs in a different way?

You can’t actually “know” what candidates are up to without continuous market research. One of the reasons that firms are struggling to prove the ROI of social media recruiting is because we really don’t know precisely how and when these new communications tools are being used by the different market segments. You can no longer be satisfied simply knowing that these new communications and networking tools exist; you need to know how top prospects are actually using them as communications channels and job-search tools.

Job expectations are constantly changing — Speaking of different expectations … are you having difficulty recruiting from the different generations? I laugh at most of the junk science used to describe the expectations of the different generations. Almost all of the assumptions about generations are based on broad global generalizations based on age rather than data-driven segmented market research.

Assuming that everyone within a 20-year generation that lives in any country of the world can be attracted using the same recruiting approach is simply silly. Incidentally, this segmented market research information can also tell you how you need to change your jobs so that they become exciting to the specific individual or market segment you are targeting. Without market research, you can only rely on trial and error to fully understand these changing expectations.

Next week: Recruiting Market Research Action Steps and Information Gathering Targets

“After this year’s show I am smiling from ear-to-ear,” he wrote, in praise of how vendors are integrating and leveraging assessment data for “analytics and business intelligence.”

I saw what he saw, but from a different perspective; a perspective that encompassed the sweep of the showroom floor, and in-depth discussions with many of the largest vendors, and casual conversations with several others.  What I sensed, more than saw, was that HR analytics are being understood as more than a measure of recruiting productivity.

Wanted Technologies is an example of how vendors are providing tools to access data and show its cross-departmental value.

The other day, Wanted added salary ranges to its AnalyticsT platform. AnalyticsT is a data product designed specifically for recruiters. It can tell you on a very granular level what the market supply is like for specific jobs; how many of those jobs are being advertised at that moment; what the trends been; and who is doing the hiring and how many positions they have.

Now with the addition of the salary range, recruiters can compare the going rate in their locale — or elsewhere — to what they’re offering.

A valuable tool for recruiters? Certainly. But it would be a shame if that intelligence stayed with HR. As Wanted’s President and CEO Bruce Murray said, “Talk about a seat at the table… They (HR professionals) can provide competitive intelligence on a company and get very detailed about it.”

Wanted was one of the companies on my not-to-miss list for HR Tech. Alas, I did miss connecting with the company there, so our conversation the other day was about much more than the new salary addition.

“These kinds of reports,” Murray was saying, “are the building blocks of HR providing business intelligence.”

Before going further, let me explain what Wanted’s AnalyticsT does. First, there’s the database of job listings going back years. The company’s roots are in collecting online sales information. Among other things, the company spidered listings of various types, cleaned it, sorted it, and sold leads to companies.

Its recruitment database goes back six years has 650 million job ads alone. From that job descriptions, titles, salaries, the company placing the ad, and other critical information has been extracted and indexed, making it possible for a recruiter in Milwaukee to learn how many game-level software developer jobs have been listed in the last several months, how the number has changed over time, what the pay is, and who’s doing the hiring.

There’s more than that available, but with just that much, HR can inform marketing and sales about what the competition is doing. Have salaries been going up? What’s the supply of potential candidates like? Critical information for managers of the development teams, which may need to adjust their pay scales or spend more time plumbing the career plans of their people with hard to find skills.

The AnalyticsT platform integrates with LinkedIn so recruiters can directly source candidates. The integration handles the supply side. Wanted’s job posting collection handles the demand side.

Other companies collect job listings, but Wanted is the only one to be vetted by The Conference Board, a private business organization that collects and distributes enormous amounts of economic information, including the widely quoted Consumer Confidence Index. It’s from Wanted that The Conference Board gets its data for the monthly Help Wanted OnLine Data Series.

Let’s get started by first defining Quality of Hire (QoH). In an ERE article last year, I proposed this as a basic definition: how well a new person meets the performance needs of the job using the following 1-5 yardstick:

Level 1.0: Underperforms on all core performance requirements of the job.

Level 2.0: Reasonable match on most job needs, but needs extra management, direction, or coaching to meet the basic performance standards.

Level 2.5: Average performance. Meets basic requirements of the job with a normal degree of management coaching and direction.

Level 3.0: Solid performance. Meets significant performance requirements of the job on a consistent basis with minimal management direction and support.

Level 4.0: Consistently exceeds significant performance requirements of the job on measures of quality and/or quantity.

Level 5.0: Far exceeds significant performance requirements of the job on a consistent basis.

While typical interview and assessment tools can differentiate between above and below average performance, they don’t do too well in determining if someone is a Level 3, 4 or 5. Traditional job descriptions are part of the problem, not the solution, since they emphasize skills rather than performance. Generic competency models are similarly flawed, since they don’t adjust for the actual job requirements nor any unusual circumstances involved. Behavioral interviewing works to some degree by adding structure to the interview and reducing emotional bias, but is not specific enough in measuring variations in good performance. While these tools are adequate for separating the good from the bad, they’re far less effective for measuring QoH.

To more precisely measure pre-hire QoH, understand what drives performance and what causes underperformance. Assuming the person hired was appropriate on all traditional measures, a determination then needs to be made as to whether the person was hired for the right job, for the right manager, for the right company, and under the right circumstances. This type of multi-step approach offers a model for developing the means to measure pre-hire QoH. Here’s how: 

1. Good person hired or not. First determine if the person hired was a generically solid performer in past roles doing similar work. For our purposes let’s define a Level 3 performer as someone who is in the top third or the top quartile of their peer group. These are people who get assigned bigger projects, get promoted faster, get bigger reviews, and receive formal recognition for a job well-done.
2. Good job fit or not. A good person put in the wrong job is a big cause of underperformance, yet in most companies this assessment is not as robust as it should be. To measure pre-hire QoH on a job fit basis requires an assessment of past performance to some predefined future performance. Consider the Gallup Q12 as a guide for this. The Q12 identifies 12 factors that drive performance and satisfaction. Most of them relate to job fit, e.g., clarifying expectations up front; providing appropriate tools, resources, and materials; assigning people work they are highly motivated to perform; and providing appropriate training. Most companies blunderbuss their way through the job fit part of the assessment by over-relying on generic competency models, poorly constructed assessments, and an over-emphasis on skills. None of these help measure pre-hire QoH more precisely. A direct assessment of job fit, including the ability and motivation to perform the work at peak levels is an important subset of the pre-hire QoH measurement.
3. Good managerial fit or not. A good person doing the right job for the wrong manager is a primary cause of dissatisfaction and under-performance. Bad managers demotivate their teams, and the best ones inspire them. One way to measure managerial fit as part of pre-hire QoH is to compare the new hire’s developmental and managerial needs to how the hiring manager trains, develops, and manages his/her team. This is a variation of Blanchard and Hersey’s work on situational leadership.
4. Right company/situation or not. Given a good person, appropriate job, and the right manager, a mismatch at the company cultural or circumstance level could still undermine performance. During the assessment some measure needs to be made regarding these environmental issues, including pace, intensity, level of sophistication, complexity, how decisions are made, resource availability, and company politics. While most companies recognize the importance of this, the actual assessment is relatively superficial.

Considering this multi-step concept, here’s an approach for measuring and maximizing quality of hire:

1. During the intake meeting, prepare a performance profile clarifying the performance expectations for the job.
2. Look for the achiever pattern during an extended work-history review. This is comparable to gathering forensic evidence that the person is in the top half of the top half, doing work similar to that described in the performance profile.
3. Conduct a “performance review” approach to interviewing, rather than a traditional behavioral interview. Here’s how: during the interview spend 10-15 minutes digging into the best example you can find of the candidate doing something similar for each of the performance objectives listed in the performance profile (here’s an interview guide for this). Then “grade” the person the same way you’d conduct a performance review using the 1-5 scale noted above.
4. Examine the trend of performance over time and compare this to top performers in your company. The idea is that the steeper the slope of the line the stronger the person.
5. Assess managerial fit. One way to do this is to compare how controlling vs. hands-off the hiring manager is to how much direction and support the candidate has received in the past.
6. Measure cultural and situational fit by understanding the circumstances associated with the candidate’s best work. The idea here is to determine if there are any situational issues that affect performance.
7. Measure team skills by examining the functional makeup of and types of teams the person has led and has been assigned to.
8. Combine all of the separate scores for the 10 factors into an overall pre-hire quality of hire measure using the talent scorecard.

One problem companies have in measuring pre-hire quality of hire is the continued reliance on old tools. The metaphor that to a person with only a hammer every problem looks like a nail, rings true in this situation. To measure pre-hire QoH more precisely requires a different way of thinking and different measuring sticks. The multi-step approach is a simple way to rethink the problem in combination with a pre-hire performance review type of interview. Using a quality of hire scorecard like this is a reasonable approach to assess all of the variables that best predict on-the-job performance and those that contribute to underperformance. As long as the scorecard is based on real job needs and circumstances, the same evaluation process can then be conducted post-hire. The causes of differences in predicted vs. actual job performance can then be identified and used for process improvement.

Implementing a talent acquisition strategy requires some type of QoH metric to monitor effectiveness and provide immediate feedback. After the fact is too late to do anything much about it, since you won’t know if it’s working or not. The approach suggested here offers a commonsense roadmap to begin. From what I’ve seen, getting started is often the most difficult part of the journey.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on HR be sure to check out TLNT!

Based on my observations in the field over the past 40 years, I’ve compiled the following list of what I have seen that leads to greatness.

Some of the factors relate to strategy and goals, some basic perspective, and others operations and administration. Truly great recruiting leaders understand not just a few but rather all of these laws and govern accordingly.

Irrefutable Laws Related to Functional Strategy and Goals

• The primary goal must be business impact — strive to directly impact business results and the organization’s strategic business goals (including revenue, business expansion, productivity, and innovation). This impact will result from designing a branding, recruiting, and hiring process that hires employees who rank in the top percentile of performers based on on-the-job performance, retention, innovation, and diversity.
• The recruiting strategy must lead to domination of the talent marketplace — recruiting leaders must select and implement the most effective recruiting strategy that contributes to an overall “performance culture” and that allows the organization to dominate the talent marketplace in its industry. The strategy must be agile so that it shifts to fit the current business environment and competitive marketplace. Recruiting processes and goals most closely mirror the business strategies of marketing (including branding, prospect identification, market research, and sales) and supply chain. Those business approaches should be the foundation for developing recruiting strategies, processes, and tools.
• Executives are the primary customer — executives are defined as the primary customer because they best understand the “big picture” needs of the organization and they approve funding. Individual hiring managers are important, but they are not primary because when hiring, they routinely put their own selfish short-term interests ahead of the long-term corporate interests.
• The primary target is top talent – in order to be effective, you must clearly delineate and define your primary recruiting target. The primary recruiting target in most cases should be top talent, which includes top performers, those with critical skills, game-changers, and innovators. Top talent can come from anywhere, but most are employed and well-treated at competing organizations, so the strategy and process must be designed to convince those not looking for a job (some call them passives) to consider working at your organization. While “active” candidates should be considered, recruiting leaders must realize that approaches that attract active candidates will not work for individuals who are not looking.
• A competitive advantage is needed in a zero-sum game — because recruiting faces a limited pool of top talent, it is a “zero sum game.” As a result, the recruiting strategy and process must not only be effective, it must be clearly superior to those of your talent competitors. In order to build a competitive advantage, recruiting leaders must create a differential and continue to differentiate between your organization and its talent competitors. That should include conducting a competitive analysis, gathering competitive intelligence, countering each competitor’s moves, and being able to react whenever a competitor improves their recruiting approach.

Irrefutable Laws Related to the Basic Recruiting Paradigm

• Recruiting has five key components — employer branding, talent prospecting, talent courting, candidate assessment, and offer closing. While all are important, the first three have the most impact because great assessment and selling can’t produce quality hires unless top talent is in the candidate pool.
• Employer branding has the greatest long-term impact — managing the employer brand(s) is the most strategic component of world-class recruiting in the long-term. Functional leaders must measure and proactively influence a firm’s brand image in order to ensure that the very top prospects become interested in working at your organization.
• Prioritization allows you to focus – because not all jobs have the same business impact, recruiting leaders must work with management to identify and give priority treatment to high-impact jobs.
• A talent pipeline approach is superior — in order to maximize effectiveness, recruiting must start well in advance of an opening. That means that the strategy must include a “pre-need” component to build a talent pipeline for key jobs. In the same light, truly outstanding talent needs to be proactively recruited and hired even when there is no current open requisition.
• Speed is required for quality — because top talent is in high demand, the hiring process must be fast if you expect to land top candidates with multiple offers, but also thorough.
• Timing is required for quality – because an organization’s chances of recruiting top talent are diminished when the competition for talent is high, it is essential that recruiting efforts be timed appropriately. Many organizations recruit whenever a position opens up, but a superior approach is to consider labor market trends and recruit top talent at the most opportune time: i.e., low competition, great supply.
• A global capability is needed — because top talent exists around the globe, organizations must develop processes that are effective at attracting and hiring talent anywhere. This should include offering remote work options and adapting recruiting processes to local needs.
• Aggressiveness is the norm — unlike most areas of HR, recruiting is a highly competitive act. When labor market conditions are tight, it is literally called a “war for talent.” If you want to dominate the talent marketplace in your region or industry, you need to be proactive, bold, and aggressive. Aggressiveness is required because the recruiting process mirrors the sales function, where they are literally trying to “steal” away another organizations’ customers. You also you need to be able to successfully “counter” the offerings of your talent competitors.
• Recruit diversity for improved business results — one of the primary goals of recruiting is to hire individuals with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking. In addition to meeting legal requirements, diverse perspectives increase innovation, help identify major errors, and ensure that the employee base understands the needs and expectations of the organization’s diverse customer base.

Irrefutable Laws Related to Operations and Administration

• You must be talent centric — the recruiting process, at least for top talent, must be “candidate centric” so that “the candidate experience” meets the needs and expectations of top talent. Recruiting must have a process to identify top talent job interests and acceptance criteria, and tailor communications/actions accordingly. The process itself must demonstrate innovation because candidates will assess the innovativeness of your firm based on their experience throughout the process. All candidates could be a current or future customer, so the overall process must be candidate-friendly.
• A strong business case is essential – recruiting must continually compete for resources with other talent management and business functions. In order to get sufficient resources for the function and convince managers to spend enough time on hiring, recruiting leaders must work with the CFO’s office to build a compelling business case. A key business case component is to convert the output of the recruiting function into operational impact, including the dollar impact of hiring top talent, the cost of prolonged position vacancies, and the cost of weak hires.
• Influence managers to act correctly – hiring managers are the final decision makers on hiring, but they dislike being ordered or threatened. As a result, recruiting must accept their role as “influencers” and internal consultants. That means that they must develop effective arguments that convince hiring managers to precisely follow the hiring guidelines and to devote sufficient time toward hiring. Measuring and rewarding managers for great hiring can also contribute to managing hiring manager behavior.
• Technology drives capability, speed, and globalization — technology use must permeate all aspects of recruiting to enable greater capability and capacity. You cannot have an effective global recruiting effort without technology.
• Great recruiters are required to land top talent — services and technology can help any organization source great talent, but subpar recruiters can rarely sell top talent. Recruiters who continuously learn, are aggressive, who understand the business, who have strong sales skills, and who make data-based decisions are the ones who are the most effective.
• The most effective tools are required to land top talent – recruiting depends heavily on tools, so great recruiters and hiring managers cannot be effective unless they are provided with the most effective recruiting tools. The function must continually identify and assess which recruiting tools, processes, and approaches work best for each major need.
• You must use your employees as talent scouts — since there are never enough recruiters due to budget constraints, another strategic goal must be to build a recruiting culture where all stakeholders support continuous recruiting. Employees are well-connected to top talent through their professional networks, so an essential component of the strategy must be to harness those employee connections and relationships. Recruiting must encourage, recognize, and reward employees for acting as talent scouts to identify, assess, and refer top talent.
• Data-based decision-making is best — modern recruiting is more of a science than an art, so in order to produce industry-leading results, most decisions must be based on data. Data must be used to identify the best sources, the most accurate assessment processes, the most effective sales approaches, and other critical success factors in recruiting. Metrics must permeate the entire process in order to ensure that problems are identified and that best practices quickly spread.
• Integration is critical – because recruiting does not work in isolation, the recruiting process must collaborate with other talent management functions. In order to gain their cooperation, recruiting must demonstrate to the leaders of other functions both the positive and negative impacts that compensation, benefits, relocation, onboarding, development, internal movement, retention, etc. can have on recruiting results. In addition, contingent hiring must be fully integrated with the process for hiring permanent employees.
• Legal compliance – recruiting leaders and recruiters must work with the legal department to minimize legal risks. However, great recruiting is never “driven” by the fear of being sued. Effective recruiting departments calculate the risk levels and continually improve processes to ensure a better quality of hire.
• Continuous learning is required — because there is intense global competition for top talent, recruiting is continually evolving. Due to the rapid speed of change, knowledge, information, and “solutions” that are suitable one year may be completely wrong the next. As a result, recruiters and recruiting leaders need to be on the “leading edge of knowledge” concerning best practices, tools, and upcoming challenges.

Final Thoughts

There are several hundred thousand recruiters in the U.S. alone, most of whom operate without the support of a professional organization or uniform code of conduct. Most corporate functions are “ad hoc” functions operating without a complete, organizationally accepted mandate and written strategy or plan. Too many recruiting professionals seem happy to operate without understanding and following the irrefutable laws of world-class recruiting. If you are not among them, use this list as a simple “audit checklist” to identify where your recruiting function stands against world-class standards.

Climbing wall at Google - Boulder

Firms that have successfully overcome negative momentum and turned their performance around often select new leadership with a proven ability to operationalize a much narrower strategy. They also accept that the talent that was with the organization going into decline may not be the best talent to help pull the organization back up.

Turning around an organization is a tremendous feat, one that involves numerous cultural battles. It’s illogical to assume that any organization in a state of decline could transform itself into the next Apple, Google, or Facebook without dramatic changes to every aspect of its culture.

Corporate culture, often the subject of much debate, is quite simply the real operating environment of the organization. It has nothing to do mission, vision, and values, and everything to do with the unwritten rules that are inferred every day by management actions. Many CEOs who led less-than-successful turnarounds did so with the expectation that the answer was in product development, R&D, or sales, overlooking the role of talent management.

Talent Is Key in Any Turnaround

Despite CEOs acknowledging that developing “strategies for managing talent” (Growth Reimagined, PwC, 2011) is the most critical business problem they face in this difficult business environment, there are few leaders in talent management bold enough to accept the challenge of leading a business turnaround. Recruiting leaders often say that they want to have a strategic impact, but focusing on tactical issues and efficiency demonstrates that they don’t know what actions they need to take in order to be strategic.

“Being Strategic” Requires a Performance Culture

Southwest Airlines Bags Fly Free Photo Shoot

Being strategic requires actions that demonstrate a multi-year impact on the primary strategic goals of the organization (i.e. revenue, profit, productivity, market share, time to market, and innovation). In cases where a dramatic business turnaround is required, CEOs often articulate the need to build a performance culture (every employee, every manager, every process expected to increase performance and innovation). Unfortunately, many organizations attempting to transition fail to consider the insane impact a talent management activity like recruiting can have on corporate culture.

It’s no secret that firms notorious for delivering record-shattering performance invest significantly in both recruiting capability and capacity, while those that fail often institute cost-containment efforts without any consideration for functional effectiveness. Companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos accept that the recruiting function can dramatically impact corporate culture by managing the caliber of talent that makes it through the front door. There are few more impactful ways to build a performance culture then to populate your firm exclusively with new hires who know how to build that culture rapidly.

The First Step – Accepting the Role of Gatekeeper

By accepting gatekeeper responsibility, recruiting leaders send a clear message to everyone inside the organization that they will ensure that all new hires will either be a top performer, an innovator, or a game-changer. This is necessary because despite the crisis, individual hiring managers will likely continue hiring in their own short-term interest if allowed to.

20 Additional Steps Recruiting Can Take To Help Turnaround a Business

The following 20 actions are the most impactful actions a recruiting leader interested in driving a turnaround effort should consider. They are broken into four categories.

Change Goals, Targets, and Branding

1. Shift the goal to “hiring for the good of the firm” – traditionally the recruiting function has allowed most managers to hire for their short-term, self-serving needs. In a performance culture, that tendency must be changed so that all hiring decisions are made based on meeting the goals of what is best for the overall performance of the organization. Follow the example of Google and consider instituting a broad hiring team that will ensure that every hire fits the new culture.
2. Change the targeted competencies – recruiting leaders need to change the definition of “corporate fit.” Organizations must target individuals with new competencies who would not “fit” the old culture. This is necessary because in a performance culture, every job description and selection criteria must emphasize performance, the ability to lead, and the ability to successfully innovate. You can’t produce significantly different results if you hire the same competencies that got you into your current situation.
3. Change employer branding and recruiting communications – in order to attract the very best, recruiting and corporate communications must shift messaging radically. The new approach must clearly communicate that “things are changing” and articulate why the organization would be not only relevant, but also an exciting place for top performers, game-changers, and innovators to work. Those involved in hiring must be provided with a sell sheet that helps them to effectively communicate the changes that are occurring and how the new culture would be exciting to top candidates. Emphasize fast decision-making and a chance to try new things.

Change Who You Hire

1. Begin with a few magnet hires — start by identifying and hiring a handful of “magnet” individuals. This will quickly send a message throughout the industry that the very best have recently decided to join your firm. By bringing in a few well-known people, you automatically attract others who admire them.
2. Prioritize the hiring of managers and leaders – managers and leaders have the most influence over changing the culture and improving performance and innovation. As a result, recruiting must prioritize the hiring of great managers and leaders, so that they are filled with change agents and innovators.
3. Prioritize high-impact jobs – in a performance culture, everyone acknowledges that all jobs do not have an equal impact on business results. Because at least initially there will be a limited number of hiring opportunities, with its remaining hires, recruiting must identify and prioritize the business units and the jobs that will have the most impact on performance, innovation, and the turnaround. Recruiting leaders must influence the CFO and COO to prioritize the authorization of requisitions in those high-impact areas.
4. Hire change agents – whenever you hire regular employees, emphasize the identification and hiring of “change agents” with a track record for implementing change. Also target individuals who have a history of intolerance for the status quo and those who overly defend it. Look for “fist raisers” and individuals who will instantly speak up when they see a performance weaknesses or a lack of innovation.
5. Shift the focus to external hires – a successful turnaround will require employees with a completely different skill-set and a mentality. Although organizations normally have a preference for promoting and transferring current employees, changing long-held employee values and behaviors may require more time than the turnaround allows. You need to shift the ratio of internal versus external hires to emphasize external hires not overly tied to the current culture.
6. Target your competitors — if you’re going to beat your competitors in the marketplace, you also have to beat them in the talent market. Winning the battle for top talent must start with a competitive analysis that includes the strengths and weaknesses of each of your major talent competitors. Because a large percentage of the top performers in your industry are likely working at one of your competitors, target your competition’s best talent. Hiring from competitors not only helps your firm but it also simultaneously degrades the capability of your competitors.
7. Speed requires team lift-outs — in order to minimize the time it takes for your turnaround, you may have to target and successfully recruit entire intact teams from other firms. This is because intact teams are already used to working together, and as a result, they often can produce results much faster than a newly organized team of “strangers.”

Change Your Processes

1. Change the assessment process to identify performers and innovators – at least for the first year of the turnaround, recruiting must change its resume screening, interviewing, and candidate assessment processes, so that they effectively screen out anyone who is not a top performer or an innovator. Instead of simply relying on candidate statements, require each candidate to demonstrate their ability to perform and innovate on real problems that the company is currently facing.
2. Emphasize proactive referrals — in order to ensure success with limited recruiting resources, every employee must become a talent scout. Start by approaching current employees who are known for performance and innovation and specifically ask them to use their social networks to identify and make employee referrals of those who fit the new culture.
3. Focus on direct sourcing — you cannot assume that broad advertising will successfully reach and convince the people that you really need to apply (especially if you are targeting individuals who are not actively looking). Instead, your sourcing effort must proactively identify and sell the specific individuals who you need to build your culture of performance and innovation.
4. Improve coordination and sharing – effective recruiting relies heavily on other HR and talent management functions. In order to maximize speed and results, interrelated functions need to be more closely coordinated and integrated. A process must also be put in place that ensures rapid and widespread best practice sharing. You may also need to develop a SWAT team to rapidly address the most difficult recruiting problems that come up.
5. Develop metrics to identify problems – in a performance culture, metrics improve accountability and spur continuous improvement. As a leader of the turnaround, recruiting must lead by example by developing quarterly performance metrics that quickly allow everyone to identify hiring successes and failures.

Additional Actions to Consider

1. Show the business impacts of recruiting – recruiting leaders cannot assume that executives and hiring managers will automatically see the tremendous economic impact that recruiting can have on the business turnaround. In order to get executives and managers to own recruiting, both groups must be shown the direct dollar impact on revenue that results from hiring top performers, game-changers, and innovators. In fact, all recruiting results must be converted into their dollar impact on corporate revenue and sales.
2. Negotiate control over other types of labor — because as much as 50% of an organization’s “labor” may come through contingency or outsourcing channels, the head of recruiting must ensure that they have some degree of influence or visibility into contingent hiring as well. This is necessary so that everyone (regular or contingent) is on the same page when it comes to performance and innovation.
3. Re-train your recruiters – in order to hire the best, you will need to retrain your recruiters so that they have the mindset and the capability of bringing in top performers, game-changers, and innovators. The tools and technologies that you provide to recruiters and managers must also improve if you are to successfully recruit top talent into a firm with a lagging reputation. Focus on referral and social media tools because they are effective and inexpensive.
4. Reward great hiring – in order to get managers to focus on great hiring, work with those in compensation and performance appraisal to add the hiring of top performers, game-changers, and innovators to the bonus criteria of every manager and executive.
5. Improve internal movement – because resource limitations will restrict the amount of external hiring, it is a good idea to use your corporate recruiters internally to identify and move innovators and top-performing employees quickly into areas within the firm where they can have a larger impact. Influence the promotion criteria so that they promote based on a recent record of performance and innovation, rather than on experience and loyalty.

Final Thoughts

In my former role as a chief talent officer, I can tell you that I learned quickly that the prime differentiator between great and average recruiting leaders was their ability to see the tremendous business impact of great recruiting. Once a recruiting leader realizes that recruiting alone can have a tremendous impact on building a performance culture and on turning around a struggling business, they are simply unstoppable.

Online and available for all practitioners to review is a second draft of a proposed standard for cost per hire. An initial version was posted earlier this year. After getting some 50 comments, the SHRM committee that drafted the standard adopted some of the suggestions, made changes, and now, following the rules of the American National Standards Institute, has reopened the comment period.

Jeremy Shapiro, who led the 42-member taskforce, explained the latest version has “no substantive changes.” “This version,” he said in an email, “contains tweaks and clarifications based on great feedback…”

The most significant changes are the inclusion of a definition of sourcing and a note clarifying that the cost per hire standard relates only to full-time employees and not fractional hires. About sourcing, the draft says this: “A subset of the recruiting process, sourcing refers to actions taken to identify potential candidates for employment within the organization.”

Assuming the latest round of comments doesn’t require further changes to the standard, Lee Webster, director of HR Standards for SHRM, says it could be submitted to ANSI shortly after the close of the comment period June 20.

It will then be up to the standards organization to review the proposal and act to adopt it as an official U.S. standard. That could happen by the fall, Webster says, making the cost per hire standard the first HR metric to become an official U.S. standard.

No practitioner or employer is obligated to follow the standard. Those who do, however, will be able to compare their hiring costs to those of their industry, confident that it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. Even for those who don’t apply the standard rigorously, it will still give them a guide to know what HR practitioners agree should be counted.

“I think people will choose to have a more consistent standard,” Webster says.

The CPH standard is the first of several being developed by various SHRM committees. In the works are standards for job descriptions, diversity, and measuring the financial value of a company’s human capital. Developing standards is a long process, but someday, Webster says, there will be a “body of performance standards” measuring HRs effectiveness and giving weight and substance to the pronouncements of corporate HR leaders.

The standards also have the potential to go global. In February, the International Standards Organization accepted a plan crafted by SHRM to develop global HR standards. So far, Webster reports, 25 nations are participating in some form in a technical advisory group. Representatives from each participating country will review every standard as it is proposed. The first one, Webster says, is probably going to be the cost per hire standard.

Interestingly, Iran has expressed an interest in participating, Webster says.