Most recruiters, corporate or agency, have finally developed career sites and use the Internet for attracting, sourcing, and communicating with candidates and clients. The website is the bedrock of an effective recruiting practice, and while it may still be possible in local or niche markets to avoid it, for mainstream and volume recruiting a website is essential. In this article I am assuming you already have a decent website that has interactivity, video, audio, and other graphic material and updates frequently. That is old news.

But, to get a jump on your competition and to attract the savviest candidates, it takes more than a good website and good recruiting skills. Here are four essential tools for success.

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

You should have a personal and a corporate presence on a social network. I have only listed Facebook and MySpace because they represent the largest share of the social networking world in the United States and a significant percentage outside the U.S. If your organization has global operations and recruiting needs, then there are networks for China, India, and many other places that you should also consider.

College students and most other young professionals turn to these networks for information about you, to ask their friends about you, or to join a community of practice that you have created.

IBM DB2 developers have a Facebook community developed and maintained by IBM. KPMG in South Africa has developed a Facebook page to attract and communicate with potential candidates.

The U.S. Army, faced with massive recruiting challenges, has numerous Facebook and MySpace pages. Some of the pages act as testimonials or provide videos of real people talking about why they joined the Army. Other pages are focused on fun experiences such as simulations of driving a tank or on gaming.

However you use these networks, you will be exposing your brand to thousands of potential candidates who, at least to some degree, will judge their potential work experience by the quality of the content. That’s why these pages have to be done thoughtfully and have to connect to the type of viewer and what they are expecting to see and hear.

Tool #2: LinkedIn

I separate LinkedIn from Facebook and MySpace because it is not really a “social” network so much as a simple way to link people who know each other together in a web of interconnections. These interconnections can be useful when they are leveraged well, and LinkedIn has developed special applications for recruiters.

You should all get a copy of Bill Vick’s excellent guide to using LinkedIn for recruiting. LinkedIn allows you to build a network of people who know you and each other. By working to populate this network with the kinds of people who you either would like to recruit or who can help you find those you can recruit, you can leverage your success many times over.

And by learning methods such as those taught by Shally Steckerl you can use LinkedIn as a structured, searchable database of potential candidates.

LinkedIn is a versatile tool and can be used for marketing, search, and connecting. This is what makes it as essential tool for your toolbox.

Tool #3: Your Personal Blog

Developing a blog puts you ahead of almost all other recruiters by building your brand and your organization’s brand. Blogs have become the most authentic course of information for candidates. They like to read the personal stories and hear about your organization from your perspective.

Most candidates are wary of official corporate career sites because they realize how controlled these sites are and they understand that a public relations expert wrote the copy. What candidates are hungry for is authenticity and personality. And this is what blogs have in abundance.

Yet, every time I tell recruiters to create a blog I hear groans and complaints. I hear things such as, “My organization won’t allow us to blog.” Or, “I don’t have time.” Or, “No one can read all the blogs that are out there.”

While I can’t do much to help you overcome internal organizational bans of recruiting blogs, I can suggest you think about creating a personal blog outside of work that can build your brand and help you source good candidates.

Blogs can be updated once a week or so and entries can be quite short. Good blogs keep each posting to a single idea and add pictures or video to maintain interest. Devoting an hour or two a week to a blog is far more useful than spending that time pouring over unsolicited resumes or cold calling.

Tool #4: Twitter

Twitter is the most recent and least understood of these tools. It is a mini-blogging tool that allows you to write 140 characters at a time and send the message to a candidate’s mobile phone or website as a message or as an SMS. Over 2 million people have Twitter accounts and the number is growing very fast. Twitter can be used in a variety of ways to improve the recruiting experience and as a sourcing tool.

Jason Whitman from IT.Toolbox has written a few blogs pointing out ways Twitter is being used as a sourcing tool. Art’s Blog from Bullhorn, a major supplier of recruiting software for the agency world, also gives some ideas of ways to use Twitter for recruiting.

Use Twitter to push out job announcements to potential candidates, stay connected to a special group of people, or keep those top candidates in the loop. It’s free and easy to use. And, because so few are actually using it, you will have a real advantage for a while over everyone who is isn’t using it.

Staying current is never easy, but at least it can be fun. Experiment, play, and see where these tools take you. I think you will like where you end up.

He heads recruiting for a large construction company where business is good and hiring strong. There are many open positions for experienced, senior-level people and there will soon be many more as a large number of boomers are approaching retirement. He is being urged by some on his team to begin using Web 2.0 techniques and to develop a more exciting and interactive Web presence in order to get ready for both current and projected needs.

So Willie is wondering….would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do)?

What would you do if you were Willie?

Here is one of the first responses that I received from a reader:

“I would suggest Willie fishes where the fish are. Web 2.0 is fun, new, different, exciting and sexy, however the fish he is looking for are not feeding there. 45-55 year old engineers and project managers are not on social sites on the Web. . .”

There is certainly a lot of merit in this argument. While a recent Pew study suggests that a very large percentage of people over 50 are using the Internet, it is likely few of them would use the Internet to find a job.

Most people – even those much younger – are most likely to find a job through a personal referral or family member. In the construction industry, this is even more likely as teams of workers often stay together and go from job to job.

So should Willie just forget about the Internet and Web 2.0? Another thoughtful reader offered this opinion:

“However, the trend line of usage is only heading in one direction – up.  Willie should not jump in just to be there. He should develop a plan to systematically explore the sourcing effectiveness of a range of established and emerging social networks.”

One intriguing thought was put forward by this reader:

“Let the old-schoolers do an open house or attend events and let the new-schoolers do another Internet-based project. Measure both, see which one works better. Experimentation is the heart of problem solving and data doesn’t lie (if you don’t lie to the data).”

And another writer says:

“Sticking to ‘old school’ exclusively won’t work (it tends to attract old-school candidates) nor will emailing everyone and his brother via LinkedIn or Zoom. However a mixture of these approaches (along with well-thought-out and updated Employee Referral, Employee Alumni, Blogging, Industry Websites, etc) and an action plan that follows up with rigor and process to emails with calls (early in the morning or late in the evening) has worked for me.”

One reader seems to think that if we could find an incentive that attracts construction workers, then the Internet, specifically a Ning site, could be leveraged to spread the word and attract potential candidates. Many organizations have had success with methods similar to this – Cisco Systems used to give away water bottles and associated running/jogging paraphernalia to attract potential candidates with great success. He writes:

“I would get a bunch of tool makers for construction to sponsor tool giveaways on his Ning site and establish an email campaign offering multiple entries into each months drawing for the tools to members that drive new membership to the site. I would set a limit of 5 entries per person per month for folks that drive a certain number of new members. Tools talk to construction guys!”

This would be a low-cost solution as well because the tool makers would be paying for the giveaways.

As in most things in life, there is no one answer or magic bullet. Change can be evolutionary or disruptive depending partly at least on when you choose to get started on a change effort. If you start before things are in crisis, it can be an evolutionary experience.

If not, it will certainly be unpleasant and highly disruptive. This reader recognizes this and presents a reasonable approach for Willie to consider:

“Willie is in the same boat as many recruiters. They all face the same challenge; what I’m doing now is working so why should I change? What they are doing now is just fine and will work in the current hiring environment. However, what works now might not work in the future. If the team is having problems with the hard-to-fills now, I would anticipate the problem only getting worse.”

Thanks to each of you for sending in your opinions. Here are some of my thoughts, many of which are mirrored in those of the readers who responded:

• Willie needs to develop a comprehensive approach to this issue. He should continue doing what works now and even needs to do it better. This means relying on some of the older and more experienced recruiters to continue building referral networks, holding on-site events, and doing other things that will engage and attract the current experienced worker.
• On the other hand, he also needs to start building capability for tomorrow. This means perhaps letting some younger recruiters get a social network started and to begin finding ways to connect effectively with construction workers virtually. That may mean focusing on mobile technology — recruiting via mobile phone, using Twitter, or finding some other ways to engage people working outdoors without a typical office connection to the Internet.
• Extensive planning, deep research, and large teams are not the best way to approach this. He should not spend much time in deciding which way to go because there is no good data and not many people with experience.
• His solution should be one of experimentation. He could start a number of small projects that each use a different approach and monitor and measure each one for effectiveness. As soon as one approach fails, he needs to kill it and move on. Speed is important, as is effectiveness. Keep each approach simple and cheap. Use low-cost solutions such as Ning until he is certain of its potential and then invest as much as possible to make the chosen approach robust and highly engaging.

As in almost everything in life, there is value in yesterday and in tomorrow. It is finding the right balance that is the key to success.

Through speaking, I not only help companies understand the latest recruiting trends, but I also learn from hundreds of professionals about what they see as hot topics, emerging trends, and how they are approaching them. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my thoughts on what recruiting trends will top the agendas of Global 500 recruiting managers in the next 12 to 18 months based on my interaction with more than 300 organizations around the globe this year.

The Latest Trends in Corporate Recruiting

Based on conversations with recruiting leaders, questions asked during seminars, advisory requests, and best-practice research, expect to see an increased emphasis in:

• Upgrading employment branding. Nothing is hotter around the globe in recruiting than employment branding. Firms throughout Asia, in particular, are increasingly adopting employment branding as a wildly important activity for 2009. The success of Google, a firm that has built the world’s strongest employment brand over an amazing five-year period, has led others to focus on this impactful long-term strategy. Key focus areas include increasing media coverage, increasing visibility online, building your “green” brand, and countering your “negative” employment brand. Firms to watch: Facebook, Google, Yum Brands, Tata, E&Y, Enterprise, U.S. Army, and Sodexo.
• Reinvigorating referral programs. Despite the growth of career-related Internet sites, the highest volume and quality candidates still come from well-designed employee referral programs. While heavy adoption was initially hampered by cultural issues around the world, today such programs are proving highly effective everywhere. Key focus areas include proactively approaching key employees for referrals (program targeting), leverage non-employee referrals, making reward systems more comprehensive, immediate, and visible, and last but not least, helping employees leverage social media to restore relationships, make new relationships, and build stronger relationships. Firms to watch: AmTrust Bank, Edward Jones, Whirlpool, and Amazon.com.
• Renewing the focus on quality of hire. As a result of strong research by organizations like staffing.org, recruiting leadership has begun to refocus its efforts on identifying factors that increase the quality or the on-the-job performance of new hires. Key focus areas include improved quality of hire metrics, calculating the performance differential between average and quality hires, and identifying sources that produce high-quality hires. Firms to watch: Aimco and Wipro.
• Reinforcing the business case for recruiting. As budgets tighten and slow economic growth continues, recruiting budgets will face constant constraints. Instead of whining, many leading talent organizations are seizing the opportunity to reposition themselves as non-transactional organizations. When the focus in recruiting is placed on non-transactional, more systemic issues, such organizations can work with the CFO and risk management to demonstrate the importance of supporting recruiting even during times of reduced hiring volume. The key focus areas include predictive modeling, dollarizing recruiting results, and showing the dollar impact of vacancies in revenue generating positions. Firms to watch: Aimco, DFS, Wipro, and Google.

• Utilizing social networks. Although using social networks as a recruiting source has been a well-discussed concept for a while, few firms have found productive ways to truly leverage social media sites. However, as new approaches are developed that more accurately align with the paradigm of social media audiences, recruiting on social networks will become more mainstream. Focus areas include encouraging your employees to be more visible online and using networks to identify innovators. Key networking sites include Facebook (global), MySpace (global), Friendster (global), LinkedIn (global), Twitter (U.S.), Multiply (Asia), Mixi (Japan), Cyworld (Korea), and Xiaonei (China). Firms to watch: E&Y, Zappos, CIA, Yum Brands, Google, and Facebook.
• Utilizing video. While it may be hard for some to fathom, 1:1 and 1:many video has become a very popular communication medium, surpassing all other forms of Internet traffic. Second only to employee referrals, the most impactful tool for effectively demonstrating the excitement and passion at a firm is online video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then moving pictures demonstrating what it’s like to work at your firm would have to be “priceless.” Focus areas include posting on video-sharing sites such as YouTube (global), Youku.com (China), and sharing employee-generated “unscripted” videos on your corporate site. Firms to watch: Deloitte, Microsoft, and Google.
• Upgrading succession planning. A common practice becomes much more critical as global growth and large-scale retirement loom on the horizon. Focus areas include replacing retirees, improved succession planning metrics, adding external candidates to your plan, and fast-track leadership development. Firms to watch: Intuit, Eli Lilly, Deloitte, and TVA.
• Using employee blogs for recruiting. A practice that is finally beginning to enter the mainstream is employee blogging to support recruiting efforts. The very best firms use blogs not just to spread their message but also to answer questions and to make their company appear more “real” and approachable. Key focus areas include blogs by employees other than recruiters and micro-blogs. Firms to watch: Microsoft, Google, and Sun.
• Using mobile-phone recruiting. As mobile phones with amazing features spread throughout the population, recruiting managers are beginning to realize that they can be a powerful recruiting media. Key focus areas include text messaging, mobile video, and mobile-accessible corporate careers sites. Firms to watch: Google and nearly any firm in Asia!
• Revitalizing corporate jobs page. Recruiting managers are beginning to understand that pitifully dull and dated websites drive away innovators. Focus areas include providing personalized information to the visitor, Flash video integration, blogs, podcasts, and virtual Q&As. Firms to watch: Microsoft, Google, and Deloitte.
• Using a CRM model for hiring. I’ve been touting the values of the CRM (customer relationship management) model for years. More firms are beginning to understand the value of improving the experience at each “touch point” with the candidate. Key focus areas include relationship recruiting, automated applicant profiling, automated event calendaring, and robust lifecycle metrics. Firms to watch: U.S. Army, GlaxoSmithKline, and E&Y.
• Hiring innovators. Rapid product copying and the high visibility of innovative firms like Apple and Google are forcing recruiting managers to modify recruiting processes in order to successfully recruit innovators and game changers. Key focus areas include relationship recruiting, pre-need hiring, and tolerant/inclusive screening and interviewing processes. Firms to watch: IBM and Google.
• Recruiting globally. Recruiting managers are beginning to learn how to differentiate multi-national recruiting from true global recruiting. Key focus areas include global sourcing, globalized websites, and globalized employer referral programs. Firms to watch: Infosys and IBM.

Other Trends to Observe

Although these trends aren’t red-hot, they are emerging areas where a few firms have taken the lead and have produced noticeable results. These are certainly not going to become mainstream for most firms during the next year, but if you are an innovator, keep a close watch:

• Virtual-reality recruiting on SecondLife
• Video games as recruiting tools
• Online assessment tools
• Using contests to identify internal and external prospects
• Simulations for candidate assessment
• Inclusive recruiting (replacing diversity recruiting)
• Remote interviewing
• Remote college recruiting
• A renewed focus on internal redeployment
• Boomerangs (bringing back key ex-employees)
• Recruiting at professional events
• Using credit card/sales leads to find prospects
• Using analytics and modeling to predict future workforce needs
• A new focus on the use of contingent workers in the weak economy
• “Remote” college recruiting
• A focus on contingent hiring
• Improving on-boarding to build the employment brand
• Reality TV shows as a recruiting and branding mechanism

Not-So-Hot Areas

Here are some areas that vendors and consultants talk a lot about, but in many cases, there is little innovation to report:

• Outsourcing recruiting processes. Protecting your own recruiters makes this option less attractive as budgets get tight.
• Video resumes. It’s still hard to get managers to view them.
• Competency modeling. Too time-consuming to undertake during tough times.
• Large job boards. Always mediocre, and their value is shrinking.
• Retention. In a tight economy, only the very best will consider leaving.
• Speed of hire. As unemployment rises, there is less pressure to make rapid hiring decisions.

Final Thoughts

These are just my thoughts. If you have identified any additional trends, let me know (johns@sfsu.edu) or post them on the ERE forum.

Willie is a progressive guy, usually the first to try out new technology or bring new ideas into a conversation. He was one of the first recruiting managers to adopt an applicant tracking system years ago, and he is an advocate of maintaining close relationships with candidates via email. He is just not sure how to go about implementing a Web 2.0 strategy or how to create a social network.

Willie’s organization is a construction company with over 1,000 employees, mostly all located in the United States with a handful in China setting up a new operation.

Despite the economy, they have lots of work. Many of their contracts are local and state government jobs that are funded by tax dollars and have strict deadlines. Revenue is excellent and the firm projects to earn more than US$1 billion this year. The future looks bright given the poor state of the U.S. infrastructure. They project doubling revenues within 5 years as more roads, bridges, airport runways, and water systems need to be replaced.

But Willie faces some major challenges.

The average age of employees is around 45 and the most valuable ones are the oldest. In fact, some of the key project supervisors and head engineers are approaching retirement and the CEO is worried about replacing them. As the competition for experienced project supervisors, civil, and mechanical engineers grows the pressure will definitely increase on his recruiting team.

His staff is centralized and large. He has two recruiters who focus on sourcing. They are expert at Internet search and generate a lot of names and potentially good candidates. He has another 10 recruiters distributed by function. Most of them are recruiting hard-to-find and hard-to-hire supervisors and engineers.

There are a few recruiters who focus on other types of hiring needs including IT and human resources and there are a few administrative and coordinating staff members to help out. Willie has resources, staff, and senior management confidence.

His senior recruiters are mixed in their interest in Web 2.0 and social networks. A couple of them are old-school and are opposed to any technology solution. They think that engineers and supervisors are not computer types and don’t surf around the web. They want to spend more time and resources on face-to-face meetings, attending conferences, and even dropping by construction sites. They would support adding more seniors recruiters.

But the rest see value in setting up a social network, especially if it could become a forum for discussing construction problems or for finding new projects. They are advocating a site that has lots of content and is less obviously a recruiting site and more of a site that generates interest and answers questions. They think it would be a way to begin attracting younger engineers and help them develop skills.

He has a colleague at another company that has used Ning to start a social network for prospective candidates. It really hasn’t been very successful. It has a few hundred members who are mostly passive.  They sign up and then never are heard from again no matter how many emails he sends or provocative chats he tries to get started. Willie suspects the problem may not be a Web 2.0 or social network issue, but more about how it is being used.

There are other factors that give him pause about social networks. For example, most people over 35 are not active on social networks, not everyone has the “Internet habit” and only log on occasionally, and some people are reluctant for privacy reasons to put personal information on the web.

But the looming retirements, lack of a strong current pool of qualified candidates, and projected robust hiring environment are real cause for concern.  Willie needs to ensure a supply of this talent for at least a decade. Current recruiting methods are working today (actually quite well) and any diversion might cause a problem.

So Willie’s woe is complex: Would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do).

What would you do if you were Willie?

I will collect your responses and print some of them (anonymously). I will also provide my own opinions about what Willie should do in a future article.

I hope (and believe) both these excellent groups will give Sam exposure for his phone sourcing business, Longfellow Search. More than that, I know Sam will personally go places he never dreamed he’d go as moderator of these groups! (How are those working for you, Sam?)

Recently I’ve been watching (and thinking about) the changes that are coming over our ERE site.

Being most concerned with my beloved groups here on the site, I’ve watched anxiously with the new design as the buttons for “Groups” and for “Discussions” descend from their former prominent placement at the top of the page to the bottom, bunched under the heading “ERE Network” along with “Feedback & assistance” and “People.”

Encouraged by the recent addition of community conversations on the right side of the Main page near the top, I notice I can watch all the recent activity at the site scroll by as it develops: Group Postings, Group Comments, Articles, Article Comments, etc., and click on any one of them to be whisked to the post. Knowing that ERE has made wise choices in the past regarding their site re-design, I trust in the powers that be and look forward to an ever-brightening future for the forward-thinking and powerful ERE. I feel privileged to be a part of this.

Getting back to the main subject, I know there are over 140 groups on the site broken into three categories:

• Topics & Interests: 46 groups
• Industries & Occupations: 38 groups
• Geographic Regions: 58 groups

The site further earmarks groups by:

• Active groups
• New groups
• Special groups

If you’re interested in getting involved in a community, joining a group and contributing to the daily discussions in that group is a good way to do it!

Beyond that, forming a group as a Group Leader is an option available to any ERE member. Simply click on the “start a new group” button on the Groups page, name it, fill out a Mission Statement for the group, and submit it for approval. The process couldn’t be easier and it is usually approved within 24 hours. Once you have a group you are free to direct its course. This part is not as easy as it sounds!

Creating a group carries a responsibility with it — by volunteering to birth and guide a group you are signaling to the community that you will be here for the long term. You’ll watch over and tend that group and make it an interesting and safe place for community members to “stop by” in their quests for information.

It goes without saying (or maybe it should be said!) that it is mostly up to the group leaders to keep a group on track and interesting. On a daily basis I watch over all my groups and attempt to contribute something to at least half of them (I have several) in an attempt to start discussions, keep discussions going, keep them interesting, and keep them contributing to the community.

It’s not an easy job.

It requires diligence, time, and an eye out for “issues” that might be of interest to members. I peruse the online news for topics and I freely use them, teasers with links to the originals, on my groups. I try to contribute something original from my own experiences at least two to three times a week. Sometimes this gets hard, but I try to discipline myself to this rigorous schedule. I don’t always succeed, but I try.

More than anything, group maintenance takes time. I spend two to three hours each day watching, reading, posting at my groups — it won’t take you nearly this amount of time if you only have one group to start. That’s how I did it — I had ASK Maureen first and stayed that course for a while before I got the bright idea of opening other groups. I start early, usually at 4 a.m. and I work my groups (both here on ERE and off) ‘til the birds start singing around 6.

Throughout the day, I spend another one or two hours between all my groups, so I can say with certainty I spend three hours a day on group maintenance. I like it, and that’s another advantage: it gets my creative side going and I enjoy that immensely. This is why it’s so important that we all understand what makes ourselves tick.

I push my groups hard. In the beginning of my groups (and I know Sam has done this) I invite people here on the network to my groups; you can do that if you’re a Group Leader. It’s not an easy process. In fact, it’s laborious, allowing you to invite maybe two people every minute, one by one. I encourage ERE to consider allowing Group Leaders easier access to the site’s members to make this community-building easier.

I also watch other groups and contribute when I can. There are many fascinating groups here on ERE that have creative and active Group Leaders who place community first and I appreciate them. I would signal out Diane Propsner, Sam Medalie, Barry Geiman, John DePolo, Steve Levy, and Steven Rothberg as outstanding and successful Group Leaders we can all learn from. There are others and I apologize for anyone I left out.

Here’s a trick that goes a long ways toward building community: If you’re the type to visit and contribute at other network sites, it’s a great boon to network (and group) membership if you include a link in your postings back to interesting posts/articles or posts of your own here on ERE. I try to whenever I can and I hope it helps build our membership base. I try to do this democratically, it should be noted; I link to other network sites as well as ERE. I confess to having a preferential fondness for ERE and links back here are probably more prevalent in my online posts.

Creating a group is just the beginning of an exciting and rewarding commitment to community that will return dividends you just can’t imagine. Try it!

For those of you who showed up, thanks for coming! A big thanks to Beeline RPO for sponsoring appetizers, door prizes, and name badges! For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a taste of what you missed.

We’re just getting started with these local meetups, so if you have any suggestions for places where we can hold them, or want to help us put them together, get in touch with me at madeline@ere.net

What makes a network valuable to you or me?

Is it the number of connections you have? I don’t think so. I have over 10 million first-, second- and third-degree connections on LinkedIn, but I get almost no value from that network, per se. I know recruiters who collect names because they are looking at quantity not quality. They judge themselves and others as “successful” by how many people are in their network.

Yet, successful collectors in any area do not just collect at random. The good ones have a system, a focus, and a rationale behind their collecting.

For example, stamp collectors are usually focused on a specific country or theme. The same is true for coin collectors. Baseball card collectors concentrate on a team or league or person. Focus is necessary and is the first rule for successful use of networks because it is so difficult to sift through thousands of anything to find the one(s) that meet your criteria.

It is much better to have hurdles to entry that ensure the integrity of those who are admitted. A recruiter needs to know exactly what type of people they are looking for and then spend the time to attract only those and admit them to a community of similar people.

Does the amount of communication that goes back and forth between connected people make networks successful? Volume does not predict success. Most communication on networks is small talk, meaningless chatter, and disengaging tirades.

Rare is a conversation that allows a recruiter to evaluate the qualities of a prospect. While there is nothing wrong with chit-chat, it does not refine what a recruiter knows about a candidate. The networks where people engage in discussions about relevant issues and have arguments that are based on facts and evidence are powerful, but hard to find.

The second rule of getting value out of your network is to create a forum where good discussion can take place and where people get engaged in issues that shed light on their skills. Volume and frequency of communication is not an indicator of quality.

The Most Valuable Network

The most valuable network I could imagine would help me attract similarly well-qualified potential candidates. It would ultimately lead me to people I could place, after using less energy and time. Anything else would be less useful and less valuable.

Valuable, robust networks need to meet at least four criteria:

• Have a mix of people with similar interests and motivations.
• Be led by an instigator, or a rebel who rouses passions and gets people engaged.
• Have a large-enough number of people so that someone is always “there” to respond, comment, and keep the ball rolling.
• Save time and energy in the screening and interview processes.

Most networks fail to become significant factors in recruitment because they lack one or more of these criteria. Take a typical recruiter’s version of LinkedIn. It probably contains between 400 and 1,000 contacts, if the recruiter is slightly above average and has spent some time building her contact list.

Almost all of those contacts are not personally known to the recruiter and they belong to a broad spectrum of skills and backgrounds that have little similarity. The recruiter almost never engages the candidates in discussion and learns little about the prospect even though the person might have been in the network for some time.

In theory, a recruiter can then ask for a referral to a person she has found that looks like a promising prospect. If a referral takes place, the recruiter most likely falls back to yesterday’s model of interaction and asks the prospect to submit a resume. By doing this, she circumvents the network and makes it even less valuable.

More Power for Your Hour

If you’re going to spend the time networking, use a more powerful engagement model that ensures that everyone who enters the community has a similar set of skills. Use a short questionnaire or screening tool, or simply invite people based on title, years of experience, or educational level.

Whatever the criteria, remain consistent and relevant to the kinds of positions the organization has open.

Once people are invited to join the community, the recruiter can act as an instigator of a discussion. Their job would be to set up a discussion board or case study site where there could be a quality period of exchanges.

These exchanges would get the prospect engaged and interested in the opportunity (or not) and act as a preliminary screen of the prospect’s skills in solving a problem, answering a question, or analyzing a case. The interactions would be recorded and saved for future analysis.

Of course, it takes a significant number of community members to keep a discussion going and that may be hard to do at first. It will mean that the recruiter will have to spend time getting personally involved in discussions or find a hiring manager who is willing to take on the responsibility.

The recruiter will also have to know when a topic is fading and get another topic ready to stimulate thought. The goal is to reach a point where the recruiter can spend as little time as possible and still learn a great deal about a prospect.

Finally, networks need to have criteria and processes that channel prospects to more relevant career sites or explain why the organization is not a good fit for their skills or values.

Eliminate those who are not potential candidates. Strive to keep your network filled with those you would actually hire, and of course, those you would be happy to work with. Cultural harmony and candidate quality can only come from networks that are deliberately set up to achieve those goals.

All around the world, organizations are scrambling to formulate policies to deal with social networking. Should our employees be allowed to use Facebook at work? Can we check out someone’s MySpace page before we hire them? Can we stop our sales manager from posting pictures of himself at a drinking festival wearing just a barrel and a cheeky grin?

There’s an equal air of excitement within marketing: It’s so hot right now, how can it help us sell more, find new customers, or stay closer in touch with the customers we have?

It’s having an impact. Companies who block Facebook or MySpace are finding themselves having to justify it. Many younger people have never been out of touch in their lives, and even eight-year-olds have mobile phones these days. It’s a logical extension to be connected to all of your friends.

Facebook as Job Perk

If only one or two of a peer group are not permitted to use Facebook at work, then they feel out of touch with the group. A job comes up where a peer works, and suddenly an employer is wondering why they just lost a useful employee.

No one ever admits at an exit interview that lack of access to Facebook was a key factor!

Unlikely? Well, search a job site for “Facebook” and “MySpace” and you’ll find companies are now starting to mention access to these sites as a perk of the job.

Talent acquisition professionals know the benefits of sites such as LinkedIn: personally, I have access to over five million people worldwide, along with plenty of information about them! I can search for people who went to university in South Australia but now live elsewhere. Or I can find people who have specific expertise. As a recruiter and an author, that’s gold.

With recruiters plundering social networks and employees spending all day talking to their friends, no wonder management feels uncomfortable.

Management response is schizophrenic. Let’s stop our people from accessing this stuff at work because we pay them to work and we don’t want them poached! Then, let’s use it to recruit for ourselves.

That’s dumb. You’re finding and recruiting people who enjoy free and easy access to social networking and offering an environment where it’s frowned upon.

How can you help organizations embrace change without being swept along in the excitement?

• Point out that mobile phone technology allows employees to circumvent any restrictions anyway, and allowing access from the PC at least offers some control.
• Explain that an employee who feels trusted and respected is likely to waste less time than one who feels trapped by policy.
• Argue that poaching is a process that starts with an employee not feeling that their current role is valued and respected.

There’s still the fear that allowing access to social networking sites at work will lower productivity and make staff more visible to poaching. So take baby steps.

Make suggestions for improvements: “If we allow some online social networking at work, it will improve the reach, scope, and effectiveness of our already-beneficial ERP” seems quite innocuous.

Eventually suggest something along the lines of “Here’s a way to make an already excellent system 10% more effective.”

As the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: make sure you have superb metrics in place to measure success and costs. IT departments can easily measure connection time on social sites. A policy that limits rather than prohibits is likely to be more respected.

Many companies are actually making social networking activity a compulsory part of the job, as it tells your customers you’re confident and connected. It also shows your competitors’ staff a glimpse into your great work environment.

It ceases to be a great idea if you treat employees like eighteenth-century serfs. The key here is the employee’s perception, and that’s the only one that matters.

Are you overwhelmed with the hundreds of new tools, applications, websites, and services that have sprung up over the past few months?

Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are all the rage. Some recruiters are charging forward with Twitter and other SMS-type tools. Websites are being revamped with videos, blogs, and simulations.

Recruiters who are not using any of these tools or who are not remaking their websites feel as though they are falling behind. Other recruiters are feeling confused and uncertain over how to effectively decide whether these tools are useful or just a waste of time they don’t have.

As a profession, we are faced with too many tools and very little experience or wisdom in applying them effectively. Recruiters are confused, as are the senior management teams of most organizations, as to which technologies are essential to winning the talent war and which are fads.

Some recruiters rely entirely on Internet search or on job boards. Others are busily creating new interactive websites and writing blogs. Some are reverting back to telephone and face-to-face meetings out of frustration and confusion.

Tools and services are often purchased because the salesperson did an effective job in selling the benefits of their product, or because the recruiter is afraid that they will lose their competitive edge if they don’t have the latest tools. Unfortunately, recruiters rarely have a clear strategy on how to deploy and integrate technology into their recruiting process.

In order to steer technology choices, you need to understand what is happening in the world of recruiting technology, and there has to be an appreciation for the evolutionary nature of all technology.

Four Technology Rules to Implement

Here are the most important technology rules that every prudent recruiter should follow and understand.

1. Recognize that technology evolves faster and faster. Whatever software or Internet application you are using today will most likely have evolved significantly within one year. It may have been upgraded, it may have evolved or merged with some other technology, or it may simply be superceded by a better concept. You always need to understand this when you invest in a technology. Never purchase any technology without agreements and understandings about how and when upgrades and changes will be made. Always be willing to “pull the plug” if a technology seems to be going nowhere or does not meet your needs. Have a backup strategy and don’t rely entirely on any tools or technology until you are certain that it works for you. When you first hear about a new technology or tool, use Google to search the Internet and find out what others are saying about it. Log into forums or consult sites such as Geoff Petersons’ StaffBytes, which is a fantastic listing and commentary on emerging tools and technologies. Use your own networks to seek out in-depth information or just survey your colleagues to see who else might be using the tools or technology.
2. Have a technology strategy. Take a step-by-step approach, perhaps starting with a base-level solution that will allow you to handle administrative tasks and automate the transactional side of your work. The tools that handle this are usually applicant tracking tools, and I consider them to be foundation technology. You might then focus on branding and attraction tools that could include a more interactive website, email campaigns, a blog, and other similar tools. From that, you could move to Internet search and talent pool development using Facebook or LinkedIn. Most medium to large organizations could perhaps implement two of these at the same time, but lay out a project plan and set milestones to track your progress.
3. Look for “out-of-the-box” tools and technologies that expand your capabilities. All early tools copy what is done in some other way. For example, early applicant tracking systems simply scanned in resumes, duplicating paper electronically. These early systems rarely add anything new. Over time, the products evolve and become more aligned to their own unique capabilities. Always seek tools that do more than you can do with existing methods. Think outside the traditional and be open to vendors who offer products that seem to break the established molds. They are probably onto something pretty good. Firms like Itzbig, Checkster, SkillsSurvey, Job Fox, Twitter, Ning, and Standoutjobs all offer innovative solutions that are worth looking into.
4. Create a way to sort or categorize technology. Even though the world of technology can be confusing, most products fit into categories that then help you decide what might be best for you. I fit most of these into one of six categories: Branding or Attraction; Sourcing; Talent Community Development and Relationship Management; Assessment; Administrative; and Onboarding. Branding and attraction includes your career site, email, or other outreach campaigns you do along with videos on YouTube, for example, or a corporate profile on Facebook. Sourcing technologies would include any tools and techniques for finding people on the Internet, such as Google. Tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ning are social networks and are useful both for sourcing candidates and for maintaining relationships with them. Tools such as Checkster and SkillsSurvey help conduct reference checks and assess candidates. By putting the technologies into categories, it becomes much easier to decide how relevant they are to your needs and strategy. If you can’t figure out where a tool fits, ask the vendor and have a discussion that educates you and helps build your ability to make tough decisions.

Technology is an essential part of being a modern recruiter. Most recruiting will revolve around the Internet, social networks, and the related tools that make this work.

We will be communicating with candidates over email, SMS, and IM. We will be assessing them with simulations and other tests, and we will be checking their references virtually.

No one will be untouched by technology, and having a coherent and well-defined approach to adopting new tools and technologies will be important to your happiness, peace of mind, and success.

My definition of talent is simple: it’s those people who have the skills, knowledge, and desire to work for your organization. Increasingly, it is hard to find people with either the skills or the desire.

When I speak with young people they are generally turned off by what they perceive as the impersonal and uncaring attitude employers have toward them. They wince every time they hear the expression “people are our most important asset.” They know that most executives really believe that labor is a cost, just like steel or semiconductors, and want to get it as cheaply as they can.

Their cynicism has basis, in fact: layoffs and dismissals still occur among the youngest and mostly recently hired employees regardless of contribution or ability. We still believe that time on the job is the most important reason to keep or promote someone.

Prospective employees instinctively seek out organizations that appear to care for their employees, treat them with respect, provide development and career opportunity, and keep people based on contribution. However, even organizations that do provide these often overlook how important they are to getting candidates interested in the organization.

Most career sites remain uninspiring. Interview processes remain sterile, with most recruiters and hiring managers not capitalizing on the power of getting candidates more involved in the recruiting process through technology.

Many recruiters are adept at engaging candidates when they are face-to-face, but many are at a loss on how to do this with candidates who are on their career site or whom they have found during an Internet search. The power of social networks and Web 2.0 is its ability to get people involved, with a process, with a topic, and with each other.

Facebook and other social networking sites offer a variety of experiences, tools, and content to excite, engage, and motivate people to come back often. LinkedIn offers email, lets you invite friends to join, and provides job information. Facebook offers more. It adds the ability to share photographs and music and to engage in real-time conversation. These are all elements that should become part of your recruiting process.

Five young people between the ages of 22 and 27 were part of a recent panel discussing work and recruitment. These men and women said they wanted to work for an organization that is a fun, exciting place. They wanted to contribute to the success of the organization in meaningful ways, not just by doing what they are told. They wanted some say in what decisions are made and in the manner they work. They were especially attracted to organizations focused on doing some sort of good for the world and its people. They all felt that the career sites of their organizations failed to give them any information about these issues. The sites were also deemed boring and administrative. These are from people who are used to Facebook and YouTube!

The Lesson

It is really a simple lesson. If you want to capture more candidates and get them to accept your offers, and ultimately retain them, then improve your thinking around how you get candidates involved virtually.

Forrester recently presented the results of a survey they conducted on engagement. In it they list four elements to a successful marketing engagement program:

• Involvement. Essentially is the component that measures whether a person is present.
• Interaction. Doing something meaningful. Buying something. Taking a survey.
• Intimacy. The sentiment or affinity that a person exhibits in the things they say or the actions they take.
• Influence. Addresses the likelihood that a person will recommend your product or service to someone else.

I have taken the four Forrester findings and written them with recruiting and candidates in mind.

Involvement

This is step one. This is your career site, your job description, or your company itself. Is it presented in an interesting way? If someone were to come to your website, how long would they stay? How many people who hear about you actually ever look at open positions or ask for information? Are your job descriptions written like the marketing tools they are, or do they just list requirements and facts? There is a lot of room in this step for improvement. Most career sites are not very compelling nor do they try to involve candidates in discovering more about the organization. Measuring this step is easy: use the Web analytics I am sure your IT department is already capturing to tell you how many have come to your career site, how long have they stayed, and how many additional pages have they looked at.

Interaction

Do your candidates fill out profiles? Do they watch videos or download podcasts? Are they participating in your site? Interaction is a significant component of any Web 2.0 application and is the main method for getting people really excited and willing to explore deeper. All career sites should have three to five different ways to involve candidates. And once again, success can be measured by how many candidates use these tools and for how long.

Intimacy

This is a complex part of engagement and often its depth depends on the brand your organization has and what employees say about it. Candidates who get involved and interact for some time should come away with a general feeling about your organization and what it might be like to work there. Whether this is positive or not makes a huge difference as to whether someone will accept your offer and to how long they will continue to work for the organization.

Success in this step can be measured by how often candidates mention your company as an example to other recruiters or to friends. It can be measured by surveys about candidates’ perceptions of what it is like to work in your firm.

Influence

This is the Holy Grail or the ultimate goal of your engagement process. At this level, candidates are recommending your site to their friends and a viral referral program is in effect. This is easily measured by the number of referrals from other candidates and by membership in any networks you establish.

While this is a high-level view of a complex topic, the idea of getting candidates engaged is not new. What is new is how to do it effectively using the Internet and the more impersonal tools that have emerged over the past five years.

I am sitting in Vermont this morning reading a local newspaper with the headline: “Vermont lost 2,000 jobs last year.” But the article does not attribute this to the slowing economy; instead, it attributes it to the aging workforce.

Now, Vermont is a tiny state and certainly does not represent most of the United States. Its unemployment rate is low, its workforce a mix of highly skilled professionals and those engaged in farming, forestry, construction, or tourism. But what is noticeable is that this loss of jobs is attributed to demographics.

Andy Condon, chief of the economic and labor market information section of the Vermont Department of Labor says, “We believe it is demographic, that working-age population is beginning to decline in Vermont.” He goes on to say that as we come out of this recession, companies “may have a hard time finding workers.”

While this may be an isolated example of the impact of an aging workforce on employers, I believe it is validation of the claim that we will face a large shortage of qualified workers because of exiting Baby Boomers and the lack of younger skilled workers to replace them. Of course, many young workers have left Vermont for warmer and more prosperous climates, but this trend underlines the larger issues all organizations, state and governments will be facing over the coming decades.

Social networking offers the beginning of a solution to finding qualified people, no matter where they are, and connecting and communicating with them about opportunities. Social networks give recruiters the channel to market what they have to a broad, global audience.

They give recruiters a chance to develop personal relationships with people they have never seen face-to-face and to learn a great deal about them. Vermont’s issue may simply be that people are not aware of what the state offers or what jobs are available. Connected recruiters could make a difference in changing that perspective.

Being proficient at searching for candidates on the Internet also extends your reach and power when it comes to filling those hard-to-fill positions. I have been in discussions recently with recruiting leaders in remote areas of North and South America who are seeking mining engineers, one of the toughest professions to find. Without the Internet, they would not be able to find half enough of these engineers to meet their needs. By using Internet search techniques, they are slowly building talent pools that will continue to grow as they are linked into a private social network.

Connecting Recruiters to Candidates

Some social networks connect recruiters to potential candidates. Examples of these include LinkedIn.com, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and a host of small emerging networks. Compete.com’s recently released figures on the number of visitors to social networks show LinkedIn growing by over 700% in one year, Facebook by 77%, and Twitter by more than 4,000%!

Any recruiter faced with building a talent pool will quickly find value in creating a Facebook page or a LinkedIn entry directed to a network of potentially interested job seekers.

For example KPMG, Deloitte, IBM, Microsoft, and scores of other organizations that recruit large numbers of college graduates have numerous Facebook pages to communicate with potential candidates and provide them with information and contacts within the organization. Microsoft has even published a blog entry aimed at college students who are reluctant to be candid in their Facebook pages for fear they will be denied an interview or a job.

Smart candidates and recruiters are realizing that the age of job boards is declining and that the age of social networks has arrived, being pushed by the strong wind of an aging population and an increasing need for skilled workers on a global scale.

Of course there are challenges. There are legal concerns about how the information is being used and when it is being used. Organizations need to establish internal polices about how employees and recruiters use these networks, and candidates need to also learn how to create entries that are honest, candid, and fun as well as useful when seeking employment.

Connecting Recruiters to Recruiters

Other social networks are focused more on connecting recruiters and in allowing them to share best practices and experiences. Dave Mendoza of SixDegreesfromDave offers one of the largest of these networks. Dave’s is actually a meta-network, where his group feeds the growth of a recruiters’ LinkedIn network.

Dave states that this network is “a staffing professional’s social networking group which values the building of passive talent relationships as a means of enhancing best practices, meeting pipeline demands, and building value in community.”

I can attest to its power. He recently added me to the network and within a few weeks, I had grown my LinkedIn connections from around 450 to almost 2,000. This means I am within two connections to more than eight million other recruiting professionals around the world. Leveraged well, this gives me the potential to reach almost any type of candidate I could imagine anywhere.

Shally Steckerl of JobMachine offers training, online resources, and workshops that teach how to leverage search and social networks to create talent pools and find people with scarce skills.

For a large list of resources for recruiters you should take a look at Recruiting-Online.com. They list dozens of sources, local and global, that you can use or join to improve your skills at search and at actually using social networks productively.

It seems as clear as these blue skies of Vermont that being able to find people anywhere, quickly, at low cost, and then maintaining a relationship with them over the Internet will become the core skill of a recruiter this decade.

If you would like to follow me on my journeys, both physical and intellectual and sometimes just for fun, join me on Twitter. You can find me as kwheeler on Twitter. It is a wonderful and quick way to stay connected and share ideas, travel, and resources.

One of the most common questions I get from recruiting managers and executives is “What differentiates a world-class recruiting function from an average one?”

Well, in case you didn’t know, one of the primary differentiators is the practice of “proactive recruiting.”

It’s possible to categorize corporate recruiting activities into two basic types, reactive and proactive. Nearly 99.9% of all corporate recruiting activities fall under the first type, which is reactive. Reactive recruiting simply means that the recruiting function reacts or responds when, and only when, a requisition is opened up.

The second option, “proactive recruiting” (or “proactive talent management”) is an extremely powerful approach in which recruiting, on its own, takes positive action, regardless of whether there is a current job opening. Proactive recruiting provides you with a chance to WOW managers and to become a corporate hero.

Proactive talent management is a forward-looking approach that anticipates problems and opportunities. It involves acting independently to take advantage of a talent opportunity or confronting an upcoming talent problem, rather than waiting to resolve it after it occurs.

Of course, most business professionals already know that anticipating and being proactive is almost always a superior approach to being reactive. Although proactive recruiting is rare in corporate recruiting, it is however widely practiced in executive search, where it is a standard business practice to have search professionals continuously identify top talent, regardless of whether the search firm has a client with that current need. They rely on the premise that if they identify currently available top talent, they will invariably find a client that wants them. In the same light, corporate recruiting managers must learn to assume that if they identify great talent, that at least one manager will be willing to act on them.

The broader concept of “proactive talent management” includes many distinct proactive elements including pre-need hiring, “most wanted” lists, competitive analysis, predicting turnover, and “recruiting opportunity alerts.” In the remainder of this article, I will focus on the single element known as “recruiting opportunity alerts.”

Understanding Recruiting Opportunity Alerts

The premise of “talent alerts” is a simple one. It is perhaps best illustrated by an example.

Think of yourself as the head of a golf team with no open positions. Suddenly, your team’s recruiter enters your office and says, “I know you are not hiring but perhaps you might want to know about a ’sudden talent opportunity’ that I just learned about. I learned that just an hour ago Tiger Woods quit his current golf team and no other team, other than us, knows that he’s available. Given his talent, would you be interested in talking to him about joining our team?”

Of course the manager would respond with something like, “Hell yes! I’d love to talk to him immediately before the other teams have the chance to reach out to him!”

Under the traditional “reactive” corporate recruiting model, even if a recruiter knew about Tiger Wood’s sudden availability, without an open requisition, they certainly wouldn’t go out of their way to tell managers about it. As a result, after your managers later found out that he left one team and joined another, they would agonize over not being the first to know.

This example illustrates the concept of a “recruiting opportunity alert,” a recruiting function that continuously scans the talent horizon and periodically “alerts” relevant managers when the “tracked” superior individuals and teams suddenly become interested in a new position. Rather than the typical problem-solving mode, in this case, recruiting has a chance to shift its focus toward seeking out positive opportunities.

Alerts Are Better Than Not Knowing

It’s the same concept as when your stockbroker calls you up and tells you about a financial opportunity based on something that happened an hour ago in the market. Knowing about the “sudden” opportunity gives you information and a choice, which is superior to ignorance and no choice.

With a recruiting opportunity alert, there is no guarantee that a manager will take action on it. Nevertheless, it probably is a good idea to give them a heads-up so that, at a minimum, managers know that the recruiting function is on top of “what’s happening” in the talent marketplace.

Three Steps to Setting Up a Recruiting Opportunity Alert Process

It’s important to begin the design process by working with your corporation’s competitive intelligence team. Identifying when top quality talent is about to become available is a form of competitive intelligence gathering.

Developing the rest of the process includes three basic steps.

Step 1: Program administration

Developing the program’s rules and procedures through the following administrative elements:

• Determine who can participate. At least initially, identify the individual managers who are willing and who have the authority to act quickly on sudden talent opportunities. There’s really no sense in focusing on managers who have no budget, no authority, or those who are unwilling to take a risk.
• Prioritize. Some alert processes give priority to a small set of managers. One option is to give the “first shot” either to managers who respond the fastest or to those who have a track record of successfully hiring individuals as a result of alerts. A second option is to prioritize by the importance of the manager’s product or business unit. At firms where managers are quite competitive, it makes sense to allow managers to “bid” on the opportunity to interview high-value individuals.
• Establish rules. By definition, sudden alerts reflect immediate opportunities, so establish rules that require managers to respond rapidly once alerted about an opportunity. Managers who fail to respond with a sense of urgency should be given a lower priority or even dropped from the alert program. Warn everyone involved that this information on candidate availability is highly sensitive and thus it cannot be allowed to leak to competitors.
• Develop program metrics. This helps to determine what elements of the alert program are working well and which ones need improvement.

Step 2: Identifying sudden recruiting targets

Next, develop a process for identifying the individuals who managers will be alerted about. Some of the approaches to increase your organization’s capacity to identify these high-value individuals include:

• Use a Google score. As a foundation, provide your managers with an initial list of individuals who they can pare down to the ones that they have the most interest in being “alerted” about. You can develop this initial list by conducting Google type searches, which can easily identify the most “visible” individuals in each functional area. Next, ask managers to review the names and their profiles to identify the ones they want to hire. Place special emphasis on identifying individuals who write articles or are media savvy.
• Use a “most wanted” list. Comparable to a sales manager’s list of the most desirable potential customers, a “most wanted list” is a short list of highly desirable individuals who were pre-identified by managers at the beginning of the year. This list should also include high-value former employees who you would like to return. The high-value individuals on this list should be constantly tracked. So whenever information is received that indicates that any individual on it is becoming available, a pre-specified individual (usually a senior manager) would contact them immediately. For all other individuals (those who do not appear on this select list), an alert would be sent out to managers in order to see whether there is any interest in hiring this individual.
• Ask at orientation. Ask every new hire during their orientation process which of their former colleagues would be most apt to leave if they were asked in the next few months.
• Enhance the employee-referral program. One of the goals is to make every employee a 24/7 talent scout, because as professionals in their field, they are the people who are most likely to know when someone is ready to leave their job. As a result, add a component to your traditional employer referral program that gives employees a small reward (i.e., a $25 Starbucks card) for providing information related to the immediate departure of anyone on your firm’s “most wanted” list of talent. If that person is eventually hired, that employee gets the full referral bonus.
• Monitor social networking sites. Many individuals change their social network “page” or profile (on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc) the minute they are ready to change jobs. Ask current employees to look out for these profile changes or to use RSS feeds for auto-notification of any changes. Plan C is to hire an intern to frequently check the profiles of targeted individuals.
• Track conference attendees. Individuals often leak the fact that they are considering leaving at conferences. As a result, notify every employee attending these large conferences to be on the lookout for information or even rumors about who is unhappy and who is considering leaving. Funneling this information back to recruiting provides them with the opportunity to assess its accuracy and to put a “watch” on this individual.
• Track conference speakers. Conference speakers and panelists are often high-value individuals of interest to managers. Use seminar and conference brochures to identify these high-value individuals to track.
• Monitor negative business situations. These business situations might include rumors of, or actual, mergers, the departure of key executives, the loss of a major customer, the canceling of key products, etc. It’s probably true that managers and employees are already are aware of these business situations but it’s recruiting’s job to remind them that these negative situations might in fact mean that a number of sudden talent opportunities are about to occur!

Step 3: Types of alerts that are provided to managers

Finally, you have to determine which types of alerts that you will provide to managers as part of the program. Some options include:

• A single manager alert that goes to a single manager who has pre-identified this individual as a person of interest.
• A narrow alert targeted toward a few individual managers who are most likely to desire an individual with these types of competencies. Alerts can be provided in person, on the phone, or through email.
• A broad alert goes to a large number of managers. It is used when there is broad interest in this type of candidate or if you’re unsure.
• An immediate “act today” alert covers an individual on the “most wanted” list, or anyone in high demand.
• A business situation alert that covers “negative” business situations. This alert may be sent to all employees or all managers. It warns them to keep their eyes and ears open and to explore their networks in order to identify which of the highly desirable individuals at a “troubled” firm may be considering leaving. Any names that are provided are sent to recruiting for confirmation and possible action.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard for any organization to shift from the reactive to the proactive, but if you want to be strategic, you really don’t have a choice. Strategic recruiting departments are always proactive! Almost certainly, after your organization has some success in landing someone of the caliber of “Tiger Woods” as a result of your alerts, there will be no remaining doubt in your mind that this program has the potential to make recruiting a corporate hero.

After you successfully bring one of these “magnet” hires on board, you’ll also discover that they in turn will bring several others with them. Once you bring on several “magnet” individuals with a high industry stature, you almost guarantee that as a result, your overall employment brand will also improve significantly. Not a bad ROI is it?

Ever since the unsolicited offer by Microsoft to buy Yahoo, recruiters have been literally “circling” Yahoo in a manner that would have to be labeled as aggressive even by Silicon Valley standards. The tactics vary from the relatively tame practice of “cold calling” into Yahoo in order to find nervous employees to the more aggressive “trolling” by recruiters outside Yahoo’s parking lot and in local spots where Yahoo employees hang out.

Even though Microsoft hopes to gain a significant amount of Yahoo’s talent through acquisition, a number of groups at Microsoft are not waiting. Already on the Internet you can find copies of emails sent by Microsoft recruiters to known top talent at Yahoo, offering them an opportunity to explore a Microsoft career in this time of uncertainty. Those interested in reading one such email can check out this blog posting.

However, the most aggressive approach has to be a firm that has aggressively posted “we are hiring” posters in the entrance way and in the bathrooms of the building that they share with Yahoo’s famous San Francisco “Brickhouse” innovation site. I call it “bathroom recruiting” and by the way, I’ve heard that it has already yielded results. The firms that are actively attempting to poach talent away from Yahoo range from the very small startup Cake Financial to the recruiting machine Google, which recently successfully hired away a key Yahoo executive, Steve Souders, their Chief Performance Yahoo.

The Majority of Hires Are Poached

If “bathroom recruiting” shocks you, it’s only because most aggressive recruiting approaches are kept secret in order to maintain a firm’s competitive advantage. If you think that poaching (the direct targeting of current employees from another firm) is rare, you would be totally wrong. I estimate that nearly 75% of key hires in major firms are directly recruited away from other talent competitors, and that nearly 100% of CEOs (that are external hires) are poached.

Sometimes the person is lured away from their current firm not by a corporate recruiter but instead by an intermediary (a third-party recruiter or agency), but the net result is the same. One firm gains a new employee and another firm loses a current employee as a result of a recruiter paid directly or indirectly by the corporation. Even the practice of recruiting away individuals is being superseded by a more aggressive approach, known as “lift outs.” In a lift out, an entire team is poached all at once (Yahoo once lost an entire team to the software firm Nuance). Some firms now even keep score of their poaching activities. They calculate what I call their “giveaway/take away ratio,” which tells the firm whether they successfully recruit away more individuals from their competitors than competitors successfully poach away from them.

Poaching is Becoming a Global Phenomenon

Because of the almost continual poaching between giants like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo, many individuals think that the United States is at the epicenter of worldwide poaching, but that wouldn’t be true. China, closely followed by India, would win the award hands down.

The widespread economic growth in China has made the demand for managers with experience working and managing in China stratospheric. In my many visits to China, I have learned about how firms literally “bid” for experienced managers with amounts of money that would double a manager’s present salary.

India is no slacker either in the fight for top talent. I once met a CEO in Bangalore who was willing to open a plant across the street from Nokia in Finland just to increase the likelihood of directly recruiting away their engineers.

In Europe, the mobile phone firm Vodafone recently poached one of Microsoft’s top executives to head up its new Internet services division. In Canada, EA once placed a billboard in the vicinity of a competitor in order to incite them to switch employers.

Since the late 1990s, U.S. firms that are perceived to be in trouble or those that are being threatened with a merger have been subject to aggressive “across the street” recruiting efforts. It happened to PeopleSoft right before the Oracle merger. One Chicago-area hospital recruiter confided in me that their hospital unabashedly placed a recruiting van with a large canvas sign outside of a competing hospital that was having labor trouble.

But Isn’t Poaching Illegal, Immoral, or a Cause of Global Warming?

Whenever anyone brings up the topic of poaching, there are invariably squeals from the timid or the un-informed claiming that it’s illegal, immoral, unfair, unethical, etc. It’s funny that much of the talk comes from third-party recruiters who get a majority of their recruits from among the actively employed population.

Even some corporate recruiting managers somehow think that it’s better (or less dirty) to “poach” employees from another company by using an intermediary, as if somehow using a third-party recruiter and poaching the talent circuitously is more ethical.

Such an argument is just silly. If you pay a recruiter (whether it’s someone on your payroll or a vendor) to entice someone to leave their current firm to go to your firm, you have poached an employee. Hiring someone else to do the deed indirectly still means that your firm has gained an employee and another firm has lost one.

Incidentally, poaching away employees is not illegal because employees are not “owned.” (Ownership by one human of another has been illegal since the Civil War). Today, nearly all states and all corporations embrace “at will” employment, meaning that at anytime, either party may sever the relationship with or without cause.

Poaching May Spur Competition

Some HR professionals or managers are reluctant to poach because they are afraid that other firms will retaliate. Unfortunately, if you act this way your fears are misguided and you are probably hurting your firm with your timid approach. Using this fear of retaliation logic, the products division of your firm wouldn’t offer new products that competed directly with a competitor’s product because that large competitor might retaliate and squash your firm’s new product! In the same light, your sales people wouldn’t compete head-to-head for the same customers out of fear of retaliation.

Competition is everywhere. Business people expect competition everywhere; only HR people see “ethical issues” that just are not raised in other business functions. I have difficulty understanding HR professionals who keep saying they want to be business partners. It seems that when they are given a chance to actually compete like a business-person, they fail to act like real “business people” do every day, and that is to compete in the marketplace.

Executives and senior managers actually enjoy competition. If you have the best jobs in the best recruiters, you really have nothing to fear because you’ll win more than you lose. It’s a recruiter’s job to provide their current team with the best possible talent, so it’s time to stop being a pacifist.

Recruiting great talent is always a fight (some call it the “war for talent” for good reason) and if you want the very best well-trained candidates, you really have no other option other than to poach from your competitors.

The other option, hiring exclusively from “non-competitors,” invariably means hiring candidates without experience in your industry, candidates from outside the region with high relocation costs, or those candidates without any relevant experience. Hiring unemployed people with out-of-date training or individuals from other industries means extra costs to the firm because of their slow start up and their long learning curve.

Poaching objectors should also understand that, whether you like it or not, large competitors in any industry are continually targeting the employees of smaller firms and those in trouble. Large firms in every industry invariably look at smaller firms as their “farm teams,” so if no one is attempting to steal your employees, either you have a great blocking strategy or you may have some pretty undesirable employees! Any company that has good employees needs to constantly battle to keep them. It’s just part of business.

HR’s Dirty Little Secret

Refusing to poach may actually be illegal. One of HR’s dirty little secrets is that senior executives routinely make “pacts” where they agree not to poach each other’s employees. On the surface this might seem okay, but the reason these “gentlemen’s agreements” are always unwritten is because they probably violate the restraint of trade principle.

By agreeing not to compete, they are essentially hurting their current employees by restricting their freedom of movement. Under the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, employees are free to leave and go to any employer that they wish. When a firm agrees not to hire a competitor’s current employees, essentially what the firm is doing is legally limiting the freedom of its current employees.

Some unscrupulous firms attempt to “scare” their current employees and further restrict their freedom of joining a competitor by forcing them to sign odious non-compete agreements which are almost always unenforceable unless significant trade secrets are involved. Because no one can successfully hire them away, the current employer has an increased opportunity to poorly treat and underpay these individuals. Yes, competition forces employers to treat their employees better. A lack of competition allows employees to be abused because they have few options within the same industry or city.

As an employee, you might think that you didn’t get an interview at a competing firm because of some weaknesses in your work experience. Unbeknownst to most, the real reason they get no response are these secret, hideous, under-the-table non-compete hiring agreements.

The Benefits of Hiring Away Your Competitor’s Talent

If you’re unsure about whether you should poach, consider the many benefits that come from taking the best employees away from another firm. First, because they are currently working, they’re probably well-trained, up-to-date, and above-average employees. When you hire individuals from another firm, you get with the employee an understanding of your competitors’ processes, tools, and approaches.

Effective poaching will probably also force the competitor to focus more of their efforts on employee retention, which will in turn limit resources available to any recruiting effort that they might undertake against you.

Final Thoughts

Despite the inevitable whining that comes whenever anyone suggests that poaching is a positive thing, it exists and is getting more aggressive. You can either bemoan the point or accept it as part of the ongoing, continuous war for talent.

If you find yourself battling for talent, maybe it’s time to realize that in a war, you have to use aggressive tactics in order to win. Instead of blaming other firms for your current employees choosing to go elsewhere, instead look in the mirror, and blame yourself for not providing them with a superior opportunity. If you consider poaching to be war-like, so be it.

If Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft can practice it out in the open on a regular basis, I would instead label it as a standard business practice in the 21st century world of global recruiting. Any of you who think poaching away talent from Yahoo when it’s down on its luck is poor form needs to realize that it is being targeted not just because it’s weak, but instead because its human resource function and its managers did a world-class job in attracting some of the most desirable talent on the planet.

You see, it is extraordinary success that draws poachers, not weakness!

I read around 50 blogs on a regular basis and find myself scanning more and more of them. They are replacing newspapers and even magazines as a source of information. Some blogs are taking over the product review business and give you and me the chance to express our candid opinions about products and services we use.

This means that, eventually, blogs will comment on your recruiting process, your career site, and even on how people were treated when interviewed by your organization. They bring what used to be private, or at least fairly contained, to a much wider audience. Hence their power and their potential to do harm.

Right now, most blogs focus around a topic or profession. For example, the majority of recruiting blogs are written for fellow recruiters with only a handful aimed at candidates or potential candidates.

When you think about that, it really isn’t unusual, as the motivation people have to write blogs comes from a desire to share information or to state an opinion. It’s a bit of a shame, though, as blogs can also be powerful for marketing and influencing.

I always come back to Heather Hamilton at Microsoft who has been writing a blog to encourage people to apply for jobs at Microsoft for several years. She is a great marketer and subtly influences people to think about working at Microsoft. I think we need to see far more blogs on this type.

I know that recruiters face some real issues in getting their legal and marketing departments to agree to blogs, but the effort would be well spent. They can help avert negative publicity by addressing issues in a proactive way. They can promote what’s good about your organization and showcase opportunities. They are an authentic voice in the sea of marketing hype that most candidates have to plow through.

If you are writing a blog for your candidates or potential candidates, I would really like to know about it. I am going to do a column soon on how to get your blog approved, and I need any tips I can get.

On the Periphery

Most intriguing are the blogs that are on the periphery of recruiting but help us to better understand the people and issues we face in recruiting.

The best of the bunch is the blog by Penelope Trunk who has written the book Brazen Careerist. In that books she provides career advice to Gen Y and in doing so explores many of the myths and truths about both Gen X and Gen Y.

If you read the reviews on Amazon from readers of her book, you will quickly discover how controversial she is. Half the reviewers say she is full of you-know-what and the other half love her. As a Gen X writer herself, who focuses a lot on Gen Y and what they want from work and life that is different from what she wants, she opens up a Pandora’s box of issues that need talking about. Her open attitude and tell-it-like-it-is style make this a very refreshing book and blog.

Just about every recruiter I know is a member of a social network. Most likely, they have joined LinkedIn, as it has become the de facto social network for recruiting. It has the most business-oriented members and reaches a global membership.

For recruiters focused on younger people and college students, Facebook and MySpace are popular choices. But these are only the tip of a very large iceberg. Wikipedia lists over 104 different social networks, but perhaps fewer than half are really suitable for recruiting purposes. These public networks are great for finding potential candidates but do not do much to help build relationships.

I have recently written about Ning, the site that allows you to create your own social network for anything. Ning was created by Marc Andreessen, who not so long ago created Netscape Navigator, a service that opened the Internet up to folks like you and me.

Ning has been an opportunity for several ERE readers to develop social networks for their candidates and employees and thus begin exploring how relationships can be fostered using networks. Ning, or sites like it, have the potential to revolutionize how we communicate and maintain relationships with candidates.

It is so easy to use that even I have created several networks. While Ning may not be the eventual platform of choice for recruiting, it opens the door to what is coming. You will see more and more networks being designed by the current ATS and HR software vendors and many organizations will also develop their own networks.

Recruiting is moving rapidly from a find ‘em and screen ‘em profession to a find them, court them, stay in touch with them, and sell them profession. These networks will power that change.

Marc, always at the very edge of change, is well aware of this and also has a blog where he discusses Ning, social networking, and the future of software and technology. It is not directly related to recruiting but it is well worth spending some time reading if you want to be on the leading edge.

Jason Corsello, an ex-analyst (if there is such a thing) and an executive with the Center of Excellence at Knowledge Infusion also writes a blog, The Human Capitalist. He explores talent management, talent-related software, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and a lot more. It is a well-written blog from a person with in-depth expertise in the human capital and talent management arena.

All new technologies arrive before we know how to best use them. We are in the experimental stages with both blogs and networks, and staying informed is very critical to eventually figuring out how to use them wisely. I hope these leads will be useful to you.

Most career sales professionals have learned that it is easier to sell reluctant customers face-to-face versus remotely via phone calls and emails. As recruiters are essentially professionals selling career opportunities, it makes sense that nearly every recruiting strategy should leverage one or more face-to-face approaches such as an invited open house.

Unlike some approaches, the invited open house can be tailored to fit nearly every situation and industry around the globe.

Defining an Invited Open House

An invited open house is an event that can take many forms. In short, it is a “show-and-tell” held at your facility that highlights the benefits and characteristics of life as an employee of the organization targeted at potential candidates, be it known to them or not. An invited open house differs from traditional “public” open houses in that attendance is limited to those who have been sourced, qualified, and invited.

It differs from employment-related events (i.e., job fairs) in that there is a greater degree of interaction and individual attention paid to servicing the guest?s curiosities. At an invited open house, potential candidates see the facilities, meet team members they may someday work with, and explore some of the more exciting things the organization is working on. Of course, this is all absent of the pressures that usually accompany any element of the assessment process.

The premise is simple: you have a great story to tell but relatively few trusted channels that get it to the right audience, so you need to employ a mechanism that gets candidates in the door.

Around the world, invited open houses have proven an effective approach to get potential candidates to “test drive” a variety of new opportunities. In survey after survey, employed top performers have stated that the nature of the work and the people they work alongside are what attract and retain them, so let’s give candidates the information they need to trigger a job switch desire.

Not a New Concept

Open houses are certainly not new, but they all tend to produce mediocre results. Too many recruiters approach nearly every facet of recruiting from their perspective, designing processes and approaches that make their lives easier, consistently failing to realize that getting someone else to do something requires that they realize the value of doing it.

To that point, the critical success factor in any open house has little to do with the administration and a lot to do with “attractants” used to get the right audience, something few invest anytime in developing. The right audience is not a cadre of folks interested in employment; we already have approaches to deal with them.

Instead, focus on employed individuals with no intention of applying but who are open to coming to an event to benchmark, to learn, and to be exposed to the way other firms do things.

Once they are in the door, excellence in execution is key. The guests are the customers, and delivering on their every need is a critical success factor. They need to meet the right people, see the right things, have an opportunity to have their questions answered, and learn how to take the next step once they realize their desire.

The Benefits of An Invited Open House

An open house affords companies the chance to communicate a message directly, often to an audience that hasn’t built a barrier to the message that would routinely be encountered using other channels.

However, that is just one of many benefits this approach presents. Others include:

• An opportunity to populate the room with the people most credible to the prospective candidate, increasing the probability that guests will trust the information they hear.
• Attendees are more likely to be excited when they see best practices and innovations in person than they are just reading about them.
• Because attendees must be invited, you won’t waste time on “lookie loos” and individuals you don’t really want to build a relationship with.
• Because employees are involved in selecting individuals to be invited, they are more likely to take ownership of the recruiting process.
• Because a relatively small number of individuals are invited, there is more time to build a relationship and to assess their technical skills and fit.
• For some organizations, the process can lead to same-day hires.
• Because there might be several professional reasons for attending, individuals are more likely to attend it over a pure recruiting event.
• Because the scope of the event is narrowed down to a particular business unit or function, the show-and-tell and selling aspects can be targeted and focused.
• Letting candidates see the equipment, the technology, tools, and facilities they would work with excites them and defines the organization better than any words can.
• Having “outsiders” interact with your employees allows them to see other perspectives and to learn.
• Because you’re telling individuals about your best practices, open houses can help build your employment brand and make your firm one that professionals talk about and benchmark against.
• It helps get employees and managers more involved in recruiting and relationship-building by making it easy and fun to meet candidates (because it is on-site and there are refreshments).
• It is a tool for gathering competitive intelligence, benchmarking, and assessing your organization’s strengths.
• The social aspects of the event and “bragging to others” may improve your own team?s cohesion and help to reduce turnover.

Six Variations to the Invited Open House Approach

1. Bring a friend to work. This high-touch variation of the traditional employee referral program is less impersonal than just having an employee make a standard referral. Employees are asked to invite people they know on a professional basis and who have the competencies needed. Recent hires, in particular, are asked to invite colleagues from their previous firm. The employee who sponsors the individual helps to make sure that they get to meet the right individuals and that they get to see the exciting things that your group is working on. The key “attractor” here is that a colleague is specifically asking you to attend because they have been impressed with your work.
2. Benchmarking. The key attractor for this type of event is that those who attend have an opportunity to benchmark and to learn about your team’s best practices. The benchmarking approach attracts individuals that are curious and are interested in continuous improvement and learning. Employees and managers are asked to identify and invite individuals who are involved in benchmarking at talent competing organizations.
3. Recruiter-driven. This premise offers a place for unsure candidates to informally ask questions and find out more about the company without making a commitment to apply. In this variation, the recruiter guides the individual so they see who and what they “need to see” in order to convince them to apply.
4. Onsite seminar. This variation uses a known speaker on a hot topic or best practice as an attractant. Enveloping the guests is a user experience that affords them opportunities to network with the right people, each of whom can share specific employment desire creating stories and invite them to tour the facilities. The seminar itself might be sponsored by the company or by a local professional organization.
5. At an industry event. If the audience you with to attract lives outside your geographic region, target locations where these desired candidates may be coming together (i.e., an annual industry or functional event). Take a team and resemblance of the company to the industry event and provide a meet-and-greet/show-and-tell in a hotel conference room. Hold your open house before the industry event, after the day’s events are over, or following the wrap-up of the industry event.
6. Virtual open house. Again, if the talent you’re trying to attract isn’t physically located in the same region as your facilities, you still have options. A “virtual” invited open house offers the opportunity to attract a global audience. There are several relatively new electronic variations on the virtual open-house approach. For ex