I chose the word tribe because it is a good, short noun for the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” And top managers can be a destination. They have their own posse and peeps who follow them wherever they work. I know: I work for one. But even the most incredible managers eventually run out of people to call when rounding up the usual suspects. This is where I come in. I sell the manager and the team. I look at the group that I am headhunting for and try to find some common denominators.

1. Get the existing team’s resumes. Use LinkedIn, resource managers, or go to their portal and search the bios. Look for common schools, themes, associations.
2. Ask the manager where he found them. Who is his best hire? How did he find them?
3. Take a look at the companies they worked for, and when. Is there a theme?

You figure out that Java developers in Europe like Twitter, W.O.W., Ruby games, and Stockholm. To get them to leave their company to come to yours, build your own tribe’s membership theme. To get a pitch, figure out what membership privileges are:

• Ask the people who work for your “chief” why they worked at three companies for him.
• Ask them what they like about the company.
• Ask them how it was different than the company they came from.

You can build a message from this, like “we still have Peet’s coffee! We still have Thirsty Thursdays! Conference Calls longer than 17 minutes are forbidden!”

That is the message. Not “Java Consultant — EMEA.”

• If they are doing the exact same thing, why would they leave one software company to come to another? To come back to a tribe like them.
• Examples of common denominators might be, “worked in start-ups,” “went to MIT,” “plays W.O.W.” or “brags about Platinum status.”

Here is a thumbnail of my tribe:

Bay Area Software Company. Managers who are Java experts. Peet’s Coffee. Thirsty Thursdays. “It’s-It” ice cream bars. People from Cal and Stanford.

I get that tribe. It’s the tribe of the Bay Area software engineers.

If you have ever been a worker bee or a headhunter in the Bay Area, which I have during several waves (1990, 1999, 2009), you know that there are companies with handbooks containing phrases like, ‘Managers must wear shoes. Beer Me Fridays are mandatory, and don’t get Folgers or you’re fired.” They stock Peet’s coffee; everyone is a Stanford and Cal grad; and now, It’s It (a Bay Area ice cream bar with a cult following) is in the breakroom. These people swarm to the new “it” company and they don’t stick around when Folgers makes its debut.

Call them and/or connect with them on Twitter, LinkedIn groups, user’s group meetings, industry associations, however, whenever. I may even ask an Internet sourcer to find some profiles to add to the pile. I look at my Rolodex. I put the whole lot of them into one big pile and I begin to air out my message that “we want you eventually and this is why.”

This is where the Tweetups come in. If I can get the manager/chief to ask the real qualifying questions that I mention above, it is not a stretch to get to the next piece. “If I find someone from Cal working at XYZ company, would you buy him a coffee in Stockholm?”

Or even better, “Tweet me before you go to Stockholm … and let’s find a place to meet … and if you have time, let’s send out a TweetUp to all of the Java developers in Stockholm who are following me on Twitter, and get them to meet you somewhere. We’ll Tweet that the first round of Guinness is on you at The Rusty Nail pub across the street from our client.”

That way I can put real live candidates who don’t have resumes in front of a real, live “chief” and without a lot of wasted time. Sounds expensive? Twenty five rounds of Guinness is a helluva lot cheaper than 35% of an annual package which the agencies are charging us, and you get to meet a real live person and do the puppy dog close.

For those of you with ADD, here is the upshot:

1. Analyze the tribe. Who are these people and what do they do and care about?
2. Evangelize the message of the tribe through your grapevine — Twitter, LinkedIn, your company’s career page, user group meetings — heck, anywhere you can.
3. Sell the manager on selling his job on the fly.
4. Always be closing the candidate on why your tribe kicks their tribe’s ass. Ask: “When they can come have a look see?”

There are going to be accountants and HR people who read this and say, “how does that fit into $10,000 cost per hire, and how do we know that this will work, and why do we have to do anything since everyone is unemployed and is dying to work here?”

But top-tier people are always taken out of companies. There are some things that just can’t be automated and outsourced and cost-optimized, such as building a A-team, building a tribe, and building loyalty.

Rethinking how we source is not easy. But the unrefined tools such as search engines, job boards, advertisements, and even referrals are slowly giving way to far more powerful social networks of candidates. These networks can be shaped for specific types of candidates and for specific skills and competencies. They can be the only source of candidates you have so that your focus can be on your brand and building awareness of your organization and the kinds of work you offer.

Does this sound a little pie-in-the-sky? Maybe given today’s level of understand and technology, it is a stretch to give up all other forms of sourcing, but I predict these networks will replace 90% of other sourcing techniques with in decade.

What Is a Social Network?

For those of us in recruiting, a social network may be better thought of as a pool of potential candidates or as a community of talent. This is not the same as a static database of candidates. It is an ever-changing, expanding network of people who have chosen to associate with one another virtually. I often make an analogy to a network being like a series of circles rippling out from a center. Those people at the center of the circles are your most valuable and most likely candidates. Each successive ring of candidates gets further from you, is less known, and therefore less valuable. LinkedIn denotes this by giving priority to those people you know and who know you and then giving lower priority to people who you know through others.

Why Create Your Own Social Network?

Most of us rely on the established networks for sourcing candidates. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and many others depending on your geography and specialty. These will always have some place in recruiting, but by creating your own network you can have much more impact and get better results.

The purpose of creating a social network is to bring the best people into your innermost circle. By building a relationship through frequent communication via whatever means make sense (telephone, email, Twitter, SMS, or IM), you get to know more about each other. Potential candidates can make decisions about whether they like you, the organization you represent, and the positions that are available. You get to screen candidates and select people who closely match your needs.

Creating the infrastructure for a social network can be demanding, but free ones such as Ning are available and provide some level of customization. Others are built from scratch or by using open source tools and modules. ERE.net’s community of users (you and me) is a good example of a social network of practitioners. We have common interests and any of us can find other recruiters who we might like to recruit or help to find a new position. This is an example of an open network, but it could just as easily be available only to people who answer some questions or pass through a filter of some sort qualifying them for membership.

With your own network, you can build in tests, require certain information, or in many ways decide if someone is the right person for your organization. By doing this you eliminate hundreds of unqualified people and reduce the time your recruiters spend screening out the unwanted.

A social network, or talent community, is always growing and changing. People can become a member of a talent community in several ways, but each requires them to learn more about the organization and provides the recruiter with more information about them. For example, if someone comes to the recruiting website and indicates an interest in a particular job, software can quickly assess a variety of things including aptitude for the job, interest, and skill level. People who answer questions in a certain way or who achieve certain scores can be referred to the most suitable positions, turned away completely, or forwarded directly to a recruiter for immediate followup. No one is asked to just “dump” their unevaluated resume into a hopper and wait for a follow up call — which usually never comes.

What Do Candidates Think?

Given these economic times, candidates are stressed and unhappy, as I have written in past articles. They are keen to find organizations that are responsive, friendly, and where they can showcase their own unique qualities. A social network allows this, and the candidates I speak with respond very positively to the immediate knowledge of how well they meet requirements. They are pleased to be invited to be part of a community they have an interest in and they are also glad to know right away that they are not a good fit and won’t be considered. No news is not good news to a candidate who is trying hard to refine his or her knowledge of different organizations and different positions, and who wants to maximize her time.

I am surprised that the hype about social networks revolves almost entirely around the public networks rather than on building your own. If you are in the planning stages for next year, set aside some of your budget to explore creating your own branded social network. You might be surprised at how well it works and at how it creates a far more efficient and candidate friendly environment than you probably have today.

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments.

Tweetie ($2.99). Do you keep your network informed via Twitter? Tweetie makes communicating via Twitter easy and fast. Tweetie provides all of the functionality of the twitter.com website, such as saved searches, inline web browsing, and the ability to manage followers. In addition, Tweetie supports navigation between multiple Twitter accounts, easy retweeting, automatic URL shortening, and uploading Twitpic pictures. I find Tweetie easy to use when tweeting from conferences. There are other, free, Twitter-for-iPhone apps, such as Twitterific, but I find that the additional features of Tweetie make it worth the small investment.

SearchOnTheGo ($9.99). SOTG is the first iPhone app written especially for recruiters by recruiters! SOTG turns your keywords into a full-blown Boolean search string. SOTG automatically generates search strings for resume searches, blog searches, PDF and Excel file formats, and more. SOTG will also execute web profile searches and public LinkedIn profile searches. After executing the search on the iPhone, users can save the search, email the search, or review results real time. Pretty nifty, especially if you dislike writing Boolean strings. Currently, SOTG returns only Google results. I would love to see other search engines included in future versions.

LinkedIn (free). Can’t live without LinkedIn? Then make sure you download the iPhone companion. The mobile version provides basic LinkedIn functionality — search, status updates, invites and more — for recruiters on the go. When meeting someone in person, try linking in instantly, instead of exchanging business cards. I am especially impressed with the Address Book Integration, which uploads contact info to the iPhone in one click. Unfortunately, there is no ability to receive or manage LinkedIn Groups information.

AgileMobile ($9.99). It was not until I joined Yahoo! that I became a big fan of instant messaging. Used properly, IM can improve the speed and quality of communication. Phone calls and emails are best for initial outreach, but nothing beats IM for quick confirmations and clarifications. AgileMobile is an all-in-one instant messaging service for mobile phones. Agile allows instant chat-on-the-go with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, and GoogleTalk. This kind of agnostic service is great for recruiters, who can communicate with candidates or colleagues regardless of IM service provider. AgileMobile also enables voice chat and media sharing.

Interview Pro (1.99). Technically, Interview Pro is an application developed for jobseekers. And a pretty clever one at that. This app provides a list of “50 of the most common behavioral interview questions.” Each question is accompanied by an answer that helps candidates navigate the interviewer’s intent and expectations. The questions are divided into categories such as “Team Dynamics,” “Planning,” and “Success Factors.” The interview questions are not all “behavioral” and the app does not come with instructions for the interviewer (such as how and when to drill down to get complete answers). With a few modifications, however, an application like this could be very useful to recruiters and hiring managers. Imagine if your hiring managers were able to download a custom interview guide. Never fear: the makers of Search on the Go tell me that they are working on just such an app.

beamMe (free or $1.99 for subscription updates). Finally, I can feel comfortable leaving the house without business cards! beamMe allows users to exchange vCards by inputting an email address, mobile phone #, or @Twitter id. The recipient is directed to a secure website, where he or she can download a vCard (including a photo or logo, and links to URL or Twitter id). Genius! The only downside is the subscription scheme; so far the free version works well for me. I’m not sure I want to be billed $2/month to continue to receive product upgrades.

There you have it. The future is here!

To suggest that recruiters are control freaks is not an epiphany or an “ah-ha moment,” as being controlling is one of the traits that make recruiters good at our jobs.  We are managers of a set of projects called search assignments or requisitions and are required to direct a volume that easily reaches the double digits. And we need to control as much as possible to be successful.

Recruiters like the idea of community and having a relationship with prospects and/or candidates. But when recruiters take a deeper dive, they begin to understand that some of the conversations that transpire in community are outside of their control, they lose some enthusiasm. So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome?

In my upcoming Fall 2009 ERE presentation, I am weaving five topics/questions/discussion points into the storyline. One discussion point is “Web 2.0 solutions proclaim that this is the new way to pipeline candidates into a private talent community. What is a talent community and how do I build one? In this article, I will deal with the “why” of talent communities.  And if you are in Florida in September, I will discuss the “how to” at length.

So why advocate community if one cannot control the outcome? There are several reasons why community and the relationships that are formed and built are essential in the 21st century Web 2.0 model of recruiting; they include:

Communities Can Be Influenced

Most community experts indicate that while a community is not controllable, it can be influenced. On a brand level, thought leaders argue that conversations about your brand are going to take place with or without you. The question becomes: Do you want to participate in the conversation? Participating in the conversation allows you to have some influence over the opinion of a given community’s members.

Communicate With Your Audience Where They Are

The growth of social networking sites is staggering. Sometimes the size of a social networking site is larger than smaller companies. How long do you think it will take Facebook (225 million members) to eclipse the population of the United States? If our target audiences are joining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and communities on Ning, shouldn’t we want to join them? 

Your Target Audience Has Moved Online

If you target audience has not formed a online community or affinity group, they will do so in the very near future. The growth in social networking sites has been accompanied by a growth in all sorts of online groups and communities. Most of us have a segment of the labor market that includes the talent we’re interested in and has migrated online. These affinity-driven communities segment themselves naturally into ideal groups in which to build relationship and share your organization’s story.

Transparency Is a Byproduct of Community

One of the biggest results of Web 2.0 and social networking sites is a move toward transparency with respect to process and conversation. With everyone watching, it is better to be a truth teller. With everyone watching, it requires us to engage in the conversation. With everyone watching, it makes us better citizens of a group.  And above all, it enhances the experience of the prospective employees who engage in our recruitment process.

The question on everyone’s lips can often be answered by having just one person comment.

Leverage is an important aspect of community. It allows us to communicate one thought and have it seen by many. In a previous article, I discussed the aspect that most members are in the crowd and do not engage in conversation. But they are listening. That is why it is important to engage the members who are asking questions or making comments.

Community Makes Navigation of Enterprise-size Companies is Easier

In a company the size of Microsoft, the inner workings are somewhat of a mystery to a job seeker (and to some employees as well). The transparency of the connections that are seen in a LinkedIn Group make it easy to reach out and engage. Questions can be answered; issues clarified; and relationships built.

Community Is Counterintuitive

Community isn’t intuitive. Previously, I compared the counterintuitive nature of community to learning how to snow ski. It took a while for me to get my head around “leaning away from the mountain.” Talk about counterintuitive. If I lost balance while turning, my instructor said to lean away from the mountain; away from apparent safety; away from the natural pull of gravity. Every instinct told me leaning away was wrong. Yet, I could not move off the bunny slope until I stopped trusting my instincts and listened to my instructor. I had to change my mindset. In the same way, we must move from a transactional recruiting process, to get closer to community, regardless of what our recruiting instincts suggest.

Community Is Guanxi (and that is a good thing)

Guanxi [guan-shee] is the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence in Chinese society and seems to be most fitting when we think about community.  Guanxi suggests that the relationship is more important that the transaction itself.  So when one considers Guanxi in recruiting, it opens the door to the following possibilities:

• Exploring ways to begin and capture a relationship with desired prospects even if they aren’t currently looking for a job
• Developing a longer-term relationship with prospects during their entire careers
• Discovering ways to bring value to your prospect community even if they do not take your job
• Becoming more transparent to target talent and enhance prospect experiences
• Moving away from transactional recruiting and into relationship recruiting

So why is community so important in recruiting? At an elementary level, the move of our target audience online mandates that we meet them where they are. And the rule of the road in Web 2.0 is that people online must have the capability to have a conversation. Gone are the days of Web 1.0 and static content and organizations just creating content. At its heart, Web 2.0 is user-generated content and creating conversation. Conversation is expected by our target audiences who have moved to these online communities. And for the most part, we in corporate recruiting have disappointed our target talent (by necessity third party recruiters engage in relationships to a greater degree than corporate counterparts). And if we don’t change, we will not be successful.

Why community? If we are going to attract the best talent in the world, we must connect with them where they are visible — online social networks and affinity groups. How do we build community? That is a discussion for September.

But the big questions for many are simple: What are social networks, what do they replace, and what makes them useful?

What Are Social Networks?
Very simply, social networks are Internet-based applications that allow you to expand and grow the number of people you know who have the skills, interests, or abilities that you are looking for. They also give you the opportunity to market your organizations to a targeted group of people.

For most of us the challenge is how to find enough of the right candidates to meet the needs we have and how to find people in markets and geographies that are new and strange. When your boss says that there are positions open in China, and you are in Minneapolis with only a local network, what do you do? This is where social networks can be magical.

Social networks as an idea are neither new nor unusual. We all have our own networks of candidates, friends, college mates, sports mates, relatives, and so forth. The only difference is that our networks are physical, and most likely interactions only occur face-to-face or over the telephone. We also often have very limited information about the people we meet everyday, and really aren’t certain if they could fit an open position we have or not. The Internet-based social networks provide a much broader ability to screen and communicate with potential candidates.

The social networks we all know best are LinkedIn and Facebook — both of which connect you to millions of potential candidates. They have been around for several years and through their own marketing and promotion have assembled a huge number of people. Other well-known social networks include MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, and others. There are also many smaller networks, some more focused on a particular type of candidate or candidates of a certain age group, but still very valuable.

By offering the ability for you to connect to people through other people, you can build a global network of potential candidates. By using your own branding and marketing efforts, you can create a large and robust sub-network of people who know you and your organization and who you can communicate with as frequently as you wish. Some organizations use LinkedIn and Facebook to find people and then invite them to join a private social network that you may create by using a tool such as Ning, for example. By creating your own network, you can tailor the messages to your potential candidates and you can use the members to find more people.

What Do They Replace?
Instead of posting jobs to job boards, you can instead list your job on your career site and invite your network members to refer it to anyone they think is appropriate. If you have a large enough network, you may find enough candidates using only this method. But, for many recruiters you may still have to post to a job board or use some other outreach method to gather enough candidates. But, given a large enough network, it could replace job boards.

And, rather than hire people to do Internet search, you can simply ask your network members to refer someone who has the skills, abilities, or experience you need. The potential of a social network is huge and is only limited by how many people you have in the network. That is why many recruiting functions are taking budget dollars from traditional sourcing and investing them in marketing and promotion to build their social network.

What Are the Benefits of a Social Network?
Social networks also let you reach out to targeted groups of candidates to let them know about new opportunities or to just provide them with background information about your organization. By doing this on a regular basis, you can slowly inform candidates about many aspects of your business, the culture of your organization, and the kinds of opportunities you generally have. This helps candidates to self-select out of organizations they are not comfortable with, and prevents many bad hires. It also creates excitement in potential candidates who feel they are a good fit.

By using Candidate Relationship Management tools, you can build excitement and create a relationship with candidates. CRM allows you to:

• Send messages on birthdays or other special occasions
• Offer the opportunity to come to events and/or job fairs you might hold
• Send information about internships or special assignments
• Share facts and corporate news with them
• Comment on their background or ask for additional information

Social networks allow you to increase the level of trust that candidates have in you and your organization, especially if you offer regular communication through a blog or some other media. Some organizations create regular videocasts or podcast about their business, offer videos of the CEO or other leader, and provide potential candidates with a broad perspective on the organization, its leadership, strategy, and culture.

What Role Does Twitter Play, for Example?
Tools such as Twitter are really micro-blogs and allow you to send messages to a group of followers to build or maintain interest in your organization. Twitter also serves as a type of CRM tool by letting you send job listings or specific messages to those same people on a regular basis. But Twitter is just one of a growing number of applications that either help drive more people to a social network or that keep them interested in your organization or build a relationship with them over time.

As you can see, using social networking well is challenging and time-consuming. It requires you to develop a social media strategy, decide which of these many tools are best for your organization, learn about new technologies, and practice a more proactive type of recruiting.

At the ERE Expo in Florida, there will be several sessions and a panel devoted to how to better use social networking. If you are still uncertain about how to make social networking payoff for you, this would be the event to attend.

While at first it may seem overwhelming to embrace social networking, candidates are getting accustomed to being treated in this more personal way, and the results are a higher quality candidate. Social media will become the primary sourcing tool and will provide the best forum for communicating with prospective candidates.

!IT Jeans is giving away jeans that retail for around $65-$70 a pair to everyone who shows up with proof they’re unemployed and proof they tweeted or posted to Facebook about the event at Lime, a retro-60s restaurant and bar in San Francisco’s hip Castro district.

With the jeans carrying names like “Hottie,” “Industry,” “Dream Diva,” and “Studio,” don’t expect to see any resume-carrying, tie-wearing, business-suited, job-seeking mid-managers at this event. But it also doesn’t look to be just a group of 20- and 30-year-olds surprised to be out of work. Judging by the profiles on the MeetUp site that the Bay Area Job Seekers & Professionals Looking to Network group calls home, there’s a curious mix of talent coming to make contacts and learn how to get into consulting, which is the theme of the evnt.

According to the description, “This event will also focus around the theme of ‘Creating your Consulting Career,’ which simply put, means how to focus your job search efforts on consulting positions instead of permanent positions.”

One of the sponsors of the networking event, the MeetUp group is organized by Mark Thomas, CEO of the equally curious job site, WorkYourCareer. It’s a sort of job board that incorporates classic job postings with an interview auction. Participants apply for a job in the usual way, with one exception: neither application nor resume may carry contact information. If an employer shows interest, the job seeker is invited to bid for an interview. The top bid gets the pick of interview time, with other bidders winning slots until they’re filled.

And yes, the job seeker must pay; most credit cards are accepted.

Thomas, whom we couldn’t reach, also has MoneyBackJobs.com. Pointing back to WorkYourCareer, it seems to have faded with the recession. Its business concept, though, is similar to the many bounty programs that have been tried over the years. Job seekers who accept a job with an employer participating in the MoneyBackJobs program get paid between 4 and 10 percent after 30 days on the job. There are some hoops they have to go through, but the concept is fundamentally bounty.

Tonight’s event, however, is free and open to all job seeking members of the MeetUp group or co-sponsors Pinkslipmixers.com and Slipsquad.com, both of them national networking groups for the laid-off and unemployed. Recruiters from IKON, LOLApps, Jobspring Partners, and Magley & Associates are expected, says Slipsquad.

McCarty, sourcing manager at the infrastructure/construction company Parsons, is trying to address this recruiting challenge partly by spreading the good Parsons word through social media. McCarty, along with Yahoo’s Carmen Hudson and TMP’s Louis Vong, is speaking at a workshop put on in Los Angeles (where he’s apparently a rare non-car-owner) by SHRM’s staffing-management association. He was brought to Parsons partly to help infuse higher-tech tools into the company, where many employees are in their 50s.

To help craft their Web 2.0 strategies, McCarty says companies should ask themselves the following questions:

• What are the best Web 2.0 options to use?
• What is your goal? Is it branding? Is it sourcing? Is it conversion?
• Who is your target audience? Is it internal? Is it external? Is it both?
• How much content can you manage? In other words, you’ll get out of it what you put into it, but what time can you put in? Says McCarty: “You can create a really great front page, but if it’s not maintained, it’s not marketed, and if you don’t drive people there, it’s not going do you any good.”
• Are there other groups in your company that are currently leveraging Web 2.0 technology, that you can piggyback on? Can you share usage, tools, and techniques with these groups? Can you convince a non-HR entity to pay for costs?
• Do you have the ability to move or reconfigure budget to accommodate costs?

McCarty’s No. 1 source of candidates is still employee referrals. Social recruiting, he says, is merely a way to get more of them, and to get better ones (topics to be explored further in June).

He says that people (the general public, not HR/recruiting types) are just beginning to realize that “everything you publish is there, forever.” He has dropped family members from his Facebook “friends” collection because what they posted was inappropriate. “If you can’t control yourself, I now control you,” he says.

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed.

When I assess candidates, this is one of the factors I examine — finding out how the person got better. Not surprisingly, the best people have this core trait in common, and in spades. They’re always getting better. All of them improved themselves and the activities they were directly responsible for. A good portion of these people went out of their way to improve things they weren’t directly responsible for, so you need to give these people an extra star.

A much smaller group went out of their way to improve not only themselves, but also the people they worked with, whether they were responsible for them or not. These were the true leaders of the bunch.

As you assess candidates in the future, look for the degree the person got better, which will help you more easily separate the best from the merely good.

Surprisingly, very few had the exact level of skills, academics, and experience requirements listed on the job description. While they all possessed enough of the requirements to do the work required, the mix was different than the “must haves” listed, and the level of experience in absolute terms was generally much less.

Offsetting this was something far more important — a track record of consistent high performance doing comparable work, often in different industries.

Just like top people in any field, recruiters needs to consistently change and improve, just to stay even. To get better, you need to change even faster.

With that said, here are some ideas on how to get massively better. With recruiting departments being cut 30%-70% on average, getting massively better represents a survival of the fittest mentality.

In my opinion, if you don’t want to get massively better, drop out of the industry and do something you want to get massively better at.

How to Get Massively Better

1. Become someone worth knowing. Recruiters need to be able to connect with lots of top-notch people on an ongoing basis. This is the best way to get referrals of great passive candidates. If you’re worth knowing, hiring managers and candidates will seek you out. They’ll refer the best people they know to you without asking. If you’re not worth knowing, you’ll only attract the attention of those desperate for the job you’re currently representing. This is a transactional relationship. Those who are worth knowing develop long-term relationships that span years, not just a few days. Here’s an article on how to become someone worth knowing.
2. Know the job. If you don’t know the job, the best you can do is screen on skills and experience. If you know the job, you can quickly become someone worth knowing. You’ll be able to counsel and advise your candidates and hiring managers alike. You’ll be more accurate in your assessments and you’ll be able to defend qualified candidates from those hiring managers who conduct superficial or narrow interviews.
3. Build a network of all-stars. If you’re placing similar type positions (e.g., developers, tax managers, ASIC engineers, pharma sales reps), most of your placements should come from referrals. To get these referrals, you’ll need to be considered an expert in your field. Part of this is cultivating relationship (not transactions) with every top person your best employees are connected with on LinkedIn. If you’re a third-party recruiter, build these relationships with the best people on your LinkedIn list. While they won’t give you great referrals right away, after a few months of professional nurturing and knowledge sharing, you’ll have a strong network to work once the req is approved.
4. Become partners with your best managers. Recruiters are at least 50% more productive when they have a peer relationship with their hiring manager clients instead of a subservient one. This recruiter/manager partnership is developed when recruiters have a strong understanding of real job needs, present a few highly qualified candidates in a timely manner, have strong assessment skills, and can influence the shape of the job and the person ultimately hired. You know you’ve arrived when your hiring managers see everyone you recommend without having to review their resumes.
5. Implement an early-bird sourcing strategy. During the first few days of a job search, the best active candidates contact their close confidantes, previous mentors, and a short network of influential people. In parallel, they Google for jobs by searching on the job title, the city, and the word “jobs.” The best of this group start interviewing within the first week. Time is now a competitive advantage, so being called first and being found first is the key to hiring the best as soon as they enter the market. Becoming an early-bird is an essential skill if you’re sourcing active candidates.
6. Become an expert in consumer marketing. The messaging (ad copy) is a critical aspect of implementing an early-bird sourcing strategy. Rather than benchmark other recruiting departments, benchmark the best consumer products companies. When you do, you’ll notice that their advertising is written to appeal to their target audience with a focus on the benefits of the product rather than the technical specifications. For recruiting, this means eliminating traditional job descriptions filled with requirements (comparable to the product specifications) and start describing what the person will do, learn, and become (the benefits). While there’s much more than this consumer marketing stuff, it won’t help much if you’re posting boring job descriptions.

These are just some ideas on how to get massively better, and it really doesn’t matter if you do these exact things. What does matter is that you start getting massively better at what you’re doing today. Once you get on the path of getting better — whether it’s more training, attending meetings, leading workshops, taking on more challenging assignments, or becoming more innovative — don’t stop. Getting continuously and massively better is the real goal here.

As Jim Rohn said, “Things will get better for you when you get better.”

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging.

Simplicity in Sourcing

The first of the emerging trends is a turn to simpler and more basic ways to find talent. With a rise in applicants, many organizations are finding it less necessary to deploy search specialists or engage in complex sourcing strategies. They can focus, instead, on building their employment brand, often by using Facebook or some other social networking tool. They are also screening existing candidates better and are more focused on building a talent pool or community that can be tapped into as needed. In addition, many are tapping their own workforce for internal redeployment and for referrals.

All of this has reduced the need for in-depth Internet search and it has also lowered the need to post to job boards. In organizations with proactive recruiting teams, internal placements may reach as high as 15% while over 30% may come from referrals. With another 20% being sourced by third-party recruiters for reasons of confidentially or because the particular job is very specialized, only a small percentage needs to be sourced in other ways. A good social network page linked to an interactive career site can probably close much of that gap, leaving a tiny fraction to Internet search or job boards.

As I wrote in my article last week, a comprehensive talent strategy combined with internal development can reduce recruiting requirements significantly. I see this as a continued and growing trend, which ultimately means organizations will employ fewer recruiters but highly skilled in networking, relationship building, and who deeply understand the business.

Social Networks

We are seeing the power of social networking in recruiting growing faster than any other segment. Candidates are able to substitute their social networking profile for a resume at some organizations. Jobvite, an emerging applicant tracking tool listed by Gartner as one of its “Cool Vendors for Human Capital Software 2009,” allows candidates to link to their LinkedIn profiles. No need for a resume or to fill out anything. Jobvite also provides an organization a button to place on their career site that lets prospective candidates see the people in their network who already work at that organization. This provides candidates with ready-made connections into the organization as well as a source of information.

Social networks will become the ultimate sourcing and screening tools. Recruiters and particularly hiring managers will be able to see a more 3-D version of a person and get a much better sense of their past accomplishments and capabilities. But there are negatives, and many recruiters are concerned about candidate privacy and discrimination. The truth is, discrimination can and does occur in face-to-face conversations, in interviews, and even over the phone because of accents and the way people phrase things. Every new technology and application has to pass through a maturity curve, which is happening rapidly for social networks. Laws will change and policies will adapt to accommodate them.

I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves than they can today. I think that as social networking matures, candidates will find themselves moving from a generic social network like Facebook to more specific ones aimed at an industry segment or a profession, and then perhaps to organizational-specific ones. We will have to wait a while to see what model eventually takes shape, but the roots are growing and resumes, traditional profiles, and static career sites will fade away.

Internal Redeployment

Smart organizations prevent the needless loss of talent by developing barrier-free internal transfer polices, by shifting talent and skills as jobs change, and by operating development and coaching programs to help employees successfully bridge skill and experience gaps.

They are also beginning to practice sustainable talent management — sizing the workforce for sustainability through good and bad times — and filling peak needs with temporary and contract staff. But sustainability is not just about numbers; it is also about having the right skills spread across all employees. This means development is continuous, internal movement common and often, and that a goal is for every employee to be able to function well in three or four different positions.

The natural result of this will be more focus on employee development, the rise of learning portals with relevant information and on-line training classes; the capturing of the knowledge of experienced employees on videos (using storytelling, talking about how projects were completed and barriers overcome, and by sharing technical knowledge that might be useful to those who follow); and connections to coaches and experts willing to answer questions or provide skill training.

We will see that more and more people will stay with a single employer for longer periods of time, as they find it easy to get refreshed and retrained.

Right now, the business climate happens to be a little frightening. Since it looks like things will be like this for a while, I’d like to offer some thoughts on something that you’re certain to encounter in the next few months: a notable increase in executive referrals.

Anyone who spends time here knows that employee referrals are a simply fabulous way of bringing talent into your organization. The benefits are legion: employee referral hires are cheaper, pre-screened, more likely to be successful, increase employee morale, etc. A well-run program that delivers a consistent experience to both the candidate being submitted, and the person doing the submitting, will pay for itself many times over.

Executive referrals are a little different . . .

They come in three general categories. First, are the referrals that are simply sent to, say, the CEO’s office by strangers hoping for a leg up on the hiring process. I find that they usually arrive at my desk in batches, the time and date they were received stamped on the top, and sent along whenever the executive assistant felt like it was time to get them off their desk.

Second are those from an executive who has been brought in to lend some firepower to a referral. These often arrive in e-mail from a senior-level executive, and if you start at the bottom of the e-mail chain, you see that the first note is a “Hey Charlie, remember me?” note to the executive, in which the sender forwards a resume, and asks for help in “getting it to the right person” for consideration. Typically, Charlie does not know the person being referred.

The third scenario is quite different. In this case, the executive is referring someone that they know personally, or have at least met. Sometimes there is an expectation that someone will “reach out to them” for a conversation, or (in some companies) that they will be brought in for an “exploratory” interview. Depending upon your company culture, there can be tremendous pressure to hire these referrals. I once worked for a company where the second-in-command was trying to get a job for the boy who mowed his lawn. He insisted upon accompanying the young man to any interview that he had. Imagine scheduling an interview with a 19-year-old kid for some summer help, and having one of the most powerful people in the company walk into the room along with him!

The reason for this article is that you are about to see Scenario 3 a lot! One and two are easy to manage — I typically draft a polite note to the person being referred, personalize it with their name and the executive involved, and invite the candidate to visit the careers webpage and build a profile. I then forward a copy of that e-mail to the executive involved so he or she knows that follow-up occurred.

Under normal circumstances, Scenario 3 is rare. However, the current tough economic times will make it much more common — if more people are looking for work, and there are fewer jobs, they’re more likely to use an executive connection they might have in order to give them a competitive advantage. These interactions are very tricky.

Years ago I worked in a large recruiting organization that was led by a remarkable leader. After some months, this person appeared to take an interest in my career, and I was chosen for some great developmental assignments. One day, this person approached me, and handed me a resume. It was a resume from her best friend’s son. He was finishing school, and she wanted me to “keep his resume in mind” for future openings.

While this young man was bright, his experience was in an area slightly different than what we typically hired new college grads for. To make a long story short, I eventually did find a job for him in the company. While that might sound like a success, it took time, and things were never quite the same between me and the departmental leader after that. She believed I was a promising recruiter. If that was the case, then why was it so difficult for me to find this young man a job? Clearly, her best friend’s son was a star (in her mind), so the problem must have been with me.

If that was the outcome from actually finding an executive referral a job, imagine what happens if you don’t find them a job! Managing an executive referral is time-consuming, politically risky, and rarely leaves everyone satisfied. One or two per year is a manageable volume (you probably have a resume like that on your desk right now!), but you’re certain to see many more in the coming year. The time to start planning how you’re going to handle these referrals is now.

Here are some tips to help you come away looking like a business partner, instead of the goof who can’t find the CEO’s best friend a job!

Decide Now How You Want the Process to Work and Have Conversations

Your executives may have no idea how often you receive resumes from their colleagues. Schedule time to talk about this, and let them know you’re committed to bringing great talent into the organization. Ask what they’re expectations are regarding the referral of a friend. If you have the opportunity, try to have the conversation with as many executives as possible. Make sure you know what they expect to happen.

On a related note, be sure your HR leadership is included in these conversations. For one thing, they’re an important business partner, and it’s critical that you are both on the same page. Often, the resume in question will go to an HR VP, and then to you. Make sure these referrals don’t become a game of “telephone,” with you sending a polite note while the HR VP promised that an exploratory interview would take place!

Offer Options and Recommendations

After listening to your customers, offer some possible alternatives. Do they really want exploratory interviews? Who will be on the interview schedules? What sort of expectations does that create? In other words, will it make things worse in the long run to have someone in if it turns out that simply by examining the resume it’s evident that there is probably not a place for this person? What if you agree to reach out to the person each month for a status update? What about a process for maintaining a slate of executive referrals, and reviewing their credentials against open jobs at their level? My experience has been that it’s easy for an executive to send over a resume — after all, you’re in charge of Staffing. Why can’t you just hire this person? Helping your customers understand what’s involved in finding a match, managing tight headcounts, and understanding the minutia of work authorization, competencies, and salary expectations is a worthwhile exercise.

Insist Upon Shared Accountability

How often have you received a call or a note from someone in your organization who knows a “great executive recruiter you should really be working with”? Rather often would be my guess. I suspect you’ve been asked to meet with people from executive recruiting firms to “explore ways of working together” and “discuss opportunities for them to help you with your executive hiring.” While I genuinely appreciate the chance to meet new vendor-partners I’ve not met before, often there is an expectation on both the part of the recruiter (”Susan said you’re the one who makes the decisions about executive searches”), and the person who introduced them to you (”George is a great recruiter — after all, he found me!”). Suddenly, you’ve become the person who is “not willing” to give them one of your searches!

In the same way, executive referrals can paint you as the villain. Insist upon some measure of mutual accountability from the person sending the referral. Would they be willing to hire the person into their own department? Would they be willing to network within the company at their level to locate potential opportunities for the person they are referring? Making the placement a shared effort can go a long way in building your credibility as a consultative business partner instead of someone who “finds a place to put people” for senior leaders.

Communicate What You’ve Done

Once you establish a process that everyone agrees upon, make sure you keep the executive who referred the candidate informed. As I look back to my earlier example of my department head’s best friend’s son, I don’t think anyone had any idea how many calls I made, or how many meetings I had with various hiring managers to discuss this young man’s qualifications. It might very well have looked like I didn’t do anything at all to find a job for that candidate. Once you agree to a plan, communicate your activities regularly so the executive knows what actions are being taken.

Report Back Results

Executive referrals are extraordinarily complicated. They require many hours of your time, and take some pretty sophisticated maneuvering within the organization to ensure all parties walk away satisfied. For every hour that you’re shopping a resume around the company, or meeting face-to-face with candidates, that’s an hour you’re not focusing on getting your company through these tough economic times. It’s important for your leadership (and your HR partners) to know how much time this activity requires. It’s also important for them to appreciate the return on investment it generates. If you end up spending 20% of your time on this activity, and it ultimately results in no hires, it’s critical that your customers know this. Often this leads to a mutual appreciation for the resources the activity consumes, and can lead to some new approaches for handling these referrals.

Your executives are well-networked, and can give you access to fabulous talent that you might otherwise miss out on. Executive referrals are an important mechanism for getting this great talent in the door.

This activity is time-consuming, though, and politically charged. It’s also certain to take more and more of our time in 2009. Invest some time into working with your leadership to create a plan that meets everyone’s needs, and you’ll find that this activity can actually become one of the most enjoyable parts of your day.

It was only two weeks ago that Mark Stelzner was eating breakfast and got to thinking about the gloomy job news. A long-time recruiting executive who now runs his own HR management consultancy, and, curiously, moonlights as a voice actor, Stelzner recalls wondering what would happen if each of his contacts could help just one person find a job.

With 700 followers on Twitter, a large percentage of them recruiters, he sent this message: “Was thinking that if each of us helped just one person find a job, we could start making a dent in unemployment. You game?”

Game they were. Today, 14 days after that January 29th tweet, Stelzner has a movement on his hand.

There were 1,400 followers and 1,000+ messages to JobAngels Wednesday afternoon. Stelzner personal following has doubled. The movement, and that is what it is, has spread to Facebook and LinkedIn, where the messages are reposted and many others originate.

“I love that recruiters are embracing this tool,” Stelzner told us, marveling at just how viral the idea became.

“It’s been fascinating,” he tells us of the rise of #JobAngels. “So many people want to help.”

Now a website is being launched to pull things together in one location.

Not only do they offer jobs, but a cadre of Guardian Angels help run the Twitter operation, reviewing the Tweets that come in and then reTweeting (reposting) them to #JobAngels. (The hash mark means something special on Twitter.) When you consider the multiple networks of followers who repost the messages, the reach is remarkable.

Though its Twitter archive is replete with jobs wanted and jobs offered (the latter outnumbering the former), Stelzner’s vision for JobAngels is to encourage people to “help those around them. I’m getting a lot of notes from people that it’s a reminder that people near to them need help.”

On his blog he writes, “I am blown away by everyday people deciding to step up and aid those in need of employment. This is a chance to truly impact someone’s life and it is amazing to watch the goodwill grow at a time when it’s tempting to thrust your head in the sand.”

So while his JobAngels with jobs are reaching out to those who Tweet about their need for work, Stelzner says the message is “Embrace one person.”

But things are different now. The openings are few and the calls from candidates are multiplying. We are now hearing from our own friends, co-workers, relatives, neighbors, people we really care about. How can we help when there aren’t any openings? It’s a new game out there, but we still can make a difference, if we take a bit of time. Even though we cannot directly hire these people there are still many things we can do to help tip the scales in their favor with their search.

• First off, try to respond to each person you hear from, if not by phone, at least send an email. Being ignored is the worst part of being in transition.
• Ask the candidate if it would be all right if you sent their resume out to your contacts. Most people are happy you can do this, but it’s best to get permission first. Send out a bcc email to those you know and introduce the candidate to them. I believe most hiring that will happen now will be ‘quiet hiring’ — not necessarily openings blasted over the job boards, but careful, and quiet gathering of candidates for a search. Helping those you know can get their resume into the hands of those hiring, even if they aren’t going public with their search.
• Send resumes to hiring managers in and out of your company if it makes sense. Most managers know long before HR does if they will have a need, and they may welcome the resumes from you.
• When giving leads to a candidate, suggest they use your name in their cover letter. If they are networking with someone who knows you well, their letter and resume has a better chance of being read, with your name as the introduction.
• Write a recommendation for the candidate on their LinkedIn page, and if they aren’t yet on LinkedIn, send an invite. Adding a recommendation as a co-worker, a co-member of a group, or as a client/ vendor will help the person to complete their profile, and can add valuable information. Be generous with your comments.
• Invite the candidate in transition to group meetings that you are part of. Most often they can come as a guest, and you can introduce them to others. This will also work with virtual groups, blogs, and online networking.
• Give the candidate a list of your favorite agencies you have worked with in the past, or forward their resume to the agencies that know you. They will appreciate the recommendations, both ways. Remember too, when agencies call to get your business, tell them about the people you know in transition and see if they will accept a referral.
• Put the candidates in transition in touch with each other. Many informal groups are created this way, and sharing leads and information is very helpful to the candidates. They don’t have to be searching in the same field either to be a help to each other.
• Forward articles and blogs; sharing information is a great way to help. Some people who have left their company and thus have left behind their company email address lose the link to information we get everyday. Forward it over so they can start getting connected again.

There are so many things we can do to help, even if we can’t directly hire those who come to us. This list of ideas cost nothing but a bit of time, and can make a world of difference. All the help we give others will come back to us someday, so build the bridges, make the connections, and help if you can. Today’s candidate could just be tomorrow’s hiring manager. It will always be appreciated and never forgotten.

The word “social” has many definitions, but some of the more appropriate ones are 1) pertaining to friendly companionship or relation; 2) Seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; and 3) living or disposed to live-in companionship with others rather than in isolation. The point being that people use social media as a two-way street and to get a sense of community. To belong to a community one has to have something to contribute and be accepted as a member. A community is people interacting with each other. It requires free flow of ideas and thoughts. None of that is delivered by a corporate web page, which is essentially static. People do not invite companies to be their friends. The same is true for recruiters wanting to get hires off Facebook. Creating and cultivating a network to the point where one actually has a hire can take a long time, and the ROI can be impossible or very difficult to justify. It’s not possible to say that X number of hours spent networking will result in Y number of hires and it is not a replicable model.

The Amway Model

There is a very successful and proven approach to tapping the potential of social networks. This has been around for decades before there was Facebook. Companies that operate using network marketing — such as Amway, Avon, and Mannatech — build and work their networks by providing a little structure and the messages they want delivered along with incentives to get the results they desire. They know that their networks exist and thrive where they become communities. They are not clubs where anyone can buy a membership and get the benefits. The people that succeed at network marketing emphasize the social component. The same is true of Facebook. Active members have built their networks to form communities they want to be part of. It’s a two-way street, with lots of interaction, dialog, and sharing — elements that have been true of communities since there have been communities.

Employers wanting to tap social media for talent need to recognize and respect these realities. It’s not about putting up a web page — it’s about what you have to contribute. Therefore it’s easier to tap the networks that already exist — those of employees. Employees can be encouraged to write about their employer, their experiences at work, things the company is doing that may be interesting to others, and so on. Some ERP systems now offer functionality that allows an employee to directly post jobs to their Facebook page. But this requires flexibility and giving up control over what gets put on those Facebook pages along with the job postings. Many employers are accustomed to having all communication beyond the firewall restricted to the boring drivel put out by the PR department. The idea that employees can be writing, blogging, and putting out stories about their employer without review can give many an HR manager an acute case of dyspepsia.

I had one such experience where a company I worked with was so shaken by a blog posting I wrote that was critical of someone, that they created an entirely new corporate policy requiring all employees to have everything they wanted to put on a blog, a website, or any other medium approved or risk termination. Of course, not everyone is as paranoid or PC as this bunch — they would be uncomfortable about any writing that was critical of Bin Laden, on the outside chance he’s really a nice guy who’s been framed or badly misunderstood.

Don’t Kill the Goose

Succeeding at tapping social networks as a source of talent requires participating or contributing to what makes them popular. Many recruiters have limited time to create their own networks or spend time blogging. But in either case what employees do will be far more effective and, more importantly, far more credible and therefore better received than any hype that marketing can spin about the paradise that exists inside the corporate walls. This isn’t exactly a new idea — some employers have long allowed candidates to talk to current employees without any monitoring of the conversation to get a true sense of what it’s like to work there.

Trying to control or restrict that is an exercise in futility, better described as tilting at windmills. Of course that never stopped employers and others from trying. Employers tried for years to restrict their employees’ use of the web out of the fear that they would just waste their time, before finally giving in, by which time mobile devices had made the restrictions irrelevant anyway. The same will be true of social networks — the desire to control the lives of others is deeply ingrained and anything having to do with the web seems to turbocharge it — just look at China and most of the Middle East. Of course, as all that try it have discovered — such actions result in equally forceful opposition.

By embracing social networks and encouraging employees to talk up their employers, warts and all, any employer can turn their workforce into a big referral program that will dwarf any effort the recruiting organization can manage on their own. The key is to recognize that social networks exists first and foremost for the benefit of their members — to provide them a sense of community and meet their social needs. To reiterate — the value provided by a social network is that it is social. An employer that can’t understand this simple concept should best stay away from trying to tap social media.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go, a Friday, most people were too busy anticipating the weekend fun to actually miss him. He managed the administration function for his division, and he wasn’t the most inspiring of people, so he was easily mistaken for an office plant.

Then, about two years ago, people discovered that for some strange reason John-in-admin knew this new “social networking” area very well. He had connections in the most obscure locations, and for a fleeting moment his star burned brightly.

If you needed to get at someone in the industry, or contact a potential hire in a competitor, John was the go-to guy. He was always happy to help, but as everyone in the company joined LinkedIn and Xing, his star gradually declined.

Management noted the time spent with social networking, and decided that it was not time well spent.

A Weak Start

The regular Friday management meeting started early, and Do It Right! Extrusion’s CEO said that the challenge was getting sales in a market that was in serious decline. The sales manager stepped right in, and assured the team that he was on top of things. In fact, he said, there were rumors that Aluminum Windows was fishing about for new vendors, and he wanted to open that door as soon as he could.

‘You just get me inside that company’, he declared, ‘and I’ll get the sale!’ So he asked everyone to search through their personal and professional networks for a contact that would open the door.

Everyone agreed to look.

Back in her corner office, the marketing director, Patsy Cline, vaguely remembered an introduction request from someone who wanted to contact the Aluminum Windows Purchasing Director. So Patsy knew the Purchasing Director should be in her LinkedIn network. When she checked Linkedin, she couldn’t find anyone in purchasing in Aluminum Windows, and only a few people in the company at all.

Never mind, she thought. Someone else can probably get to her.

Bob, in Accounting, did a few quick searches but nothing came up either. But the good news was that his searches on LinkedIn seemed to run a bit faster than usual. Must be an improvement in our broadband Internet access, he thought to himself. The water cooler beckoned, and his search was abandoned.

Jean, in production planning, ignored the request from the Sales Manager on principle. Helping salespeople was never a good idea, she thought. Salespeople made too much money and sold things before production could actually produce. And they never stopped talking!

She closed her copy of Weekly Engineering Solutions, and opened up her account on the new Aluminum Windows social network. Her company seemed to be getting some attention, and not all of it was good. She quickly switched over to the internal Do It Right! Extrusion micro-blogging network that had been set up on Yammer, and found that a few staff were talking about the negative buzz on the new Aluminum Windows social network.

“Hmm”, she wondered “Why now?”

Rapid Decline

A world away, in the next room, John Q. Gladwell had been working away quietly on his laptop.

First, he opened his connections page on Linkedin and went to ‘Remove Connections’. One by one he disconnected from everyone in Do It Right! Extrusion. This amounted to about 50 people, and out of his total connection base of 22 million people he lost only about a quarter of a million second- and third-level contacts. He figured he could get many of those back with a little additional online schmoozing.

Once severed, however, he knew the direct contacts could never be re-connected. Not unless you knew the contact’s other email addresses, and John used only one email address for all his online activities. John had the skills to find alternate email addresses for those who later resigned from Do It Right! Extrusion, but he knew that his colleagues were not quite so savvy.

When he was finished on Linkedin, he opened up his MySpace, Xing, Facebook, and Viadeo accounts. He repeated the process again, in a systematic and deliberate way. No hurry.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go, John’s extensive subscriptions on Google Reader led him to a number of sites where he knew industry people went online to communicate and collaborate. He set up a new account for an anonymous poster called AluminumGuy, and made precise, surgical cuts in the market perceptions about Do It Right! Extrusion.

He targeted their ability to deliver, the quality of their raw materials, and so on. Nothing too strong, just a few rumors, and certainly nothing that would indicate that AluminumGuy was anything other than a dispassionate observer.

Two hours a day for a month. That should do it.

It took John a little while longer to figure out what to do with his Twitter account. He never was a big fan of micro-blogging but he finally figured out the subtle art of the lob. He settled on the idea of the odd Tweet that linked to an article that he had posted on user-generated news sites like Memeorandum, Newsvine, Helium, or Now Public. He had only 75 followers on Twitter, and hadn’t spent much time on user-generated news sites, but he thought he would have a lot of time on his hands in the future.

Closing the internal Do It Right! Extrusion micro-blogging network on Yammer was his initial call, but he quickly realized that the site would soon be rebuilt by some enterprising individual in the IT dept. John was the administrator, and could do as he pleased, but he did not have to go immediately to the nuclear option.

He decided that he would put the Yammer network aside until later in the evening, and quietly cut one or two senior staff while all the subscribers were busy at the weekly Friday Beer Bust. He didn’t have much visibility beyond the people his own division, but the organization chart function in Yammer made it easier for him to decide who to start with.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go, John’s Aluminum Windows social network on Ning had only a few members. The numbers were increasing and John had time to think about how to use this particular tool. Probably a few more incisions, he thought.

John’s mind worked overtime throughout the afternoon. He felt that he had made a good start, but short-term actions were not enough to satisfy him. Questioning the authenticity of online profiles for staff in Do It Right! Extrusion could come later. All he had to do was figure out how to do it with a high degree of anonymity. If all went to plan he might not have to use an unethical method like this one.

Death By Networks

Do It Right! Extrusion never did make a connection to the Purchasing Director of Aluminum Windows. Business would drift lower, and no one would be able to identify a specific causation. Everyone agreed it was probably the economy.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go, the Purchasing Director of Aluminum Windows was very busy, signing off on a new Approved Vendor List for 2009. So it might have been difficult for the Sales Manager at Do It Right! Extrusion to get her attention anyway, even if he had the skills to close a sale.

The Purchasing Director felt that time on social networks was well spent. She restricted her contacts on LinkedIn exclusively to people who could supply material and components to her company. Facebook is where she played around with friends.

Xing was where she connected with the family from the old country — Germany. Someone had recently told her about a new social network especially for the Aluminum Windows industry, and she thought she might check it out later that evening.

On the afternoon of the morning that John was let go by Do It Right! Extrusion, he made direct contact with the purchasing director of Aluminum Windows, who put him in contact with the human resources director of the company, who interviewed him together with the IT director.

They hired Mr. Gladwell the next Friday for a new role in the company: Social Networking Manager.

Join LinkedIn Groups

Suppose one of your areas is, like mine, SAP Consulting. Search for groups using the word SAP in the group search box. The groups will be shown in the order of size. You will find:

SAP Community with almost 15,000 members
SAP Network Global (12,000+) … Active 12,000 members
SAP People Forum almost 8,000 members
etc.

Join these groups. The instant benefit is that all of the members are now in your network even if they are beyond the 3-level connection distance.

Search for Group Members and Send Them Messages for Free

There are two ways to search for people in a group. First, there’s a simple search box within the group members tab. You can search for members by keywords. The advantage is that you will see 500 results.

Now notice that you can “send a message” to any of these people using a link under their name in the list of results. If you go to the very last page of the search results, you will likely see people who are connected to you only through the group, yet you can send them a direct message. That is just like sending a LinkedIn “Inmail” but is free.

The second way to search is to use the new advanced people search functionality. You are able to check one or more of your groups on the advanced people search page to target your search at these groups’ members. You can now combine your search with keywords, target title, company, location, etc. If you have a free account you would only see 100 results. (It used to be 500 just recently.) I don’t see it as a big limitation; there are always ways to run a variety of searches to see more results. If you mouse over a person’s profile in the results list you will see the link “send message” for people who are either connected to you or are in your group. If you go to a profile view, you will see the same “send message” link there as well.

Important Notes on the LinkedIn search syntax:

a) LinkedIn search allows you to use Boolean syntax: as an example, in the group search members box you could look for
“SAP FI” AND Consulting NOT Recruiter.

b) However, just like Google, LinkedIn search does not recognize special characters like @. It’s no use to include @ in your search string in order to find email addresses either on Google or on LinkedIn.

c) While Google search would see the symbol * as “a word or a few words” and some databases like Monster would allow to use it as a “wildcard,” LinkedIn search doesn’t recognize the symbol * at all.

Post Discussion Items on Groups

On the majority of LinkedIn groups, the discussion boards have anything and everything. People self-advertise, announce that they are “open networkers,” etc. However, if you post a discussion item about your opportunities there’s a chance you will see some relevant responses.

Or, post an interesting industry-specific question in the hopes that you will hear from experts.

Explore the Company Pages

The company search is located at http://www.linkedin.com/companies

Search for the company you are sourcing for. LinkedIn shows a lot of information on a company page. That includes the “career path” that helps identify target companies for your sourcing.

Search within the companies is rather limited, but you could also do a Google X-ray search like this: <keywords> site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies
to investigate target companies and look for their employees.

As an example, do a Google search

SAP Consulting site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies “San Francisco”

and explore the results.

Use Contact Capture to Parse and Organize Your People Searches

Broadlook Contact Capture is a great tool with many uses, and it’s free. You can download it at http://www.broadlook.com/braingain

On the “people search” page on LinkedIn, use the “extended” view. Highlight-all on the page and use Contact Capture to capture the results. The tool was not made for pages like this, and you will get some extra “junk” — but this will capture all the first and last names. If you searched for employees of a specific company where you know the email pattern, you can now create an email list for these people.

(Another relevant tool comes from eGrabber. It is not free but is extremely useful for capturing and parsing LinkedIn profiles. Go to the site www.eGrabber.com and look for the “Excel” tool.)

Have Their Email Address? Learn More About the Person

If you have an email address that is likely to belong to someone you’d like to learn more about, there are several ways to do it using LinkedIn.

You can enter it in the “import contacts” page. If the person is on LinkedIn and is not in your network you will get a link to his/her profile. Another way is to use the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar. If you create a contact in Outlook with the email, save it and reopen, you will see a link to the profile. You can download the Outlook toolbar from http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=outlook_toolbar_download

Drive Traffic to Your Profile

It is somewhat similar to search engine optimization for websites. Make sure your profile is complete, and it’s clear what your competency is and who you are looking to connect with. Make your profile rich in content; add links and applications such as Wordpress if you have a blog. Use relevant keywords in your profile including variations (such as consultant and consulting).

To get more relevant people to find you, post interesting questions and answers in the LinkedIn Q&A section; start LinkedIn groups; use your LinkedIn profile link in your signature in emails, blog posts, Twitter posts, etc. (Here’s mine, by the way: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irinashamaeva)

Being an “open networker” or not is, of course, a personal preference. I think though that with 30+ million of people on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea not to limit yourself to networking with a just few people whom you closely know, but allow yourself to see and be seen by a larger community.

I hope you liked what you read. I’d also like to invite you all to join our “Boolean Strings” group on LinkedIn. It’s a great community of people and you will have a chance to learn a lot and to share your web sourcing knowledge.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

I) Recruiting Tools that Use “Other People’s Time”

If you’re short on recruiting funds and on hours in the day, the best approaches to consider are those classified as “OPT” approaches that use employee time and budget resources of other departments:

1. Recruiting at professional events. Ask your firm’s employees to recruit at local and national events, trade shows, awards dinners, and seminars they are planning to attend. This is a superior approach because your employees can easily approach potential candidates as “equals” and because their time and travel expenses are already being paid by their business unit or other sponsor. The key to successful event recruiting is to develop the expectation that each employee attending such events will bring back three names of individuals who would be outstanding recruits. Encourage your executives and superstars to speak at these events, because that exposure might result in some immediate candidates, as well as improvement of your overall employment brand.
2. Social networks. Having recruiters spend endless hours building profiles on social network sites can be expensive. Instead, shift some of the responsibility to your employees because there is a high probability that your employees currently utilize one or more social networks already (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) both on and off the job. Start by encouraging your employees to include in their profiles compelling facts and stories about the firm. Next, encourage them to proactively make group connections and to provide you with names of potential recruits.
3. Blogs. Recruiters can write effective blogs but it’s probably also true that many of your top employees probably already author blogs or are active participants in blogs relating to their field. If so, encourage them to talk about the positive aspects of your firm and to actively recruit on their blogs. Encourage other employees who read blogs to use them to also identify top talent.
4. Boomerangs/corporate alumni. The best way to ensure a high-quality hire who perfectly “fits” your culture is to focus on recruiting boomerangs (individuals who previously worked at your firm). During tough economic times, many of these individuals might regret their decision to leave but be hesitant to approach you about attempting to return. A simple phone call from an employee in their former department reassuring them that they would be welcomed back might be all it would take to land proven talent.
5. Videos. Videos are powerful recruiting tools because they allow you to more effectively “show the passion” at your firm. Rather than paying vendors to develop these videos, consider holding a video contest where employees throughout the firm compete to put together short, compelling videos about why your firm is a great place to work. The employees will do it on their own time and surprisingly, they may find many compelling features to display that you weren’t aware of. Post the best ones on your own corporate website or on YouTube.
6. Proactive employee referrals. Employee referrals need to be your number one focus because they shift a great deal of the recruiting “work” away from recruiters and on to your employees. Referrals produce high volume and high quality, but during tight budget times the cost of referral bonuses needs to be avoided. The best way to do that is to directly approach top performers that work in areas where you’re hiring and ask them to provide you with a handful of names of top people. Next ask them to make some contacts for you to begin the relationship recruiting process. Most employees are willing to do this work without an expectation of a referral bonus. Also consider expanding your referrals to allow referrals from customers, strategic partners, vendors, consultants, suppliers and retirees.
7. Ask past references for referrals. Individuals who served as references for previous top hires will often help out again in your search for new candidates if they were asked. Start identifying recent hires who have turned out to be exceptional. Call their references back, thank them, and then ask them who else they may know who is exceptional and could possibly be interested. Because these individuals have given good references once, it is highly likely these new names will also be of high quality. Most references are more than willing to help without an expectation of reward.
8. Traditional referral programs. During tight economic times you might need to shift away from individual referral bonuses and towards a “drawing” or lottery approach. This is where employees get a statistical opportunity to win trips, vacation time, lunch with CEO or other non-cash yet compelling prize. You can also make customers, employee’s families, suppliers and consultants that work with your firm eligible for the referral drawing program.
9. Hold a name-gathering Rolodex/PDA party. If you need help in sourcing or identifying top candidates, involve your employees who are likely to know the best and brightest in helping you put together a list of possible candidates. Rolodex parties are informal departmental or business unit meetings were top performers are brought into a conference room, given ice cream or treats and are then asked to “download” and share the names of the very best individuals that they know at other firms from their personal contacts. Those names might be stored in a Rolodex, a PDA, mobile phone, or email-based contact manager. Regardless of where the information is stored, the very best names are gathered at the party and are then targeted by recruiters to fill current and future job openings.
10. Chat rooms. Chances are that your best current employees are already active on Internet listservers, forums and chat rooms. Encourage them to talk up the firm and answer questions highlighting your best practices and technology.
11. Media coverage. Encourage managers and top employees to make themselves available to the press because the coverage can help attract candidates. Also encourage them to write articles in professional publications that highlight the firm’s best practices and technology.
12. Recruit at company events. Consider company sponsored business, PR, product and sales events to also be recruiting events, where you might be able to identify potential candidates.
13. Mentors and mentees. Mentoring relationships can be very strong. Take advantage of that by asking your employees if they are a mentor (or a mentee) of someone at another firm. If so, ask them to help you recruit the best ones.

II) Sourcing — Low-Cost Approaches for Finding the Names of Potential Candidates

If you’re looking to identify potential candidates, here are some sourcing approaches that will cost you little or nothing:

1. Ask candidates during the interview. Ask the best interviewees for the names of other good individuals they know during the interview. If you ask enough interviewees, you will get a pretty good list of top names.
2. Ask new hires during onboarding. Ask all new hires on the day they start who else is good at their former firm. Ask them to help you recruit any of the identified individuals that they know well.
3. Almost qualified – Re-look at “finalists” from previous hiring efforts for roles in a given job family to see what former candidates may now be more qualified.
4. Conduct Google searches. It’s almost impossible for anyone with any professional status to “hide” these days. Key people always have high online visibility, so identify well-known individuals by running their “Google score.” Names can be found by searching using major technical terms or job titles, along with a firm name.
5. Turned us down. Re-visit finalists who, in the past, rejected your job offers. Try a new approach and attempt to resell them. If they say no, ask them if you can contact them again later.
6. A find-you-again profile. Ask your current employees “how would I find you again?” Ask them what business and social events they attend, magazines and journals that they read, TV shows that they watch, etc. Use this information to identify the sources that are the most likely to produce results.
7. Retirees. Some retirees have second thoughts about leaving the world of work, while others are willing to work as “fill-ins,” so keep in touch with those that you might like to have return.
8. Community groups. Encourage leaders of community, service and church groups to make referrals and to let you speak at their events.
9. Contests. Technology firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are utilizing online technology challenges to identify the best problem solvers in the world. Finance companies are using “case contests” to identify teams of MBA graduates with the ability to rapidly apply their learning.
10. Clubs and organizations. Firms are beginning to realize that if you want risk-takers, you recruit at rock-climbing clubs. If you want people with discipline, you recruit former Marines. Several pharma organizations have begun hiring ex-cheerleaders as salespeople because of their discipline and their ability to get people’s attention. Pockets of labor usually share at least one extracurricular interest outside work. One hospital organization in Illinois found that nearly all pediatric nurses’ frequent arts and crafts supply stores regularly and began targeting crafts clubs and training classes in such venues as sources.

III) Selling Candidates — Tips on Convincing Candidates to Say Yes to an Interview or a Job Offer

1. Job descriptions. If you have a hard time getting individuals to apply, a dull job description is a common reason why. Rewrite your job descriptions to make them more like marketing pieces. Identify the WOW factors that you have and the features that excite your current employees. Put them in your job descriptions and make them compelling.
2. CEO calls. Have your firm’s CEO call top candidates directly and encourage them to sign on. CEO calls are incredibly effective.
3. Same-level calls. Many individuals make a habit of not returning recruiter calls. Instead, have someone at their professional level call them and you will get as much as a three times higher response rate. The reason for this is “professional courtesy” and the opportunity to learn.
4. Peer interviews. Many organizations have found that they get a significantly higher acceptance rate if candidates are interviewed primarily by the individuals they will work directly with. Because peers know the job, they can be more convincing and at the same time, more believable than hiring managers.
5. Side by side offer sheets. Provide your hiring managers with a single sheet that shows how your offer compares favorably with offers from competing facilities. This helps improve offer a acceptance rates.
6. Contact them on the right day. Constantly seek out information about top individuals that might “all of a sudden” be unhappy because their boss/friend just left, a merger has been announced, they didn’t get a raise, they got a bad performance appraisal or other “triggering event”. Contact them right away and close the deal.
7. Select a hiring team. Some managers just aren’t good salespeople (recruiters). Identify the employees that are good recruiters and salespeople and let them do most of the hiring. Give them recruiter training and reward them for their efforts. Because they do a lot of hiring, they will naturally be better at it than a single manager that only does hiring once or twice a year.
8. Free training. Offer top candidates you have pre-identified any vacant seats in your training classes in order to build a relationship and to assess their capabilities.
9. Involve them. Ask top individuals to help you “assess” a new idea or program, then build the relationship to the point where they know you well enough to accept an offer.
10. Sell sheet attached to your application. Attach a “sales sheet” to your hard copy application forms that highlights the best practices and features of your firm.
11. Promise them an interview. Guarantee potential recruits an interview. Consider giving them a reward (a $10 coffee card) or a free meal if they show up for an interview.

IV) College Recruiting Tips

1. Interns as on-campus reps. Ask your college interns/ part time staff to serve as recruiting representatives when they return to campus. Ask them to visit campus events and to provide you with the names of the best and what it takes to convince them.
2. Grad assistants. The grad assistants of top professors not only know the best students but they are very good at convincing them to accept your new opportunities. Officers of professional student organizations are also excellent talent scouts.
3. Use last year’s hires as sourcers/recruiters. Ask last year’s college hires to help you identify and recruit this year’s crop
4. Ask college professors. Ask college professors to be referral sources. Identify the best and begin selling them more than a year before graduation.
5. 2-years-out college hires. If you haven’t had a lot of success competing for students graduating, try re-contacting those you wanted but couldn’t get two years out of school. You might find recruiting them now is a lot easier as their preferences changed when they become more experienced.
6. CEO talks. Having senior executives speak on campus and give presentations and classes have unusually high impact on recruiting.

V) Other Miscellaneous Approaches

1. Create a hiring consortium to share costs. Consider going together with a group of similar firms to share recruiting ad and/or career-fair costs.
2. Win “best place” awards. Although it takes a major effort, winning a place on local or national “best place to work” type employer branding lists will have a dramatic impact on both the quality of your applicants and your offer acceptance rates.

Conclusion

There are literally thousands of approaches that have been used by recruiters to reach top talent. Some approaches are more mainstream and as a result have been monetized by entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to make money.

But the majority of approaches are simple, low-cost, and wildly effective when used in the right way. What works for the manager of the local tire and lube shop probably wouldn’t work for the software startup, but there are at least 100 innovative approaches that would.

The key to being a successful and innovative recruiting leader is trial and error; not random trial and error, but educated trial and error.

Look at the characteristics of the audience you are trying to recruit and identify approaches that make sense for that population. Top talent is used to being barraged by recruiters using mainstream approaches, so when you try something different you most likely will slide right past all the barriers they have erupted!

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

Set up a forward-looking workforce forecasting system. This is a quickie version of a workforce plan, but used more for predicting when hiring will come back in force, rather than a full forecast of all hiring needs. To prepare this, have your line managers forecast their hiring needs by quarter for the next 12 months for just your biggest needs. This could be all of your highest volume hires or those who are critically important to your business. Select job classes that drive your business and have some predictive power to reflect all of your job needs. Have your managers update this forecast every quarter or whenever they see a big change in upcoming requirements up or down. If you add some analytical rigor to these forecasts, rather than just rely on intuition, these changes will be meaningful and provide an early-warning signal that something big is about to happen. Most people don’t realize that forecasts are as much about improving communications throughout a company as for having reasonable numbers for planning purposes. Regardless, having a 90-day headstart on the competition will allow you to see and hire more of the best people, especially those now in the starting blocks just waiting for the gun to fire.

Create talent communities. These are talent hubs on steroids. A talent hub is a creative micro-site designed to be found by a group of people (e.g., developers, engineers, Gen Ys, retirees) who are on the margin — i.e., not actively looking, but open-minded. These people become prospects for your future opportunities, so you need to provide some incentive for them to give you basic bio data. These prospects then need to be nurtured along using some type of robust CRM (candidate/customer relationship management) system until something exciting pops up. Reporting is minimal since these people are not yet candidates for a specific job. The steroids bit has to do with the degree of automation, amount of regular contact in the form of emails and the variety of touch points, like video, RSS feeds, and chat features. (If you’d like to learn more about this, sign-up now for an upcoming free webinar on January 22, 2009 I’m hosting with Jobs2Web on this critical topic.)

Build a team of great recruiters. The best people are more discriminating. Technology can help you separate the good from the bad (one example: search on award terms), but you need to be a good recruiter to convince the best that your job is worthy of serious consideration. Without good recruiters you’ll just be hiring the above average; that’s why a serious investment in upgrading and training your recruiting team is absolutely critical. In my mind a good recruiter applies applicant control at every step in the process, understands real job needs, and uses solution selling to position each job as a career opportunity, not a compensation move. (Here’s a quick recruiter test: if candidates frequently say they’re not interested in what you have to offer anytime in the hiring process from first call to final close, you don’t have applicant control. Recruiters who use applicant control switch roles and determine if they’re interested in the candidate at these points.) Applicant control is less important and easier to maintain when you’re dealing with an average or above-average candidate, but essential when dealing with a top performer. That’s why a well-trained recruiting team is critical if you want to consistently hire the best.

The first six months of the recovery will be a free for all. If you do nothing different, you’ll find a few good people and a few above-average people. But if you make wholesale changes in how you source and upgrade the quality of your recruiting team, you’ll dramatically increase the number of top people you hire who you previously would have lost. Even better, if you set up a predictive workforce forecasting system, you’ll know 60-90 days ahead of everyone else when the recovery in your industry is ready to begin. Start now and get the best people into your prospect database. Before you know it, you’ll be hiring great people every time. However, if you wait to read about the recovery, it will be too late.

(Note: make sure you participate in The Adler Group’s annual Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey to discover some other leading hiring indicators.)

We ran a webinar today with Elaine Orler and Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion about what changes we should expect from recruiting technology in the next year.

I learned a lot on the call, but one of the polls that we took really made me stop and think. Here it is:

That LinkedIn was the most popular did not surprise me — it’s not exactly a secret that it has become one of the critical tools of our profession. I was surprised that LinkedIn was such an overwhelming favorite – nobody else was even remotely close.

The way we asked the question had people answering which of these services they are most likely to use the most. But I wonder — if we had phrased the question to ask if recruiters are using these sites at all for professional services, would the answers have been any different?

Asked a different way, aside from a very small portion of the recruiting community, are we really using social media effectively?

Tell that to nGenera. It has hired 63 people through its employee and recruiter social networks, which accounts for 70% of its 91 hires since last December. For those 63 people, that means no job boards. No third-party recruiters.

nGenera started in March 2007, and acquired six companies in one year. The company’s products (while hard to understand from its website) include call-center software, incentive compensation software, simulation software, and more.

Katie Carty Tierney (pictured) manages the recruiting function for the Austin, Texas, company, which has just under 300 employees, most virtual. “Our recruiters were relying heavily on job boards in the past, and we wanted them to look beyond that,” she says. “They weren’t necessarily getting the right candidates. They weren’t necessarily getting the right matches. There was a lot of turnover. That’s not the way to hire people.”

“How are you going to mine the network you already have?” Tierney asks. “Everyone’s got a network. Everyone in the world has someone they know. They’re not formal networks. They’re loose networks.”

nGenera’s plan wasn’t as simple as “let’s go put an ad on social-networking sites instead of Monster” (in fact, it wasn’t even very successful posting on Facebook Marketplace). It was more about building a culture where recruiters, and more importantly, all employees, spend their work time on social media. “If you’re discouraging people from developing relationships, they’re going to leave when the market’s better,” she says.

Employees were encouraged to explore and build out their social networks. It told them: “Go reach out to people you know. Go join Facebook. Go link out to people on LinkedIn. Join Twitter. In the long run it benefits you as much as it benefits nGenera.”

Meanwhile, the company reached out to alumni, as well as employees of legacy companies (predecessor companies). Tierney also started following people on Twitter who seemed to have the skills it was looking for. If it could “follow” those people on Twitter, those people could see who was “following them” — and perhaps take an interest. Tierney’s also getting her jobs sent out, for example, via AustinTXJobs on Twitter.

nGenera also uses Jobvite (not to be confused with Jobster, which Tierney tried but wasn’t thrilled about). Everyone has access to it — not just hiring managers and recruiters. They can look at openings, send them to their friends, track email conversations, and more. The company pays a flat, monthly fee, rather than a per-person cost.

Job boards aren’t dead at nGenera. Niche boards, in particular, have been used to look for people with OATS (Order Audit Trail System) compliance, for example. But, Tierney says, “I found that LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are giving me what I need.”