1. Oral (Verbal)
2. Non-Verbal
3. Written

Each of these is necessary and they work together in concert. Your communication needs to be consistent from the CEO to the lowest levels of your organization. Without consistent, clear communication you will encounter a multitude of problems within your company. Inconsistent messaging and communication will consequently cause perception problems outside. Do you really want negative publicity running around the country? Here is an example of what I mean. It’s a bit long, but I believe it’s important to tell the whole story so you can see all the mistakes that were made.

Chelsea has just received her bachelor’s degree. She had an internship with a prominent firm in NYC the summer following her sophomore year of school. They liked her so much they invited her back the summer following her junior year. Before she went back to school to complete her senior year she was told by everyone she worked for (including HR) that they wanted to hire her after she graduated, and that she was as good as hired. They told her to reach out early this year, which she did.

The HR person she had dealt with during her internships (Mary) had been promoted and told Chelsea to contact the person who had backfilled her position (Karen). Mary said she’d let Karen know to expect to hear from Chelsea. Chelsea proceeded to email Karen to let her know that she still wanted to come to work for the company and would like to set up an interview. It took three weeks for Karen to respond to the emails (Chelsea sent two more over this time).

After finally hearing back from Karen, Chelsea said that she could be available any Monday or Friday (she was still in school) for an interview. Karen just told her to let her know when she’d be in the city and they’d schedule time to interview. Chelsea made it clear that any Monday or Friday would work. Karen still wouldn’t commit to an appointment to see Chelsea.

This was mid March.

In mid April Chelsea emailed Karen again and then called her three days later. There was no response to either communication. In addition she left a voicemail for Mary (the HR person to hire her for the first internship) to let her know she hadn’t been able to get anywhere with Karen for over a month. Mary got right back to her and told her that Karen was out of the office and would be back at the end of the week.

On Sunday night at 8 p.m. Chelsea received an email from Karen asking her if she could come in to interview with her the next day at 3 p.m.. Chelsea, still very interested in working for this company, rearranged some items and agreed to the interview.

Chelsea met with Karen the following afternoon as planned. This was the first time there was any verbal contact between them. Karen proceeded to tell Chelsea that she could probably tell her more about the position and culture than she was aware of, as she’d only been with the company for a few months.

At the conclusion of the interview Karen informed Chelsea that she was to meet with two account managers for one of the accounts she might be working with, which she did. Chelsea was very concerned about her meeting with the two account managers because, not having been informed of this, she was unable to prepare for the second interview. She did the best she could with no preparation and powered through. As soon as Chelsea got home she emailed thank-you notes to all three people she met with and also hand-wrote notes and mailed them.

Three weeks later Chelsea had still not received feedback of any kind from Karen and sent her an email. Another week went by with no communication from Karen. She emailed Karen again and finally heard back five days later. Almost five weeks had passed between the interview and feedback. Karen said there were no positions they were hiring for (contradictory to what she had been told) at this time but to let her know when she’d be back in New York in case something else came up. Chelsea had made it perfectly clear in one of her prior emails, in which the thread was included, that she would be back in New York full time by May 15. Even so she emailed Karen when she got back to town. Again, no response.

Chelsea was concerned by both Karen’s lack and quality of responsiveness and assumed that this meant she’d blown the interview and they were no longer interested. Her father advised her to contact Mary about what happened and Mary responded that Chelsea needed to do research and be more prepared when she was to meet with the account managers of an account. Chelsea emailed her back immediately and explained that Karen didn’t inform her of the second interview until the end of their interview. Had she known in advance she would have prepared adequately for the second meeting.

Five days later (Sunday night, May 22) Karen sent an email apologizing for not being responsive and asked if Chelsea was available for a call the next morning at 11. Karen asked Chelsea if she could come back into the office on May 24 and meet with a different account team. Needless to say, she was prepared and Karen sent her email quickly asking for 3 references.

I spoke to Chelsea on May 25 and she told me that she had lost almost all interest in the job and was now keen on looking into other options. She felt that everything she had been told about their interest in hiring her was bunk, and told me she’s considering taking the job if they make her the offer but will continue to look for something else.

I’m sure many of you are horrified at this fiasco. I’m shaking my head as I’m writing this because it distresses me so. It’s just so unnecessary to have something like this happen, but it happens all the time. Let me list all the errors:

1. Karen’s total lack of response from the initial contact until the request for references two months later is totally unprofessional and disrespectful.
2. Karen never once picked up the phone to call Chelsea to have even the most basic of conversations. Every communication was by email. I know everyone is busy. I may be old school, but I firmly believe that we must maintain the art of oral communication. There are just too many things that can be misinterpreted in email as it’s very hard to convey emotion effectively. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe there’s a time and place for email. I use it all the time, but not when oral communication is warranted.
3. Karen admitting to Chelsea that she knew less about the company than Chelsea did. Really!? What was she thinking? What was the company thinking? How do you hire any new employee and not make sure they have correct and consistent messaging about you?
4. Karen’s lack of interest, professionalism, cognizance, etc. that she wouldn’t set an interview with Chelsea, even though she’d been told any Monday or Friday would work. Chelsea should have made a more concerted effort to actually get Karen to set a time to meet. She should have given Karen 2-3 specific dates that would work for her. Maybe this would have gotten Karen to commit to an interview, though I’m not at all convinced it would have made any difference.
5. Karen emailing Chelsea on Sunday nights after 8 p.m. to see if she would be available the following day. Now I get that things can happen at the last minute, periodically. This should not be a usual practice. Also, Karen should have had the common sense to pick up the phone, call Chelsea, and tell her that she knew it was last minute and make the request for her to come in the following day. She could have told her that the time had gotten away from her or that she had heard back from the team late or even that she’d dropped the ball. Chelsea would have much greater respect for Karen if she’d just made the time to speak to her and establish a relationship.
6. Not telling Chelsea about the 2nd interview on that first day in the office. Chelsea now knows that she needs to ask anyone scheduling an interview if she will be meeting with anyone else that day. Yes, Karen dropped the ball, but as a candidate she needed to be responsible for this.
7. Karen getting back to Chelsea after five weeks and telling her there were no positions rather than just having enough respect for Chelsea to be honest about what had happened.
8. I was told that this company doesn’t like to pay a lot for these entry-level employees. That may be, but this candidate has already lost interest. Remember, time is money.
9. Chelsea’s father told me that this is common at this company and they have trouble getting the right people and keeping them. He knows this because the Sr Executive VP is an old friend.
10. A promise to hire someone is not an offer. Chelsea knows this now.

I’ve looked at just one example of how lack of communication (oral, written, and non-verbal) can significantly affect your ability to attract and hire the best people. I hope I’ve conveyed the importance of effective communication in all areas of business and the possible consequences of ineffective communication.

As part of a larger project I’m currently working on (developing a “bad manager identification” orBMI program), I have been able to compile a long list of how weak managers hurt both the speed and the quality of hire.

If you decide to initiate an effort to train managers on how to hire, these factors and their related negative impacts could be crucial in building the business case for training hiring managers and rewarding them for great hires.

The Costs of a Bad Hire

Most would agree that managers do an OK job when they are trying to fill the typical requisition. However, everything changes when you’re trying to recruit the most difficult and desirable candidates. When recruiting A-level talent, undertrained, low-skilled, egotistical, or disinterested managers can be a top factor in losing great candidates. In addition to losing top candidates, the resulting bad hires require more costly training, they take up more of their teammate’s time, make more errors, upset customers and are much more likely to require performance management. Some may accidentally be promoted into management positions, where they will repeat and perhaps exceed the recruiting mistakes made by their original hiring manager. Remember that if your company has high retention and low firing rates, the costly damage that a bad hire can do is likely to last over many years.

What Google Does to Limit the Damage of Weak Hiring Managers

“We do everything to minimize the authority and power of the manager in making a hiring decision.”

“Managers often want to hire people who seem just like them.” So… “hiring decisions are made by a group.”

–L. Bock, Google VP of People Operations

The Top 20 Reasons Why Managers Are Unlikely To Hire Great Candidates

The top ways that hiring managers can hurt or prevent great hiring are listed below. For easy scanning, I have bullet broken them into four categories, I) general factors, II) factors related to a manager’s hiring skills, III) factors related to weak management skills, and IV) factors related to a ego and inflexibility.

I) General Factors That Prevent Great Hiring

• A-level talent will not work for weak managers — when weak managers try to hire superior talent, they cannot succeed because top candidates can spot and accurately assess a weak manager even before applying by using their extensive professional or social media networks. If a top candidate somehow gets to an interview, their ability to ask probing questions to the hiring manager will bring out answers that will cause them to immediately drop out of the hiring process.
• Weak managers probably have weak teams — the very definition of a weak manager means that they are not capable of attracting and retaining top talent. As a result, when the top candidates meet and interact with their mediocre team during the interview process, there is a high likelihood that they will be immediately discouraged. Top candidates want to work alongside the very best teammates because they want to learn from them. A-level talent will also immediately realize that they won’t be able to achieve their goals while working with this mediocre team.
• Weak managers have limited resources to offer — because of their poor performance, missed deadlines, and failed projects, weak managers are less likely to have large budgets. Top candidates will inquire about the available budget and resources in the department and they will be turned off when they learn that the resources available to them are below average.
• Weak managers are likely to be assigned low-level recruiters — some recruiting managers have a policy to assign the best recruiters to the most important jobs and the best managers. The best recruiters themselves often lobby their recruiting manager for the opportunity to work with the best hiring managers who are likely to produce high-quality hires. Even though it’s not an official policy, it is not unusual for contract recruiters or the weakest and most inexperienced recruiters to be assigned to the worst hiring managers. This may occur either as a subtle form of punishment or because these recruiters are all that are left after more senior recruiters have their choice. No matter what the reason, without the support and coaching of top recruiters, the odds of a weak manager getting a great A-level hire are almost zero. Incidentally, is also true that external executive search and third-party recruiters are unlikely to put the most effort into a search that is unlikely to succeed as a result of the roadblocks put up by a bad hiring manager.

II) Factors related to a manager’s hiring skills and capabilities

• Weak managers fail to do candidate research — many managers, in this case, both the good ones and the weak ones, fail to do adequate research into the background and the needs of top candidates. But weak managers sometimes don’t even bother to review the resume before an interview begins. This “no research” approach might be OK for most average or active candidates (because they have “easy to meet” job acceptance requirements), but A-level talent haas extremely high expectations and a detailed list of requirements that must be met (and deal-breakers that must be avoided) before they will accept the job. The very best managers proactively identify and then meet each of the major job acceptance criteria of A-level talent.
• Weak managers are bad salespeople — a weak manager is certainly capable of selling an average active candidate. However, it takes a much stronger set of sales skills and knowledge of the current market to sell the currently employed, top performers, game-changers, and innovators. Weak managers fail to conduct research and are not up-to-date on the latest recruiting sales and closing approaches. As a result, it is unlikely that weak managers will be able to close most of the best candidates.
• Weak managers are unlikely to innovate during recruiting, driving away innovators — weak managers simply don’t innovate very often. That is OK in most cases because the average hire doesn’t expect anything unusual during the hiring process. However, A-level talent and innovators will view the level of innovation and technology usage (e.g. live remote video interviews, simulations, real problem-solving contests) that they encounter during the recruiting process as an indication of the rate of innovation and technology usage in the job and the firm. In addition, if they aren’t offered the opportunity to innovate during the interview, their capabilities will be undiscovered and their frustration will likely cause them to drop out of the recruiting process.
• Failing to do benchmarking and competitive analysis may result in noncompetitive jobs and offers — you cannot recruit in isolation, so hiring managers must be up-to-date regarding the benchmark standards for top candidates in the current recruiting market. Unfortunately, weak managers are frequently unwilling to spend the necessary time required to analyze what competitors are offering and to make adjustments to ensure that “their job” is compelling and clearly superior to what the competitors are offering. Weak managers are also unlikely to monitor a competitor’s hiring cycles, so that they can focus their recruiting during times when they can avoid direct head-to-head competition with competitors that possess a strong employer brand.
• Weak managers don’t know how to manage competing offers — if the A-level candidate is currently employed, there is a high probability they will get a counteroffer from their existing boss. Even if they’re not employed, top candidates are likely to get one or more offers from other firms. Unfortunately, weak managers are often inflexible and are not willing to even make a counteroffer. Those that are willing to make one, often lack the skills necessary to successfully negotiate with the candidate and their own compensation department. The end result is that candidates who are in the highest demand will be lost.
• Managers who are not up-to-date in their field frequently write poor position descriptions — weak managers are often behind the times in the latest tools, technologies, best practices, and approaches in their technical field. As a result, the job descriptions and the position announcements that these managers help to create or that they approve will signal immediately to exceptional candidates that this job will not be exciting or challenging. As a result they will not even apply for the position.
• Weak technical skills may lead to poor candidate screening — weak managers who are behind in their technical field will also make errors during resume screening. When they are asked to screen through a stack of “finalists” resumes who are presented to them by the recruiter, they may make serious errors in the ranking of top candidates. As a result of their low knowledge level, some of the top candidates may never be invited in for interview. Obviously their weak technical skills and knowledge will also come through during the interview.

III) Factors related to weak management skills and capabilities

• Weak managers are poor decision-makers — managers who make numerous poor decisions would have to be labeled as weak managers. It’s highly likely that a manager that uses a poor decision-making process for business decisions will also use a flawed approach to make hiring decisions. The net result will be that the best candidates may be screened out early or they will not be selected as the finalist.
• Weak managers are slow decision-makers — weak managers are often indecisive. Even if a manager uses a good decision-making process, if they are slow at making the final decision in hiring, it won’t matter because the best candidates will be gone weeks before they can make a final decision.
• A poorly managed interview processes signals weak management — weak managers often develop and execute weak interview processes. Unfortunately, top candidates will project your ability to manage them based on how well you manage their interview process. If the interview starts late, include weak interviewers, are disorganized, or they include inappropriate, illogical, or illegal questions, the candidate will likely assume that the manager who owned the process is a weak manager.
• Poor feedback during the hiring process indicates poor feedback on the job — if a manager is weak at communicating and providing feedback during the hiring process, most top candidates will assume that those weaknesses will also exist after they accept the job. Therefore you are likely to lose any candidates who receive mixed messages and slow or no feedback.
• Weak managers are more likely to be biased and to generalize – in some cases, managers produce poor business results because they use their own biases and generalizations to make judgments. Weak managers are less likely to understand the value of diversity and in all too many cases, they end up hiring people that look and act “just like them.” This may result in candidate slates with low diversity and below average diversity hires.

IV) Factors related to a ego or inflexibility

• “C” level managers won’t attempt to hire “A” level talent — Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, is a supporter of the premise that weak managers seldom hire A-level talent. They often don’t even try to hire superior talent out of fear that the new talent might challenge them or even take their job. Hiring talent with skill levels below them may increase their sense of security.
• Weak managers may overreach in their job requirements — weak managers are often unwilling or incapable of training and developing new hires. So in the cases where a hiring manager is willing to seek out superior talent, they often set the minimum job requirements or specs (skills, education, and experience) unreasonably high so that they will not need to train, coach, or mentor the new hire. Unfortunately, setting unreasonable job requirements will reduce the available talent pool, so few qualified candidates may be available at the salary the company can offer. At the very least this “overreaching so that they will need to coach” will make the recruiter have to look much further, and that alone will delay hiring. These unreasonable job specs may also result in an unfilled position.
• Weak managers may insist that the job remain unchanged — weak managers are often inflexible, unwilling to change, or to make an exception for any individual. This can be a problem because top performers, game-changers, and innovators already know that they are in high demand. And as a result, it is not unusual for this type of candidate to begin the interviewing process with an expectation that the job duties and the assignments will be negotiable. And as a result, they expect the job will be at least partially be tailored to their specific interests and needs. The arrogance of the hiring manager may cause them to refuse to even consider a change in the job. They might also refuse to even consider a change because they fear the possibility of having to explain to their current workers why this individual received something that they did not get.
• Weak managers may be incapable of making high salary offers — currently employed top performers, game-changers, and innovators almost always demand top salaries. Some weak managers are insecure and they certainly don’t want any team member making close to what they get paid. Others are simply not capable of successfully negotiating with compensation, so they never even try to get the highest salary offer. Even if they are capable, they often make no attempt to get the highest offer because once again they fear having to explain to current team members why this new hire is starting at such a high rate of pay. As a result, a level talent will frequently refuse to even consider what they view as a lowball offer.

Final Thoughts

Once you get over the shock of learning how much damage weak managers can do to hiring, you need to take action. The most logical first step is to provide every new hiring manager with hiring training and support information. That training would also be offered to the hiring managers with the weakest track record in recruiting.

As a second step, recruiting management should also consider implementing a service level agreement that spells out the specific expectations for both the recruiting function and the hiring manager. Hiring managers that don’t meet their SLA requirements would be provided no corporate help and they would be required to cough up the money to pay for a third-party recruiter.

A third action step, if you have the courage, is to prioritize your hiring managers based on their track record. Those hiring managers who earned the lowest priority would go to the bottom of the requisition queue and they would get the lowest priority in resources and recruiter assignments. Taken together, the shock of receiving slow service, having the least-experienced recruiters, or having to pay for third-party help may be enough shock to get these weak managers to follow the rules and to repeat the course covering great hiring.

One last thought: Why not take a trip over to HR and demand that it implements a “bad manager identification program.” If a weak manager is destroying your chances for recruiting A-level talent, imagine what damage they are also doing in the areas of productivity, retention, and innovation!

Her company is growing. They are actively looking for people. At the same time, this manager who has been tasked with building up her team is openly telling candidates that if she has her way, not one of them will be hired. Indeed, given the choice, it’s hard to imagine candidates accepting an offer if they did get one, compared, say, to an offer from an enthusiastic and confident employer.

While making the observation that this woman lacked confidence might be something of an understatement, it is only a start.

Confidence begets confidence, just as lack of confidence begets lack of confidence. This manager was demonstrating a lack of confidence in herself, her company, its hiring process, and in the candidates. That, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to attract top people: if the hiring manager doesn’t seem confident, what does that tell the candidate about the company?

While most businesses viewed the Great Depression as a time to hunker down, cut everyone possible from the payroll, and hide under the bed until things got better, one CEO took a different perspective. He saw the Depression as an opportunity to find the best people, build their loyalty and commitment, and stockpile equipment and material against the day the economy turned. Tom Watson’s confidence that things would get better propelled IBM into becoming the global powerhouse it remains to this day.

In another example, a recent news report featured an economist claiming that hyper-inflation and total social collapse is just around the corner. Is that likely? I’m no economist, but I have to wonder how many people today remember Dow 36,000? James Glassman’s book was published at the height of the Internet boom: in October 1999, just a few short months before the market crashed in March 2000. The predictions of a rosy future stretching into forever were loudest, and most believable, at the top; what does that say about the news today?

In the end, though, while this woman’s lack of confidence may have been made obvious by the economy, and helping her reframe the news was an important step, further investigation revealed the economy wasn’t the actual cause. The actual cause was both more immediate and less obvious: she fundamentally didn’t trust the hiring process her company used. If you don’t trust the process, it’s hard to have confidence in it, and the more vulnerable you are to surrounding influences such as the news. In a strong economy, her lack of trust could easily go unnoticed simply because the positive news flow would allay her fears; without the positive backdrop, however, her fear and her lack of confidence in the system were fully exposed. Sadly, this lack of confidence appears to be the case in a great many different companies.

It’s a topic I write about in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. In that article, I specifically get into some ways to address the problem. While it’s certainly true that we don’t control the economy, we can control how we react to it. We control as well how well our recruiting systems are designed and how well trained we are in using different parts of it. Understanding what we control and how to exercise that control well is the key to true confidence.

Recruitment, at times, can seem a lot like a poker game. The client is the dealer, and every candidate is a player. At prescribed stages in the game, all cards are hidden, and bit by bit, each individual reveals his or her hand. Each show of cards is a risk. Sometimes the dealer wins, which is good because that means the game can remain solvent for other players to enjoy. At other times the players win, which is also positive, since a losing game draws no players. As long as the odds are relatively even and everyone abides by the rules, the game can go on. But what happens when a player steps up who doesn’t play by the rules?

A contract recruiter friend of mine — let’s call her Susan — has a reputation for respecting the rules of the game, and she expects her clients and candidates to follow suit. Because of this, a situation about two years ago shook her up, one in which a candidate seemingly decided to make his own rules.

At the time, Susan was recruiting sales candidates for a prominent organization, one with many customers as well as many aggressive competitors. With her flair for nailing her clients’ needs, Susan brought this company a candidate, Kevin, who seemed to be a perfect match for the job and the organization. He worked for the client’s primary competitor, so had an in-depth understanding of the business. He had a solid reputation with both his peers and his customers. In addition, his reasons for wanting to change organizations seemed deeply personal, not at all tinged with bitterness.

As part of the last interview round, the hiring manager spoke with Kevin in depth about the largest customer that he would support if he were hired in order to be certain of two things: first, that Kevin would understand fully the expectations of this specific role, and second, that she, the hiring manager, could be confident of Kevin’s ability to support the customer appropriately. This last interview round led to a job offer.

Kevin, Susan, and Susan’s client did the usual offer negotiation dance which resulted in an acceptance and the selection of a start date. Kevin seemed eager to wrap things up with his current employer and start his new job. However, at the eleventh hour, Kevin rescinded his acceptance citing vague reasons for his change of heart. Susan’s client was disappointed, of course, but Susan quickly found her a new, equally exceptional candidate who joined the client’s team. All seemed to turn out well in the end, with the company, final candidate and Susan all feeling as if they’d won.

Then came the game-changer. Around this same time, a new division within the client’s customer organization, the one Kevin had learned about during his interviews, opened its doors. About two weeks after Kevin reneged on his acceptance of the job, Susan’s client — the hiring manager — had to participate in a sales pitch to win this new segment of her customer’s business. As she and her team walked into the client’s office building to give their sales presentation, they passed the pitch team for her primary competitor, Kevin’s employer. The hiring manager stared at them in disbelief as she realized that Kevin was a member of this competitor’s sales team bidding on her customer’s new division. Needless to say, both the hiring manager and Susan felt that their confidence had been betrayed.

Unfortunately, to this day, Susan doesn’t know how this turn of events occurred. Was it deliberate or coincidence? Did Kevin share the information he learned during his interview with his employer, leading to Kevin’s assignment to the pitch team? Was this just an unfortunate twist of fate, one that Kevin possibly couldn’t reveal to his employer out of fear of showing too many of his own cards and revealing who tried to hire him away?

Susan’s client took a gamble, or rather an educated risk, in sharing confidential customer information with Kevin during the interview process. She showed her cards, as it were, to ensure that her next bet — hiring him onto her team — would likely pay off. Unfortunately, in this case she took a risk that not only didn’t pay off, it put her in a precarious position because the rules as she understood them — that information shared in confidence during an interview should remain in confidence — possibly were not followed.

Have you ever been on either side of a similar situation? What would you do if you were Susan or the hiring manager? What would you do if you were Kevin?

The No. 1 sweetener, as might be expected, is more money. But flexible working arrangements, including telecommuting, and commitments to new technologies, also rank high as talent attractors.

“Money is important,” says Tom Silver, senior VP/North America for Dice. But other incentives can be compelling, he adds, especially to those candidates who live in metro areas, where telecommuting might be worth more than a few extra dollars.

Workplace flexibility “is a big deal,” says Silver.

Dice released the results of a late August survey of 1,357 recruiters, consultants, and staffing firms who look for IT professionals on Dice.com.

Although 69 percent reported they haven’t needed to improve candidate offers, the other 31 percent said they have. And the No. 1 reason — cited by half of them — is that the labor pool is getting smaller as IT hiring picks up. Another 22 percent of recruiters who have sweetened their offers say they had to because “technology professionals are still hesitant to leave their current employer.”

Silver says the tightening labor market for IT is due to a pickup in hiring. Since August of 2009 Dice has seen a 40 percent increase in the number of openings advertised on the site.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics bears out what Dice is reporting. In July of 2009, the job openings rate for information occupations was 1.8. A year later, it was 3.5. For the private sector as a whole in the U.S. the rate in July was 2.7, up from 2.0 a year ago.  (The job openings rate is the ratio of openings divided by total employment plus the number of job openings.)

Hiring, on the other hand, is about the same as it was a year ago. The BLS puts the hiring rate at 2.6 for information workers in July versus the 2.7 rate of July 2009. For all private sector workers, the rate stood at 4.1 versus the 3.9 of July 2009.

Those numbers suggest that IT recruiters are increasingly having a hard time finding the talent they want. Silver says that after money, a powerful attractor for tech professionals is the nature of the work and especially the opportunity to be involved with new and emerging technology.

In tech, he says, “the skills and skill requirements are always changing.” Workers want to keep abreast of those changes and improve their skills, so recruiters who can offer those opportunities — the “latest and greatest,” Silver says — are at an advantage.

Indeed, the Dice survey shows that after money and flexible working arrangements, recruiters offered the opportunity to work with new technology as an incentive. Among all recruiters — those who have had to sweeten offers and those who haven’t — company culture is their favorite selling point, followed by the type of projects.

What this should mean to a recruiter is that money is important, but flexibility and challenging projects can be deal-makers.

So I could leave it at that, and make this officially the shortest article I’ve ever written on ERE in 10 years. But what’s the point then? Under the low probability chance the market for top talent is finally starting to heat up a bit, recruiters might soon be faced again with the challenge of recruiting candidates with multiple offers. And, if not, they can bookmark this article for that exciting day.

So for recruiters who don’t remember what it’s like, and for those recruiters who are too young to remember the golden olden days when top candidate supply was less than demand, a little history is in order. Whenever the economy is expanding more than a few percentage points, labor shortages in certain job categories frequently occur. Under these circumstances, companies aggressively compete for this scarce talent by bidding up prices (i.e., salaries and signing bonuses) and increasing the speed of decision-making. In this hyper-heated market, mistakes are made, recently hired candidates are pursued by ultra-competitive recruiters who are paid for making placements, and hiring managers are pulling out their hair. For third-party recruiters this is what’s referred to as “the good old days.”

There are some things recruiters can do to minimize the bidding wars and increase their chance of landing the star players.

1. Be first. Employ an early-bird sourcing strategy. Whoever gets the best candidates first has the best chance of closing the person a week or two later. Everyone else has to play catch-up, with a significant comp increase used as the primary lure. Of course, as you’ll discover in a moment, while being first has a huge tactical advantage, employing a career maximization recruiting strategy is required if you want to actually hire these people. This will minimize the need for paying ever-increasing compensation premiums.
2. Don’t take no for an answer. Once the market for a certain job category heats up, the best people in this class get bombarded with emails and calls from recruiters. In the hustle for face time, recruiters often stumble over their own feet, hoping to attract the person’s attention with “the best job ever.” To avoid the used car sales recruiting approach, good candidates use a number of ploys to dump said recruiter. These are typically of the form “not interested,” or “not looking,” or “happy where I am,” or something similar. Don’t believe it, especially if your job truly represents a positive move for someone. In this case, you’ll need an attention-getting statement that prevents the candidate from throwing said recruiter into the dung-heap of clichés. One of my favorites is to say something like “Are you aware you’ve just made a major decision with minor information. On the chance the position I’m handling represents a true career move, wouldn’t it make sense to talk 5 or 10 minutes?” Then go into my favorite recruiting technique of all time, the “time is your most critical asset, don’t waste it,” technique.
3. Convert the conversation from compensation to careers. One primary goal of the first call with a passive candidate is to get the person to think about your job as a career move rather than a compensation increase. As soon as you sense that money is the topic du jour, describe the differences between a career maximization vs. a compensation maximization strategy as the key decision-making process the candidate needs to consider. The idea behind this is that compensation will grow faster in the long term if the person maximizes career growth instead of money in the short term.
4. Create an opportunity gap to begin the career move discussion. Make sure you use the “candidate talks first” technique to get the person to provide a quick review of his/her work history. During this phase, look for gaps in the candidate’s background your job fills in or expands. Consider factors like team size, scope of the effort, budget impact on the company, company growth rates, learning opportunities, and the like. When you describe your job opening, mention these points as representative of growth opportunities for the candidate. Then ask if the person would be interested in considering what you have to offer in more depth. Go slow here. Your goal as a recruiter is to sell the next step, not the end game.
5. Formalize the candidate decision-making process. As part of the initial conversations, ask the candidate what criteria he/she will use to determine if the job represents an appropriate career move. While these factors vary depending on the function and job level, they typically cover items like technology challenges, company growth, the scope of the project, learning and career opportunities, the hiring manager and quality of the team, and compensation, among others. I add any that are missing or specific to the company, and ask the candidate to prioritize these in some formal way, usually in an email. The idea behind this is to make sure the candidate obtains all of this information during the interviewing process. If the candidate has multiple offers to consider, I then suggest that all opportunities be evaluated based on the priorities initially provided.
6. Be last. Don’t make an offer until the candidate says yes. As part of maintaining applicant control and using a “stay the buyer” approach to recruiting, it’s important to not enter into a bidding war. Key to this is to test all offers before making them formal. This involves a sequence of tests throughout the interviewing process. Start by asking the candidate how interested she/he is in the open opportunity after the first set of interviews. As the pursuit progresses continue the testing by asking when the person could start if a fair offer was presented. As you get closer to the end, ask the person how your position compares to others the person is considering, using the comparative decision-making process mentioned above. Finally, ask if the person would accept your offer if formally presented under the terms negotiated. Only when the person says “100% yes” should you make the offer. The idea behind this is to negotiate the offer before it’s formalized, getting agreement in incremental steps.

These recruiting strategies and tactics are useful whenever you’re recruiting a top person who has multiple offers. This is more common during periods of economic expansion, but it’s also quite prevalent whenever labor shortages by certain job classes exist. Under these supply/demand constraints, the idea is to present your position as the one offering the best career move, not the one that just offers the biggest comp increase. Of course, you have to prove it, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

“Game Changer Recruiting” Is Needed in All Organizations

You do not have to be a sports nut to realize that for the last two months numerous NBA teams have been pulling out all the stops and spending unlimited amounts of money to recruit basketball star LeBron James to their team. Simultaneously, almost-as-intensive recruiting efforts have targeted other game-changing stars including Dwyane Wade, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Chris Bosh.

Sports teams and corporations alike need all the game-changers (individuals who can change the entire direction of an organization) they can get. While you might think that sports recruiting is not comparable to corporate recruiting, that notion would be erroneous. This sports-superstar recruiting effort is ultimately an illustration of world-class “game-changer recruiting.”

If like most organizations, yours could use a few more “game-changers,” innovators, or exceptional performers, consider the lessons that can be gleaned from the events of the past eight weeks.

Lesson #1 — Calculate the Economic Value of a Game-changer

The first lesson to be learned is to calculate the dollar impact a game-changer can have on revenue. Most recruiting managers focus on the cost of recruiting individuals (i.e. cost per hire), ignoring the potential return or the economic impacts that recruiting a game-changer will have. The LeBron case study illustrates a superior approach, one focused on return on investment.

Historically the largest economic game-changing recruit was Michael Jordan. One study conducted by Fortune estimated that Michael Jordan had a $10 billion dollar impact on the NBA. LeBron will have a similar impact, not just on team revenues, but also on complimentary businesses in the greater metropolitan area. One economist recently estimated that impact could be as large as $3 billion.

Unfortunately, few corporations invest in calculating the dollar impact of recruiting a game-changer on their organization. Those that do, often find that focusing solely on cost to recruit is silly. Google for example has estimated that a top performer generates three hundred times more revenue than an average performer. What would be the dollar impact if Warren Buffett joined your investment firm or Steve Jobs joined your technology firm? On a less-grandiose scale, can you imagine the impact on your organization if the inventor of the iPod or the iPhone were to join the organization?

When doing calculations, remember that the economic impacts of acquiring a game-changer are not limited to their direct contributions, but also include the attraction of investors and other high-caliber recruits that will also impact the performance of the organization. In addition, recruiting a game-changer from a direct competitor may significantly impact their ability to compete. Once your executives understand the startling economic value, they will support the use of a game-changing recruiting approach.

Lesson #2 — Realize That Game-changers Are Different

The second lesson to learn from the LeBron case is that game-changers, innovators, and top performers truly are different and must be recruited in a unique manner. The traditional corporate recruiting and executive search models will not work when recruiting most game-changers because those models do not accommodate superstar personalities, unusual expectations, and an unbelievable array of decision-influencers. To get the attention of a game-changer, you must understand exactly how they are different. While game-changers are not all alike, in general, they exhibit the following characteristics.

• Not looking for a job — they are probably currently employed and they are almost always well treated where they currently work. As a result, they are not actively looking for a new job and if they did hear about an ordinary opportunity, they would not pursue it.
• Power — they fully understand their value and their importance and as a result, they expect to be treated differently than the average applicant. They know that they hold the power in any potential new relationship or recruiting opportunity, so they expect to be courted.
• Difficult to approach — they are incredibly busy and there is a constant demand on their time. As a result, most erupt numerous barriers that would prevent strangers from even approaching them with opportunities. In order to make an initial recruiting contact, you will probably need direct assistance from someone who influences them.
• Trust is required — experience has taught them to be cynical of strangers and promises. As a result, you will need a strong relationship built on trust before they will seriously consider any offer from you.
• A triggering event required — because they are successful and well treated at their current position, they are generally satisfied with their current situation. As a result, it will likely take a major negative career-impacting event at their current firm to shift them into job search mode. In the absence of a negative event, it will take a major “WOW” jaw-dropping positive opportunity before they would even look at a job opening.
• A game-changer recruiting approach is required — the final thing to understand about recruiting any individual who is in high demand is that they almost always have an intense dislike for standard recruiting processes. Instead, they expect and require a “tailored” or personalized recruiting process that requires little of their time, that meets all of their expectations, and that contains not a single turnoff or “dealbreaker” element.

Lesson #3 — Shift to a “Game-changing Recruiting Approach”

The primary differentiator between a game-changing recruiting process and all other recruiting processes is the level of effort that is put into truly understanding the candidate and their needs. Most recruiters would argue that they already understand the needs of their candidates; however, heavy workloads force most recruiters to generalize and make numerous assumptions about what candidates need and expect.

In direct contrast, the game-changer recruiting approach is tailored to the individual who is being targeted. It is a market research/sales-driven approach that puts together a sophisticated candidate profile that covers the candidate’s job search process, how best to contact them, and their job acceptance decision criteria. This in-depth profile takes a significant amount of time and resources but is necessary if you want to have a realistic chance of success. There are 10 activities involved in developing a deep understanding of your target and creating a candidate profile. They include:

1. Identify factors that trigger a job search — a job opportunity by itself will not be enough to trigger a game-changer into job search mode. Instead, a combination of a positive job opportunity and the simultaneous occurrence of a negative factor that makes the target uncomfortable in their current situation is needed. To time your recruiting effort precisely, you need to be aware of what negative triggering events could arise and when they are most likely to occur. You must conduct research and interviews with those who know your recruiting target extremely well in order to compile a list of the specific events likely to trigger a desired change. Such events might include a corporate merger, management turnover, corporate scandal, or a significant cut to their budget.
2. Map their job search process — whenever a game-changer does begin to consider change, you need to understand and map out the process they will use. If you fish using bait, you understand that to catch a trophy fish you need to understand how a trophy fish searches for food. Likewise, recruiters must find out how their target found opportunities in the past, how and where they research opportunities, and what factors get an opportunity on their “short list” of opportunities to consider. Once you fully understand how, when, and where they find opportunities, you need to customize your approach to mirror their activities. Additionally, there must be a process to reevaluate the quality of your recruiting process against world-class standards, because a game-changer will likely judge your entire organization based on the experience they receive. It is quite common for recruits to assume that their candidate experience is a direct reflection on how they will be treated when they become an employee.
3. Determine who must do the recruiting — in many cases, game-changers expect to bypass traditional recruiters and instead be contacted and recruited by professionals of similar stature (or even by senior executives). As a result, you must identify their expectations and shift the initial contact and much of the recruiting to individuals who they respect and trust. Leading off with the wrong person can result in your opportunity being filtered.
4. Identify the best way to communicate and to reach them — if you want prospects to respond to your messages, you need to understand their communication preferences. That means you must research their most-favored way to communicate (i.e. in person, telephone calls, text messages, e-mail, on Facebook, etc.) and what must be in a message for them to respond to it. You must also identify other opportunities to communicate with them, including events they attend, publications they read, and websites and blogs regularly visited. If you do not know precisely where they “lurk,” you dramatically reduce the chances on reaching them. It is also important to note that the sites game-changers frequently are likely to be learning on content sites related to their professional growth, rather than job or career-oriented sites.
5. Identify the factors that will grab their initial attention — due to the volume and level of competition for their attention, if you expect to get on their short list, you need to identify the factors that would cause them to initially consider your opportunity. Once you identify the factors that will get their initial attention, you must make sure that compelling information on those factors is clearly visible on the sites they routinely visit. You may also have to educate their friends and colleagues about your organization, so that they will know about you and as a result, may speak highly of your organization during their interactions with your recruiting target. If you are an unknown organization or if you have a weak employer brand image, this step is even more important in order to prevent them from immediately ignoring your opportunity.
6. Identify the decision criteria they will use to accept an interview — game-changers routinely turn down opportunities to interview for new positions, so understanding what it takes to excite them about a particular interview invitation is a critical factor in the game-changer recruiting process. Identifying interview acceptance criteria requires extensive research and benchmarking and some guesswork. In the end, you must develop a ranked list of the criteria that they will use when deciding whether to accept an invitation and make sure that you convincingly communicate each of them in all of your initial recruiting and interview-related communications.
7. Identify “deal breaker” or knockout factors — in addition to positive criteria that game-changers will use to filter opportunities, there are also negative factors that will influence their decisions. Your research must identify each of these “deal breakers” (i.e. a weak boss, no budget, restricted decision-making, a lack of control, etc.,) and ensure that there is not even a hint of one of them present within the organization.
8. Identify their decision criteria and the information they need to accept a job offer — this is without a doubt the most critical step in the overall process. Consider the recruiting process similar to the sales process for big-ticket item. In both cases, successfully making a sale requires understanding a customer’s buying criteria and a product that meets that criteria as closely as possible. Some identify a candidate’s job acceptance decision criteria by asking them directly at the beginning of the interview process, or by interviewing friends and colleagues. Typical decision criteria include their degree of independence, the extent of their authority, their ability to build their own team, their ability to select projects, and the availability of ample resources. The entire interview process must be geared toward convincing them that this job meets every one of their acceptance criteria. It is also important to periodically ask them during critical points in the interview process if you are successfully meeting their criteria.To ensure that the target candidate remains engaged in the process, give them some input into it, so that they do not view it as inflexible. Ask them what specific information they need and what questions they need answered before they can make an affirmative decision. You should also ask them who they must meet and talk with before they can make a final decision on your offer. The overall interview process should provide them with an excellent candidate experience and you should use it not just as an assessment tool but also as an opportunity to provide a comprehensive sales pitch.
9. Identify who will influence their decision — game-changers are much more apt to consult with and seek the advice of friends and colleagues than the average candidate. As a result, make an attempt to identify and then proactively “sell” those individuals who will influence the candidate’s final decision. Incidentally, the process of identifying and educating “influencers” on the powerful selling points of your firm needs to start at the very beginning of the interview process.
10. Develop a counteroffer strategy — it would be highly unusual for a game-changer not to get a compelling counteroffer from their current organization. Because the normal reaction of a game-changer is to “stay put in a known environment,” you need to proactively research what that counteroffer is likely to be and to prepare a compelling strategy to overcome it. In addition, you should anticipate that the game-changer will get several external offers, so you need to do your research and benchmarking to ensure that your initial offer is clearly superior and most closely aligns with your candidate’s dream job.

Final Thoughts

Some people viewed the recruiting process used to attract LeBron James as a circus. However, on closer examination, it was unique, targeted, and comprehensive. There were numerous WOW factors, including the city of New York crafting a customized video including a message from the mayor, and several cities organizing mass public recruiting parties to show their commitment. Teams used high profile individuals including Jay Z and even the President of the United States to influence the process. Numerous websites were created, blogs were written, and literally millions of tweets were shared on the topic.

To further highlight the importance of this recruiting effort, Lebron’s offer acceptance was televised in an hour-long TV special (a first). During the special, his decision criteria were disclosed, including the probability of winning a championship, a new coach, a choice of teammates, team chemistry, supportive owners, a large fan base, broader media exposure, and lifestyle considerations including the interests of his entourage, and of course hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

While millions were spent to recruit him and millions more will be spent to pay him, the economic return (likely to be in the billions) will far outweigh the costs. Believe it or not, the same dramatic results can be obtained by recruiting a single game-changer in the corporate world, although the fanfare would likely be less dramatic! If you are not landing your share of game-changers, the process that corporate executives must follow has been spelled out, all they need to add is … courage.

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

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

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

Recruiting Skills Required to Turn Hot Prospects Into Great Employees

1. You must be able to walk very slowly, not run. People who are fully employed and very strong always have options, even when you get to them first. Most important, they will not move fast. They want to evaluate the situation and compare it to others that will come along. They will give more value to the long-term career growth opportunities than the short-term issues. Good recruiters know they must move slowly, not selling the job, but selling the idea of a staged series of steps where information is mutually shared, all leading toward the best career move among competing alternatives. Moving too fast is a turn-off. It’s equivalent to making a passive candidate complete an application before you talk to the person.
2. You must be able to instantly convert your job into a career move. Passive candidates and early-birds don’t need another job; they want a better job, generally some type of significant career move. If you don’t know the job at a detailed level, you’ll sound like a used-car salesman selling smoke and mirrors. Knowing the job allows you to ask a few questions early in your conversation to see if there are any gaps or voids in the person’s background that your job fills. If you can fill enough of them, your job becomes a career move. For example, if the budget or team the person has managed in the past isn’t as big as your opening, you have a tremendous chance to excite the hot prospect. Doing this with flair, sophistication, and aplomb is essential, but it all starts by preparing a performance profile with the hiring manager. Without this, assume you won’t be hiring too many great people.
3. You must have exceptional verbal and written skills. Top people need to see the recruiter they’re using to advise them as someone credible. This means you need to speak well, have a complete understanding of the job (the performance profile), your company, and your industry including the competition. This includes preparing well-written emails and professional advertising copy. If you’re not comfortable speaking to people you don’t know who are more senior to you organizationally, you’ll not be able to influence them to consider what you have to offer.
4. You must understand human behavior. Candidates’ job requirements change depending on how long they’ve been looking and how desperate they are. You need to find this out right away. If a candidate is not looking, but open-minded, or has just started looking, you need to recognize that the person wants career-oriented information, not detailed job specific information. I wrote a few articles on Maslow a while back that provide some insight on how to adjust what you say and what you do based on where the person is in their job-hunting process. If you don’t modify your approach with this in mind, it’s comparable to selling a hammer to a plumber, or a laptop to someone who wants a smart phone.
5. You must be a partner with your hiring manager client. Good hiring managers — those who can attract and hire strong people to work for them — are an essential element in hiring more talented people. Good recruiters come next. Eliminating job descriptions is number three on the prerequisite list. Four is recruiters and managers working together, both having a completing understanding of real job needs, trusting each other to accurately assess candidates and jointly working through the recruiting process. If you don’t have all of these elements in place, you won’t be able to hire stronger people unless you have a great brand, an excess supply of top talent, and a willingness to spend more than necessary to convince people to accept your offers.
6. You must break some rules. If you want to hire top performers who you’ve found in the sourcing sweet-spot, expect to break from tradition and aggravate some people. For one thing, ignore the job description. For another, ask for forgiveness, not permission, from the comp department. Top people are not part of the average population. They make more money, have less experience, and won’t play by the rules. So you can’t either, if you want to hire them. If you’re uncomfortable with this, you need to only handle candidates who have responded to your ads. You won’t find many top people this way, but you’ll sleep better at night.
7. You must get the candidate to sell you. Selling isn’t recruiting. Paying salary premiums isn’t either, or playing hard-to-get with a person who’s desperate. Anyone can do this. Presenting a career move in a persuasive manner in order to get a top person who’s fully employed and/or has multiple offers excited enough to tell you why he or she is a perfect fit is recruiting. Being able to pull this off is the key to hiring more top performers. It requires that you know the job, use the interview to look for career gaps, and ask respectful, but challenging questions, that encourage candidates to present in-depth insight into what they’ve accomplished. By staying the buyer this way, you’re able to establish and maintain applicant control.
8. You must determine if you’re interested in the prospect, not the other way around. Most recruiters waste so much time calling up top people — both active and passive — making a bumbling pitch about a job opening, hoping for a statement of interest from the prospect. If not, they move to the next name on the list. If the person says yes, they then qualify the person and hope the person is reasonably good enough to send to the hiring manager for an interview. This is a very low yield and time-consuming process. By presenting your opening as a career move, you’ll be able to get the candidate to describe his/her background before you give too many details. Done properly, you’ll be in a position to determine if you’re interested in the candidate for the opening, rather than the candidate making this decision. This is one of a number of critical steps involved in maintaining applicant control.

You know you’re getting better at maximizing the use of time when top prospects tell you they just started looking or are not looking. If you’re determining interest, you can either then decide to move forward at a slow-but-steady pace, or obtain two to three great referrals if you decide they’re not qualified. Since you’re a partner with your hiring manager clients, 100% of your candidates will get interviewed. Since managers are using performance profiles, not job descriptions, to determine competency and fit, fewer candidates will be excluded for bad reasons or superficial interviews. Since you’re offering career moves, rather than non-descript jobs, fewer candidates will voluntarily opt-out of the process along the way.

On top of this, with a career move as the focus, fewer candidates will be screened out at the beginning and fewer offers will be rejected due to monetary reasons. Collectively, this is how you hire twice as many top performers in half the time. Of course, these are rules you must not break.

1. Instead of going to a career fair to find your next top tier hire, get your manager to realize that great people have to be recruited. “If you needed another QB like Tom Brady, would he stand in line at a career fair, or answer a want ad online, in the paper, or on your website? No, you have to call his agent who gets him interested and to the table to talk. I’m that agent.”
2. When a hiring manager and HR want to make a lowball offer because the recession has made everyone more desperate, but your candidate is employed, here’s what you say to get them to reconsider low-balling. “When a kid is getting ready to go out high in the draft, do you think about what the lowest package is that he will consider? No, you make him the best offer you can afford to make or you pass on the pick. No one who is good is going to be happy or accept a low-ball offer.”
3. When a manager wants to look around at all resumes and candidates on the planet even though the very best candidate just interviewed and wants the job: “It’s kind of like picking a starter instead of second string. When you see someone who is going to be the key to your bench, you don’t hesitate to look around in case someone else might be better; you add them to the team in the first string. Just because he is first doesn’t mean he isn’t the best.”
4. When a manager wants to change the position or add unrealistic job functions to a new role: “It’s not like there aren’t people like Deion Sanders who can play offense and defense and the entire length of the game. It is just extremely rare to find someone who will do both. It would be better to find a great cornerback than an average cornerback who can also return a kick.”
5. Instead of letting a team do too many jobs for too long and asking them to double that for the “good of the company,” consider this: “Even the best players need to feel like they have back up, have time to recover, and like to play one position very well. Do you think that you may risk losing your best players if you play them too long?”

I know a lot of people who will think it is very funny that I would ever remotely write about football because I don’t give a hoot about it. And I also know that managers don’t want to be talked down to or reduced to silly analogies. But there is some truth to the fact that language and cultural barriers account for the majority of miscommunications. Finding the common ground in what interests them may be the entry point toward showing them what you got.

It’s hard to argue against the statement that social networking (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is an extremely hot topic in business. But I have yet to find a single CFO or senior executive willing to fully fund a comprehensive social network recruiting strategy based merely on the fact that it’s a hot concept.

Even when budget is made available, most organizations need to develop measures to help direct spending into the right efforts that will provide them with the highest recruiting impact and ROI. There is no escaping it: making a compelling business case must become a priority for social network recruiting champions.

In this article, I’ll provide an outline of the four basic business case steps covering how to secure funding during these tight economic times.

Business Case Step #1: Identify the Potential Benefits of Social Network Recruiting

Provide targeted executives with a list of potential benefits and then simply have them select the ones that (if proven) would be compelling enough to positively influence their decision. Have them eliminate benefits that, whether true or not, wouldn’t influence their decision.

With that guidance in hand, design a process that focuses on proving only those benefits that were selected as highly compelling.

The following is a list of 20 potential benefits and business impacts that can result from effective social network recruiting. They are grouped based on their general level of impact on cynical executives:

Highly Compelling Benefits

• Hire quality — the program may result in hires who perform better on the job and have higher retention rates.
• Candidate quality — those who frequently use social networks may be the highly desirable early adopter; this source may identify higher-quality candidates who can then be presented to hiring managers (including those who are more technically savvy and more innovative). Note: even the simple act of listing the primary source (that generated the resume) on the top corner of every resume will, over time, educate hiring managers and eventually lead them to demand that recruiting shift their emphasis toward the sources that appear most frequently on top of the resumes that end up on a hiring manager’s short list.
• ROI — the dollar value of the program’s benefits may far exceed its cost, and the resulting ROI may be significantly higher than other recruiting programs.
• Vacancy days — because of the high usage rates and the short response times on some social network communications channels, revenue-generating, and key positions may be filled faster, resulting in fewer costly vacancy days in key positions.
• Higher offer acceptance rates — using social networks to attract and communicate with candidates may result in higher offer acceptance rates among finalists.
• Hidden candidates — it may identify qualified candidates who cannot be found or successfully messaged using other sources.

Often compelling benefits

• Employer brand — using social networks may increase your visibility and may significantly improve your “we get it” leading-edge employer brand image among targeted prospects (even if the image-building it doesn’t result in immediate applications).
• College impact — because of the high social network usage rates among college students, it may directly impact the number and the quality of college hire and entry-level candidates.
• Communications responsiveness — because there is less spam and in most cases you must be invited before you can send a message, using social networks to communicate may result in higher response rates and/or in more immediate responses when you send messages to prospects and candidates.
• Message impact — messages sent over social media channels may be perceived by the receiver as being more authentic or have a higher level of credibility and believability than traditional corporate mechanisms. The relatively low cost of sending messages over social networks may also allow your firm to increase the number of messages that it can afford to send. Together, these two factors may result in more effective messages that directly increase applications.
• Job visibility — using social networking sources may ensure that your job openings will be seen and read by a larger number of qualified candidates.
• Candidate diversity — it may provide your firm with a higher percentage of qualified diverse candidates in managerial and professional jobs.
• Global candidates — it may provide your firm with a high number of qualified candidates who reside outside of your headquarter’s country.
• Cross-fertilization — the methods, tools, and approaches that are developed using social networks for recruiting may be directly transferred to other business functions like marketing, customer service, product development, etc. So these functions may find that their social networking results will be directly and measurably improved as a result of the collaboration.

Occasionally compelling benefits

• Candidate volume — social networking sources may provide your firm with a high volume of qualified candidates.
• Lower dropout rates — you must build relationships with your “friends” in order to maintain them as part of your social network. Fortunately, social networks make it easy to build relationships quickly. Once built, it’s not surprising that this relationship may result in more applications, but it may also lower the candidate dropout rate throughout the hiring process.
• Competitive advantage — using social networks may provide your firm with a significant competitive advantage over other talent competitors. The net result may be that you can win more head-to-head battles with competitors over top talent.
• Benchmarking and learning — the time that your employees spend building relationships that may lead to recruiting successful candidates may also help gather benchmark information and improve employee learning.
• Increase sales — because using social networks directly improves your visibility and your firm’s “we get it” image, it may also influence the sales of your consumer products among those that equate product quality and being a desirable employer.
• Cost per hire — the recruiting-related transactional costs may be lower compared to other sources.

Business Case Step # 2: Identify And Counter Additional Resistance Issues

Merely convincing decision-makers that the program has significant benefits isn’t enough on its own to get funding. Unfortunately, almost all executives have some often-powerful preconceived issues that must be successfully countered. In the case of using social networks, these roadblocks almost always include issues related to:

• Employees “wasting” numerous work hours on social networks.
• Protecting the release of company information and secrets.
• Maintaining a single corporate message when you can’t control what your employees say on the Internet.
• Privacy-related issues.

At the very least, demonstrate to the COO, CFO, CIO, PR, and the corporate counsel that their potential concerns are overblown.

Start by showing that other benchmark firms that are allowing their employees and recruiters to use social networks are realizing benefits far greater than the potential costs. Next, present external research data that shows how employees use social networks for professional purposes. While studies that determine what percentage of social network traffic is professionally versus personally relevant are rare, informal studies among organizations piloting looser controls on social network activity found between 40%-65% of activity posted during work hours was professional in nature; the majority either requesting or sharing information from/with peers.

Additionally, show skeptical managers that you have developed a formal process for identifying, countering, and burying undesirable information on the Internet. Educate them that, in a connected world, they have already lost complete control of what is said about their firm, and that strategies that involve doing nothing are tantamount to giving up entirely.

Show the naysayers examples of what’s already out there. Show them how having numerous active employees on social network sites, talking positively, will directly counter the existing negative information and actually increase the number of positive messages that people can easily access.

Business Case Step # 3: Use Logical Arguments to Gain Agreement on Some of the Remaining Benefits

After narrowing the list of potential benefits to the most impactful ones, make every attempt to get executives to accept the likelihood of some of the benefits based exclusively on logical arguments. Whether you write a report or provide a PowerPoint presentation, minimize the number of benefits you have to prove with hard data.

With social network recruiting, executives might accept your professional judgment on benefits like its effectiveness on college recruiting; the value of cross-fertilization; the availability of global candidates; and the employer branding impacts.

Business Case Step # 4 – Prove the Remaining Benefits with Data

Out of the 20 possible benefits that you started with, you are likely to have to prove the actual impact of at least five of them with data. I will outline each of the five data collection methods in the remaining bullet points. Please note that the methods are listed from the least convincing to the most convincing data collection method.

Using existing data

• Provide benchmark data — in some cases, executives will agree that a program will likely provide the level of expected benefits based on external research data. The data might come from consulting firms or industry associations. However, the most convincing research data generally comes from either direct competitors or from firms that your executives admire. The goal is to convince executives that if, for example, using social networks at IBM reduced time to fill by 38%, a similar result could be expected at your firm.
• Look for existing internal efforts — on occasion, especially in large firms, you will find that some group, facility, or region has already tried your new approach without corporate approval or knowledge. In the case of social networks, you would attempt to identify and then use the results produced by any “rogue” group as an indication of the benefits or results that a company-wide effort might obtain. Because the data is internal, it is more likely to be accepted than external benchmarking data.

Limited data collection required

• Use your own employees as a baseline — assume you are trying to prove that social networks provide the capability of identifying “hidden candidates” who could be found in other sources. Start with a list of your own top performers in a particular job and then search traditional sources like job boards, attendees at professional conferences, and Google searchers to see what percentage can be located. You then do a search of their names on social network sites. By comparing the two results, you can find out whether your best employees who are “hidden” or not available on traditional sources can in fact be found on social network sites. You can use a similar approach to identify whether social networks contain more diverse candidates. You can use a third-party to see if messages to your own employees have a better response rate if they are sent via social network channels (compared to traditional voice or email).

Providing new data

• Run a small pilot sample — in order to gather performance data to prove that a program produces certain benefits or results, it’s sometimes necessary to run a small pilot project. Pilot projects are widely used in other business areas and they have a high rate of credibility. In the case of social networks, you could suddenly allow a single recruiter to begin using social network tools and you would then attempt to identify any improvement in their performance (comparing their baseline performance to their performance after using social networking tools). You can also run a pilot on a single job to see if the baseline performance on key metrics improves. If you have the resources, you can run a pilot in a complete business unit or facility and then compare the before and after results. Unfortunately running pilot projects may require some level of approval and it will cost some money (but much less than a full-scale rollout).
• Use a split sample — the most convincing form of proof that doesn’t require a companywide implementation is to use a split sample. It’s the same approach that is used by drug companies to convince regulators that their product is effective. For example, say you wanted to prove that social network recruiting produced higher-performing hires than traditional recruiting methods. You could start by identifying a team of recruiters who recruited exclusively for a single job family. You would randomly separate this small team of recruiters into two groups. Nothing would change for the control group, while the second group from the team would be trained how to use social network recruiting tools. They would be required to use social network recruiting as a major segment of their recruiting for all of their jobs over a six-month period. The initial on-the-job performance of their new hires after three and six months would be compared to the performance of the new hires from the recruiters in the control group. If the performance of the social network recruiter group was significantly better, you could say with a high level of credibility that using social networks improves the quality of hire. Continuing to measure the performance differential over time would provide additional data to support the program’s ability to improve the quality of hire.

Final Thoughts

Managers of recruiting functions seem to struggle continuously to obtain more budget and resources.

Most, unfortunately, rely too heavily on building relationships in order to maintain or increase their funding levels. If you’re tired of the up-and-down funding cycle, maybe it’s time to master the science of building an effective business case. It’s sad that recruiting is still struggling to prove what we already intuitively know (i.e., that recruiting top talent into key jobs has a huge dollar impact).

We have one of the largest impacts and ROIs of any function in the corporation, but we fail miserably at presenting it in such a way that a CFO would find it believable.

They craft powerful employment value propositions that lay out the selling points of the company, group, and position — as well as the present and future opportunities for growth.

They communicate clearly, asking direct and purposeful questions, listening critically to responses (spoken and implied), and remaining nimble enough to respond to unexpected issues as they arise.

They set clear expectations for candidates and hiring managers on process steps, compensation issues, and potential roadblocks such as counteroffers.

They are persistent, consistently reconfirming the primary issues throughout the process with candidate and hiring manager, and continue sourcing efforts even when a good candidate is in play.

They have a keen sense of timing, knowing when to move quickly and — just as important — when to slow the pace to accommodate a candidate’s decision-making.

Unfortunately, too many recruiters view closing as a standalone process that kicks into gear only after the interview team identifies its front-runner. In fact, the opposite is true: successful closing begins before a candidate has even been identified, and it touches every step of the process.

Let’s examine (and I’ll go into more depth at my breakout session this September) some of the ways you can bring a closer’s mindset to each step of recruiting:

Role Definition

Develop a compelling employment value proposition that focuses on your company’s advantages, emphasizing selling points your competitors for talent cannot match.

• Make the case for your company’s stability by pointing out steps the firm is taking to thrive in today’s economy.

• Don’t lose sight of intangible advantages which are important to many people, including on-site exercise facilities, proximity to public transit, or continued education programs.

Resume Review

Carefully examine the candidate’s history for potential obstacles — and address them during the interview process.

• Geography matters. Someone who has spent a lifetime in Little Rock may have a tough time adapting to living in New York City. Be prepared to probe how realistic the candidate is being about their ability to adjust to the move.

• Organizational culture matters. You may be familiar enough with a candidate’s current organization to know that a move to your company will demand significant adjustments. Don’t shy away from discussing these issues.

• Resigning is tough. A candidate who has been with one employer for a long time may have difficulty overcoming company loyalty and ending valued working relationships. What’s more, specialized expertise that makes a candidate attractive to you may foreshadow a relentless counteroffer from the current employer, who also values that expertise.

• Little things matter, too. Even “trivial” changes such as giving up an impressive title or shorter commute can become barriers for a candidate weighing a major career and life change.

Phone Interview

Your phone interview should be comprehensive enough that the rest of the process simply adds footnotes to the candidate’s file. If you later find yourself surprised by the candidate’s motivations, strengths, weaknesses, concerns, compensation expectations, etc., you probably need a more thorough phone interview.

You can guide the process by asking the right questions. For example:

• Don’t end the call until you have a clear understanding of why the candidate is interested in making a change, and what it will take to secure the move. And be sure to revisit this issue with the candidate throughout the process.
• If the candidate hasn’t made a compelling case for change, don’t shy away from posing direct questions such as “Your company is the leader in our industry: why would you consider joining us?” or “Why would you leave a firm that has provided you such good career and compensation progression?”
• On the pivotal topic of compensation, shift the burden to the candidate. Ask: “Do you feel your employer compensates you fairly?” (and follow up with “Why/Why not?”). Play to your company’s strengths with questions such as “Do you feel your company effectively rewards good performance?” or “Does your current firm encourage career advancement in a structured way?”
• Explore whether the candidate has sought other people’s perspectives. Ask questions such as “What does your family think about relocating to Austin?” or “Have you sought any advice about the prospect of changing jobs?”

Finally, ask if the candidate has been inquiring about “inside” opportunities with the current employer that meet their career objectives. (If not, you have a counteroffer waiting to happen.)

Interviewing

Once the candidate is ready to meet your interview team, take time to prepare the interviewers:

• Assign each member of the team one or more of the selling points from your employment value proposition. This will give the candidate a rounded view of your company.
• Tell the interviewers what you’ve discovered about the candidate’s motivation, and encourage them to discuss it further with the candidate.
• Prompt the interviewers to address potential deal-killers. An in-person reaction to a question such as “What might your current company do to keep you?” is invaluable.

Perspectives and impressions can evolve. Check in often with the candidate throughout the interview process, to make certain the role matches the candidate’s professional, financial, and personal goals.

Offer Development

As you prepare a formal offer, avoid unwanted surprises by thoroughly outlining their current compensation in greater detail than you may have done earlier in the process. Take note of anything the candidate might consider remuneration: pay, benefits, parking, stock, perks, and the like.

Conversely, identify anything the candidate might consider a financial sacrifice or takeaway: additional commuting costs, taxes or distances, waiting periods for benefits, potential “paybacks” for leaving an employer, etc. Even if you don’t make up for everything, the candidate needs to know that your offer is based on a thorough analysis of all available information.

Finally, before you test-close the candidate, check with the hiring manager to get a clear understanding of how far they are willing to stretch the scope of the role, compensation, and any other issues that might matter to this particular individual.

Test-closing

Test-closing offers a final opportunity to eliminate unwanted surprises, while creating a “cushion” between the candidate’s expectations and your offer. Advise the candidate that your firm extends offers only when there are no open issues, and the candidate is fully prepared to make a decision.

Focus the candidate on the non-financial components of your offer. Remind the candidate they already know most of the offer — the company, the job, the opportunity, and co-workers. Take the candidate back to the motivations you discussed during the phone interview, and reaffirm that this role represents the best opportunity for career growth.

Next, talk through the remaining variables — everything except salary. Share details on benefits, time off, relocation, continued education programs — and even target bonus. Find out if the candidate has unanswered questions, additional people to meet, or follow-up with or other concerns.

After you’ve covered everything else, let the candidate know your objective is to make one financial offer — and to do it right. Refer to your earlier conversations about compensation and pose direct questions such as “If the offer is $X or above, are you accepting?” During this critical step, your goals should be to:

• Eliminate ambiguity: If the candidate tells you “I was hoping for a little more than $X,” respond with “Does that mean you would reject an offer at $X?” or “If we were able to come in at $Y, are you accepting?”
• Gain the candidate’s permission to accept an offer at a specific dollar amount. That amount should be what the candidate wants, but below what you believe your offer will be. This “cushion” is crucial to maintaining excitement at the point of offer.

Finally, help the candidate anticipate a possible counteroffer. Ask questions such as “What happens when (not “if”) your boss says she will expand your job duties and beat our offer?” Close with the direct but open-ended question “Is there anything that can stop you from joining us?”

Offer Extension

On the heels of your test-close, the offer extension is simply a matter of calling the candidate to congratulate them on landing their new job. The only surprise to either party should be that the compensation is a little higher than the candidate expected.

Of course, there will be times when you won’t have an immediate acceptance. In that case, ask questions such as “What is holding you back from making your decision?” and “Are you planning on speaking with your boss or other companies about our offer?” or “Should we still expect your answer by Friday?”

Too often, at this stage, candidates tell us to “try again” — and we do! Never revise an offer that has been extended without a firm commitment that the candidate will accept without condition. If a candidate asks you to adjust an offer in any way (compensation, start date, title, etc.), your response should be “I’m not saying I can do anything, but if we make this change, do I have your assurance that you are accepting?”

Resignation

We all know there is a big difference between an acceptance and a hire. Even after a candidate accepts, there is still work to be done before you can call it a “close.” In a sense, the resignation is the most crucial step. This is because if it does not go well, you not only have an unfilled role, but have wasted a lot of your company’s time and effort. There are some things you can do to get past this final step which build on your past conversations about the resignation.

• Help the candidate control the resignation. The candidate needs to understand and embrace the idea of notifying the boss of a decision, as opposed to starting a dialogue.
• Role-play with the candidate. Discuss how the boss might respond. Pose questions such as “What happens when (not “if”) your boss asks what she can do to keep you?” and “What will you do when she asks you not to tell anyone until she has a chance to speak with management?” or “What happens when she offers to allow you to work from home two days a week?”
• Create a sense of accountability. Have the candidate call you immediately after resigning, to let you know how it went.
• Maintain contact. In addition to your own outreach, schedule “spontaneous” calls for interview-team members to contact the candidate during the important time between resignation and start date.

A Few “Closing” Words

Strengthening your closing skills allows you to directly contribute to the performance of your company by landing their most desired candidates. The best way to improve your technical recruiting abilities in this area is to experiment with new methods. Start by working some of these techniques into your standard approach to each step of the process. The effectiveness and value will show up in your acceptance rate, days-to-fill rate, and best of all, the appreciation from the business you support by contributing to their next outstanding hire.

In reality, most current approaches are relics from years of tradition, loosely defined, poorly integrated, and barely managed.

During this installment, I will build upon the goals and key elements of more effective second-generation programs discussed in Part 1 by focusing on the benefits of adopting second-generation approaches and methods to increase program participation rates.

Despite the current economic lull, consumers and top talent around the world expect organizations to continue innovating. No matter how well-staffed you may be, talent shortages or gaps will arise due to unexpected turnover, retirement (yes, a few people are still retiring), introduction of new technologies, and global expansion.

Now is the ideal time to restructure and re-engineer your internal movement processes to help mitigate the risk of key talent shortages. Fortunately, making such processes more effective is a relatively easy task.

The Definition of Intraplacement

As mentioned in Part 1, “first-generation” internal movement programs traditionally relied upon voluntary application by employees to jobs posted internally, except for a relatively small percentage of executives participating in rotation-based executive development programs.

Under such programs, internal movement really meant the permanent movement of individual employees into vacant jobs. This very narrow approach leaves out numerous developmental opportunities that are more in line with how work actually gets done today (i.e., projects).

If you’re attempting to re-engineer your process, start with a name change (i.e., Intraplacement) and a broader program scope.

Consider defining your new program as “an integrated set of corporate processes that are designed to proactively increase and broaden the options for re-assignment of critically skilled individuals based on rapidly changing business need projected talent ROI.”

The primary goal is to measurably improve employee productivity and innovation by increasing “right assignment” placements (i.e., right person, with the right skills, in the right assignment or job, at the right time).

The nature of the assignments may be part-time, temporary, seasonal, or permanent. Assignments may focus on individuals (i.e., individual movement) or groups/teams (i.e., redeployment).

Additional goals may include improving retention, accelerating leadership-development, driving best-practice sharing, improving recruiting, and intra-function cooperation. Intraplacement borrows and adapts its strategies, processes, and tools directly from external recruiting.

The Benefits of Adopting Second-Generation Internal Movement Systems

There are many reasons why firms should invest in Intraplacement. Improving internal movement can positively impact a broad range of business and HR issues, including sudden business problems, seasonal surges in workload, workforce productivity, employee retention, development, and individual motivation.

I) Business benefits and impacts

• Business results. Effective systems improve business results especially in the areas of sales, product improvement, and customer service.
• Increased productivity. Because highly skilled innovators and top performers are placed in “the right job,” the effectiveness of these individuals is multiplied.
• Better business-cycle fit. In larger organizations, some parts of the business are in different lifecycle stages (i.e., seed, start-up, established, expansion, decline, and exit). Proactive and targeted movement better ensures that an individual is placed in a business cycle where their skills and interests are a better fit.
• Increased innovation and idea generation. Moving individuals into new situations provides them with an opportunity to “view things as an outsider” and to propose new approaches that insiders might not see.
• Best practice sharing. As more individuals rotate between business units, the likelihood that best practices will be shared rapidly increases. Increased internal movement can result in the cross fertilization of ideas between previously isolated business units.
• Increased agility and flexibility. Having the capability of moving talent from areas of low return to areas of high return increases organizational agility, as well as the ability of management to shift resources as needs change.
• Better understanding and cooperation. By rotating individuals between disparate business units, individuals from both units can learn to better understand and appreciate the perspective of others. For example, purchasing professionals can better understand the problems faced by the individuals who have to operate under purchasing guidelines if they occasionally rotated into those business units.
• Improved contacts and relationships. Increasing internal movement allows individuals to build their contacts and to strengthen their relationship with individuals outside of the direct team.

II) People-management related and HR-related impacts

• More talent is available. Because individuals are proactively selected and moved faster, there are more and better qualified individuals available to managers with sudden or new strategic needs, than when individuals self-select themselves for movement.
• Higher retention rates. Rapid movement minimizes frustration and burnout. People working in their “ideal job” are unlikely to find a superior opportunity outside the firm.
• Leadership development. Multiple on-the-job learning opportunities are likely to develop leaders faster and more effectively because the development assignments will include opportunities to lead more teams under a variety of circumstances.
• Increase motivation and excitement. Not only is the individual more excited because they have a chance to grow, but each permanent internal movement also provides an opportunity to “back fill” that position, further motivating others to strive for promotions and transfers.
• Increased learning. As individuals move more frequently not only will they gain more knowledge but they will also develop mechanisms for learning faster when they enter future situations.
• Increased technical skill development. Moving between diverse projects provides an increased opportunity to develop current technical skills and to learn new skills.
• Increased exposure for top talent. Increased movement across broader areas allows more managers a chance to work with top talent. This provides individuals with more opportunities to be coached by multiple managers while giving individual managers a chance to observe and assess talent they might someday want to add to their organization.
• Reduced time to fill. Transferring people internally allows you to just fill jobs faster; assessment can be done more quickly because you already have a great deal of information about a current employee’s skills, performance, and weaknesses. Because few internal candidates reject internal offers and it takes them less time to accept, the overall hiring process takes less time.
• Decreased time to productivity. Your current employees already know the culture, the company jargon, and they already have a range of contacts. As a result, internal transfers and promotions can begin the job sooner because they don’t need a great deal of orientation, and they don’t need to give notice before they begin learning.
• Lower cost of hire and salary. Internal searches don’t require expensive external advertising and other recruitment costs. External reference checks are not needed and interviews can often be shorter. Internal candidates generally have no other external offers, so there is less likelihood of a bidding war and they are less aware of market salaries.
• Lower “job failure” rate. Because you’re hiring individuals who already know the culture, the job failure and termination rate is generally lower with internal transfers. External hiring costs are significantly higher than the cost of internal transfers.
• Improved employer brand image. Having a high-promotion-from-within rate generally improves your external brand image as a good place to work because you focus on the needs of your current employees. The increased security that it offers to current employees can also help your image.
• Allows for more entry-level hiring. By filling most jobs internally through transfers or promotions, you allow the firm to do almost all of its external hiring at the entry level. This is a good thing because entry-level jobs are cheaper to fill, have a larger candidate pool, and give the firm more time to train and assess “unknown” external hires while they are in jobs where they can do less damage.
• Decreased need for layoffs. Having a large percentage of your workers with a broad set of skills as a result of frequent movement means they are more capable of moving into new jobs or business units. This added capability and flexibility means that more workers can be transferred rather than laid-off from business units that need to be reduced or shut down.
• Individual employee benefits. Workers get more opportunities for development and learning as well as a faster overall career movement because they are proactively placed in the “right” job.

Before you implement any new process, identify the benefits that a firm can receive when the process is operating perfectly. The manager in charge of the process should set a specific program goal for each benefit. They should also identify a key metric for measuring and for assessing whether that benefit or goal was actually met.

Ways to Increase Program Participation

Despite this impressive list of benefits for both the company and the employee, you might still encounter some difficulty in getting managers and employees to fully participate in an Intraplacement program.

Some of the successful approaches for increasing participation that you should consider include:

• Business case. Work with the CFO’s office to demonstrate the ROI and business case to individual managers you want to participate. Make sure they clearly see the impact of participation to their own business results and career advancement. If possible, show how quickly an under-performing manager can improve under the program.
• Program champions. Get a senior executive, CFO, or key business unit manager to “champion” the program as a spokesperson. Let them use their visibility, political power, and influence to spread the benefits of the program. Encourage top-performing managers and employees to speak about the program.
• Recognition. Hold a recognition lunch or dinner sponsored by the CEO for all of the managers and employees who participated in the program. Plaques and certificates can also be handed out.
• Rewards. Making program participation and developing talent part of the bonus formula and promotion criteria will get the attention of your managers. Give lower priority or limit participation by managers who abuse the program.
• Communications. Sending periodic reminders to managers in the communications format they prefer can be effective, if you don’t overdo it.
• Reports. Including “ranked” program participation rate metrics in your standard financial reports not only makes your program more visible but it also serves to “expose” those managers with minimal participation. At the same time, it encourages low performers to ask those at the top of the list how to do better. Also show the correlation between program participation and meeting business results.
• Assignment design help. Provide direct help to managers in developing highly desirable project assignments and their descriptions. Provides samples of excellent (and weak) assignment descriptions, and offer coaching for those managers struggling with the process.
• Leadership development. Work with the leadership development program to make your process an integral part of the development program for new leaders so that they learn how to use it. Make the number of successful rotations that an individual employee has completed a key selection criterion for identifying high-potential employees.
• Top-quality replacements. One of the key reasons why managers are reluctant to participate is because they fear losing productivity when one of their key people rotates out. As a result, if you want to encourage managers to “release” their employees, even for a short period of time, you will need an effective “backfill” process that helps the manager to quickly replace their “lost” skill set. This might include a process for identifying those employees a manager is likely to lose and a process for training replacements.
• How-to materials. In addition to developing program materials that explains the process, these materials should be “pre-tested” with a sample of hiring managers in order to make them clearer and easier to understand. These materials should be available in a variety of formats.

Next Week in Part III: Common Problems Associated With Internal Movement Programs

Author’s note: I am putting together a guidebook tentatively called The Job Rotation, Internal Movement and Stretch Assignment Handbook. If you have job responsibilities in these areas and are interested in volunteering to be an initial reviewer, please contact me at JohnS@sfsu.edu.

Unfortunately, the questions are rarely asked, resulting in inefficient, ineffective practices.

Do not pose these questions periodically; incorporate them into your approach to build an engaging candidate experience, a more compelling offer presentation, and ultimately, a more productive hire.

Questions for Candidates (Aimed at Improving Offer Acceptance)

• What criteria will you use to evaluate and rank offers you receive? When you’re targeting currently employed individuals or talent likely to receive multiple offers (I would argue that is the only talent you should be targeting), it’s important to focus your recruiting process not only on assessing the candidates skills, but also on determining the factors that will weigh heavily in their decision-making when the process is complete. By identifying the decision criteria early on, you can improve how you position the opportunity you are recruiting for by maximizing the talking points around factors you can realistically deliver and readjust expectations around those you cannot. Too many organizations push through the process only to make a generic offer according to a template that doesn’t address the candidate’s expectations.
• What three things would make this job superior to your current one? If you are truly targeting top talent, chances are a good percentage of the candidates who make it to the offer stage in your process are going to get a counteroffer from their current employer. Failing to identify what factors would make the new opportunity better than their existing opportunity is setting the stage to focus solely on money should an offer battle ensue.
• Who will you consult prior to making a final decision about an offer? Research shows that individuals generally don’t make important life decisions without consulting close friends, colleagues, or relatives. Not knowing who will have your candidate’s ear makes it nearly impossible to predict what issues the candidate’s advisors may bring up. This makes it even more difficult to provide relevant information throughout the process that arms the candidate with positive information to remedy any possible negative issues that could arise.

Questions to Ask During Onboarding and Orientation (Aimed at Improving the Recruiting Process)

• Can you list the most compelling factors that led you to accept our offer? Once the deal has been signed, candidates, now new hires, have less motivation to couch their responses to questions in an effort to improve their chances of getting what they want, in essence, they are more honest. One of the best questions you can ask during this phase of the relationship deals with identifying what about the company, the job, or the benefits was so compelling that the candidate accepted the offer. Identifying what is and is not compelling (the next question) can help you refocus how to communicate about opportunities moving forward. You can talk up the good stuff, while minimizing focus on the not so good stuff.
• Can you list your concerns and any reasons that almost led you to say no? Again, this reversal of the previous question helps you identify what elements need to be either addressed or dropped altogether from your sales approach.
• What part of the process worked the best? What part was frustrating? If you want to improve the candidate experience, identify the aspects of the recruiting process that both engaged and frustrated candidates. Use this information along with statistics about candidates dropping out of the process voluntarily to determine what steps in your process need to be refined in order to convert more talent.
• What caused you to apply for the position? If you want to identify how best to allocate your sourcing spend, you need robust metrics to tell you what messages are driving people to apply and where they came into contact with the message (i.e., the source of hire and branding points that led to interest). Many organizations attempt to collect this information via their recruiters, but the data is often corrupted by lack of adherence to source coding policies.
• What other firms did you seriously consider or receive an offer from? This question is important for two reasons. First, it helps you identify your talent competitors, which often includes organizations that do not compete directly with you on the product or service front. Second, it helps you identify offer elements from other organizations that talent of interest to you find compelling.
• Who else should we recruit from your previous employer? Truly great talent loves working alongside other great talent and generally leverages some influence over colleagues they respect and value at their previous employer. Asking this question not only helps you target future recruiting efforts, it subliminally prods the new hire to actively position the organization as a great next step when they talk to former colleagues. If they’re enthusiastic, you might also ask for their help in recruiting the top individuals via the referral program.

Questions to Ask During Onboarding (Aimed at improving the Management of New Hires)

• Why did you quit your last few jobs? If you want to reduce future turnover, learn what was frustrating enough to cause your new hire to start looking for a new job and eventually quit their previous job. Once you identify these reasons, it’s wise to make sure their current manager knows what they are and develops a plan to prevent similar issues.
• Help me understand what motivates you and what your manager could do to help you be as productive as you can be? Asking new hires early on what motivates and frustrates them can provide you with an arsenal of information a manager can use to manage workforce productivity 1:1. While it would be great if managers would accept ownership for doing this naturally, numerous studies show they don’t!
• Where would you like to be career-wise in three years? This question helps you understand early on what expectations and future job aspirations may influence on-the-job behavior and likely tenure. By identifying what timeline a candidate/new hire has in mind, you can work to make sure you deliver career advancement opportunities in line with their expectations (i.e., before they start looking for someone else to deliver them). Also, ask what they would like to learn, which can be used to structure development and retention efforts.

Questions to Ask Candidates Who Dropped Out of the Process Pre- or Post-Offer

Delaying asking these questions for a period of three months significantly increases the likelihood of hearing an honest answer. If necessary, use a third-party vendor to capture this information as former candidates will have even less motivation to lie.

• Why did you drop out of the process? For those who dropped out of your hiring process early, ask them to list the reasons why they dropped out. Frequently, you will find that your recruiting processes are too slow or too frustrating to engage top talent.
• Why did you reject our offer? Most candidates will provide an answer to this question when they turn down the offer. More often than not, that answer has to do with money. Saying it is the money is an easy out — it doesn’t require as much courage as saying the hiring manager was a jerk, the job sucks, or the company doesn’t provide the right resources to enable employees to do the job they were hired to do. Several studies that have compared offers ultimately accepted by talent who turned down other offers reveal that rarely is the money difference significant. Other studies reveal that if you delay asking the question for several months, you are more likely to get an answer that doesn’t focus on the money.

Final Thoughts

The single-most important activity recruiters can do to improve recruiting effectiveness is to gather information that helps explain why the process is working when it is, and why it is not when it isn’t. By embedding these questions in your recruiting process, you can gain the information needed to radically improve the effectiveness of your efforts.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

If you’re not in this double RIF-proof group, you’ll find out what you have to do to get there. For those of you doing any pre-RIF assessments, it will help you figure out who goes, who stays, and who’s worth saving. What a crazy idea! (Note: your comments are being collected on my Recruiter’s Wall blog.)

Using Adler’s Crazy Metrics as the New Recruiter Scorecard

The world of recruiting continues to evolve faster than most of us can adapt. To see where you rank in the new age of recruiting, evaluate yourself on each of these factors on a zero- to 10-point scale.

This has been designed for full-cycle recruiters and it’s based on a curve, so you need to score around 65-75 points to be in the upper quartile.

1. Voice Mail Return Percent. If you’re calling passive candidates (those not looking) you should be in the 70%-80% range here. This is worth a full 10 points. Average in the current economy is about a 20% return rate and is worth about 3 points. You only score points here if you’re calling people who are fully employed or where your personal influence is the key to getting them interested. (Note: see point 3 for how to increase your voice mail return rate.)
2. Number of Days Looking. Getting people as soon as they enter the job-hunting market is a huge competitive advantage. So start asking your active candidates how long they’ve been looking. If you’re the first recruiter or company they’ve spoken to, give yourself all 10 points, but only if you had anything to do with pulling this feat off. You get a big donut if the candidate says they’ve already accepted another offer, they’ve got other offers pending, or if they’ve been in the market for more than two weeks. Give yourself 5 points if most of your candidates found your ad in the first 5-10 days of their search. If you had nothing to do with making sure the ad was found, that it was compelling, or in causing your candidate to respond, you don’t get any of these points. Instead, give them to the person who pulled this off.
3. Referrals Per Call. To score all 10 points on this factor, you need to average 2-3 worthy referrals per call. Someone is worthy if they are highly qualified and a strong candidate for your open job, or personally knows someone who is. An average score (3 points) on this factor is about one decent referral per call. I have a personal rule that has enabled me to increase my personal productivity by 300%! It goes like this: first, don’t call anyone who will not call you back! Second, don’t call anyone who’s not a top performer. Third, only call worthy prospects. The only way to pull this is off is to get 2-3 worthy referrals on every single call you make. (Here’s a networking tips article for help on improving your score here.)
4. The Maslow vs. Money Index. Here’s an article summarizing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s must-read material for recruiters. The key point here is that good candidates don’t take new jobs primarily for the money. They take them for some combination of growth, opportunity, a chance to learn new skills, to do something important, or to increase their personal satisfaction. Unfortunately, most candidates ask “what’s the money?” early in the courting phase, putting most recruiters on the defensive. Good recruiters quickly shift the conversation to Maslow-related ideas, suggesting that the primary reason a person should select one job over another is because of the opportunity for growth and personal satisfaction it represents, not the money received. (Caution: this will only work as long as your comp is reasonably competitive.) Score all 10 points if you handle this money question smoothly all of the time, and zero points if you stumble all of the time. Give yourself 2-3 points if you can convince a fair percent of your candidates to reconsider, independent of the pay.
5. Not Interested Conversion Rate. This is the percent of candidates who initially say they are not interested in your job opening but who reconsider. You score all 10 points if you phrase your questions in such a way that everyone says they’d like to talk with you about your open opportunities. Score zero points if you walk away from most of these candidates without some type of clever rebuttal. The key to good recruiting and scoring high on this factor is applicant control. You know you have it when you — the recruiter — determine if you’re interested in the candidate, not the other way around.
6. Partner vs. Vendor Ratio. If you’re a partner with your hiring manager clients you have a better understanding of real job needs, you’re more influential, they’ll see candidates who are a bit off the mark based on your recommendation, they’ll trust your judgment, and you’ll make more placements without wasting time. A vendor-like relationship with a client puts the recruiter into a subordinate and less-influential role. The recruiter typically has less knowledge of real job requirements, the hiring manager refuses to see candidates who don’t meet the exact requirements, and the manager won’t reconsider candidates he or she has incorrectly assessed. Divide the percent of your clients who are partners by those who are vendors (Note: 50/50 is equal to one and is worth 4 points.) A good ratio here is two, meaning two-thirds of your clients treat you as a true partner, so give yourself 7-8 points for this.
7. Unsolicited Referral Rate. If you regularly get great referrals without asking for them you score high on this factor. Great recruiters are known in their niche market and top people want to connect with them. Give yourself all 10 points if at least 50% of your placements are made from these unsolicited referrals. If you get 4-5 strong unsolicited referrals each month, whether you place them or not, give yourself 5 points on this factor. You get a big zero if you don’t get any good referrals, unsolicited or not.
8. Technology Utilization Factor. Whether it’s being an ATS geek, a Web 2.0 aficionado, a search optimization fanatic, or a CRM guru, recruiting in today’s era requires significant technology expertise. If you still advocate a tech-free environment, you earn a big zero on this factor. Googling for resumes is not a big deal anymore, so you get nothing for being good at this. If you’re training others in using the latest recruiter-tech stuff take all 10 points. If no one laughs at your lack of tech-expertise, score 5 points here.
9. Advertising Efficiency. To get all 10 points on this factor, you have to make sure your ads are found and at least 50% of the people who find them click through. This means you need to use reverse engineering to select the best boards and make sure your ads are so compelling top people are intrigued enough to respond. If you just post your traditional job descriptions on boards that have not been vetted, your score is equal to the number of great people who apply — zero!
10. Gauge of Persistence. Recruiting top people is never smooth. People always have concerns. Candidates always have other offers. Managers always want to see more candidates. Pushing through these issues is at the heart of great recruiters. If you can convince most of your candidates to reconsider, get your managers to see and hire people who don’t meet the exact requirements, and are constantly pushing the process forward, regardless of the challenges, you deserve most of these 10 points. Take them all if your candidates and clients thank you for persevering. You don’t deserve any points here, if you complain about all of the challenges involved, procrastinate, or make excuses about your lack of results.

Free BONUS ADD-ON: Buyer vs. Seller Quotient

Divide the percent of the time your strong passive candidates are selling you (meaning you’re the buyer) by the amount of time you’re selling them (i.e., 50/50 is equal to one and worth 5 points). If you sell more than you buy, you get 1-2 points, and if you buy a lot more than you sell, you get 7-8 points. Good recruiting is about getting a strong candidate to sell you on why he or she is qualified for the job. They’ll only do this if they believe your job represents a strong career move for them. This is also referred to as applicant control and is a core competency of every top recruiter.

New-age recruiting is about influencing people who have multiple opportunities to consider what you have to offer. While there is more technology now available to find people, this is now the easy part. Getting on the phone, recruiting them, and networking is now the real skill involved with being a great new-age recruiter. That’s a crazy idea, isn’t it?

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!

Listen here

Unfortunately, many recruiters and recruiting leaders choose an opposite path, becoming more conservative in their approach. When markets head south and fear about economic issues grip the populace, consider a counter-cyclical recruiting strategy that sends a clear message to everyone inside and outside your organization that talent truly means something to your organization.

One controversial yet extremely public, effective outside-the-box recruiting approach you might consider is “proximity recruiting.”

You Must Do Internet and Physical Recruiting

Even with the tremendous growth of Internet recruiting, not everyone is actively surfing the Internet looking for a job or combing through their email in anticipation of your generic form letter introduction.

Reaching a greater percentage of the population relevant to your job searches often requires using at least three channels to reach them, one of which should be physical. The underlying concept of physical recruiting is a simple one, just as robbers target banks because that’s where the money is! Recruiters need to target physical locations where a large number of potential hires can be found.

While nearly everyone in recruiting is familiar with the dreaded job fair, there are numerous other approaches to physical recruiting that are far more effective and fun. One such approach is “proximity” or event recruiting. Proximity recruiting at professional events (tradeshows and seminars) is clearly becoming more mainstream, but one location in particular really elevates the visibility of your efforts and qualifies as “outrageous.” The location? Across the street or in the parking lot of talent-competing firms in trouble.

Proximity Recruiting with a Taco Truck

If you have been paying attention to the business press lately, you are probably aware that Internet giant Yahoo! was planning to lay off approximately 1,000 employees worldwide, the greatest percentage of which would come from its Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

What you may not know is that despite a multi-year trend of notable voluntary exits by key employees, Yahoo! is still considered by many to employ some of the greatest engineering talent in the industry. This talent is extremely valuable to hundreds of upstarts working on next-generation technologies.

Yahoo!, like many organizations planning a reduction in force, kept its plans secret until the day when the axe actually swung. Because employees knew pink slips were coming, but no real guidance was offered as to who would be impacted, more people were concerned than would actually be cut.

Seizing on that fear and the actual swinging of the axe, Tokbox, an upstart enabling free voice and video calling over the Internet without any software download, engaged a proximity recruiting strategy that some may consider outrageous.

While pink slips were being handed out, Tokbox executives were setting up a taco truck across the street from Yahoo’s corporate campus, offering employees affected (and anyone else that wanted to chat) a hot lunch and information about employment opportunities.

Their approach was a simple one. They leased a taco truck and driver for the day, set up across the street in plain view, and offered a hot lunch to any Yahoo! employee who wanted to talk. Company executives were on hand and the atmosphere was light.

In order not to make anyone overly nervous, the conversations were kept short. While proximity recruiting has become more common in the Silicon Valley, Tokbox’s efforts still garnered a great deal of press both on the Internet and via the mainstream news media, earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free PR and employment advertising.

Other Proximity or Event Recruiting Opportunities

If you are not ready to offer free food or display a banner, consider additional proximity recruiting approaches:

• A van with a recruiting banner. If there was a most commonly used form of outrageous proximity recruiting, it would have to be the use of the recruiting van (usually with a large banner) that is parked within easy view of a large corporate site or a commuter site frequented by target talent. The “banner van” parked across the street approach has been used both in high-tech and healthcare to target firms that are currently going through acquisitions, union problems, and workforce reductions.
• The “across the street” bar, restaurant, or gym. Almost any firm with a large number of employees has a bar or restaurant close by where a significant number of the site’s employees go for a drink or meal with a colleague. These locations are packed with employees wearing IDs, who incidentally, often have their guard down. Health clubs and gyms are also great spots to target.
• Award events. You’re almost guaranteed to meet the best and brightest at events that offer awards or prizes for excellence and innovation. Not only should the recipients be targets but you should also look at award presenters as both potential targets and as referral sources.
• College recruiting approaches. Because college students love to attend events, proximity recruiting should be a major part of your university recruiting effort. Place a “banner van” key across the street from college campuses. Consider recruiting at campus club meetings, at college sports events, at music concerts, on the beach during spring break, and even at both on- and off-campus college poker events.
• Conventions. If you’re trying to hire a nurse, it only makes sense to recruit at a bar inside or outside a nursing-related convention, or where nursing continuing education is being offered. Here again you have the advantage of almost everyone having a name tag with their own and their company name on it.
• Clubs and groups. If you are seeking individuals with certain skills or attributes, consider recruiting at clubs, societies, or organizations where individuals with these attributes are common. For example, if you’re looking for risk-takers, target rock-climbing clubs. If your search includes disciplined individuals, consider military groups, math societies, and music groups.
• Hotels where company events are held. When you think about it, companies do send their very best people to meetings, seminars, and events. Occasionally, corporate events are announced on the hotels marquis for everyone to see, making it easy to schedule your next pub crawl. This time of year, immediately before a firm’s holiday party gets underway, is another time to begin building relationships with potential targets.
• Corporate training centers. Many firms send their best employees to corporate training. Because a good deal of corporate training can be long and dull, there is a high likelihood that a large group will go out for cocktails in the host hotel or at a nearby bar. So, if you have large corporate training centers near you, consider them prime targets.
• Shareholder meetings. The bar across the street from the location of the annual shareholders meeting will almost always include a number of company employees and leaders. Go before or after the event to make contacts and build relationships.
• Miscellaneous. Firms have practiced “proximity recruiting” at other events and sites including wine festivals, home shows, in shopping malls, and at charity events.

Final Thoughts

If you are put off by the concept of boldly “raiding” other firms, you should realize that “stealing” another firm’s customers is already an accepted and common practice. Both sales and recruiting are competitive functions where the most desirable targets have already been captured by your competitors. As a recruiter, your job is to provide your coworkers with the best teammates that can be found anywhere, period.

No matter what you do, you can never successfully recruit a firm’s employees unless the firm that the employee currently works at has already failed to offer them opportunities that are superior to yours. If you are even slightly hesitant about raiding firms like GM, Ford, Chrysler, Citigroup etc. that have clearly failed their current employees, don’t be surprised when you are replaced by a recruiter who is more aggressive, bolder, and more willing to try something new.

Many companies are not prepared to go through the offer step of the process. As a result, they damage the relationship with the candidate. This leads to one of two unfortunate conclusions. Either they lose the candidate or the candidate comes on board, but with scar tissue. Applying some of the best practices from the sales world into a sales talent screening program helps to avoid that scenario.

The offer stage of the hiring process parallels the proposal phase of sales. Best practices in sales say that you don’t present a proposal until a thorough needs analysis has been completed. If a sales person is presenting a proposal to a prospect, he has acquired the information needed to design a solution, has discussed budget, has a full understanding of their solution requirements, and has set an expectation on pricing. This is certainly the case if the salesperson is going to be successful in winning the account.

Looking at this process in relation to the offer stage of the sales talent screening program, many of the same best practices from sales hold true. During the screening program, information needs to be gathered from the candidate to determine their financial requirements. Unfortunately, many sales talent screening programs focus exclusively on screening the candidate for fit, but do not consider the needs for the offer phase of the process. This leads to a last-minute scurry to mine the information from the candidate, or they design the offer blindly. Neither of those are best practices for the offer stage.

In sales, it is said that if you are going to lose, lose early. This prevents you from making a huge investment in a relationship that will not generate revenue. The parallel to screening sales talent is understanding the financial requirements of the candidate early enough to stop the process before over-investing in the relationship. There is no point in continuing a process with a candidate who requires a compensation level 25% above what you can offer. This probably seems logical, but hiring executives rarely focus on this as a de-selection element early in the process.

Just like discussing pricing with a prospect, the financial-needs discussion requires finesse. The candidate knows that you are asking questions about their financials, just like a prospect knows a sales person is fishing for budget information. The better-skilled salespeople tell their prospects, “I don’t want to waste your time by getting you excited about a solution that will not fit in your budget constraints…”

In much the same way, this discussion can be had with the candidate, “I don’t want to excite you about an opportunity that might not be a match for your financial needs. As you look at making a change in position, what thoughts have you given to your compensation requirements?”

With continued finesse, you can dig further into the mix of salary versus commission. Some candidates may rebuff this discussion as they feel the information will be used against them. In some instances, they are justified for having that concern. Hopefully, that is not the case in your company. We’ll come back to this point later. The bottom line is that the two goals of this phase are to gather information that allow you to formulate an offer and to de-select those candidates whose requirements exceed your financial package.

In sales, the proposal phase should not be like a magic show. The prospect should not be shocked by what is included in the proposal. In essence, the proposal is the documentation of what has already been discussed. No surprises. The same holds true for candidates. The time to review the compensation plan details is not after they are hired, or even at the offer stage. The compensation plan should be reviewed at the point where you have a genuine interest in pursuing the candidate and they have a complete enough understanding of the company that they will be able to comprehend the compensation plan.

One of the core requirements associated with any process is that it is measurable. The offer phase of the sales talent screening program should be measured statistically to determine effectiveness. The key statistic is number of offers made versus ones that are accepted. If the acceptance level is less than 80%, the process should be reviewed by asking the following questions.

1. At what point of the process are the candidate’s financial requirements reviewed?
2. When it is known that the candidate’s financial requirements exceed the package, is the candidate removed from the process?
3. At what step is the compensation plan reviewed with the candidate?
4. In what level of detail is the compensation plan reviewed with the candidate?
5. How often is the initial offer to the candidate rejected, and subsequently, negotiated successfully?

The last question in the list above ties back to my opening position about damaging the relationship. Again, this ties back to lessons that can be learned from sales. Many years ago, a procurement training specialist shared a pearl about the counsel he gives to salespeople who ask about pricing strategy. He said, “Provide us with the best pricing that you feel comfortable providing and either way you are happy.” This always puzzled salespeople so he explained further. “If you provide your best pricing and are selected, you are happy because you won the account. If you are not selected because we found lower pricing elsewhere, you are happy because you would not have been happy at that price point. Again, either way you are happy.”

Consider this when making an offer to the sales candidate. Develop an offer based on what was learned from the candidate that represents the best offer you are willing to make. Early in the process, tell the candidate that you don’t negotiate offers, but rather put your best offer on the table upfront. It demonstrates a professional message to the candidate and reduces their fear of attempts to lowball them. When companies negotiate offers, while they may “win” the candidate, they damage the relationship. This person is onboarded with the worst scar tissue of all, a lack of trust. The salesperson will always be on the lookout for the company to try to cheat them.

As with any component of the sales talent screening process, preparation is the key to success. Organize your team and design a process that achieves your desired results. This will allow you to create longlasting, fruitful sales marriages.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

To make matters worse, when finalists are selected and offers are about to be made, recruiters and managers stumble through some clumsy closing process either paying too much or losing the candidate to a more professional and astute buyer. When viewed in this light, the idea of buying more raw materials or looking for more candidates makes no sense until the rest of the processes are fixed.

Here are 20 common non-sourcing problems (if you have more than 10, fix your sourcing scrap rate before you look for more raw materials):

• Job descriptions are boring.

• Managers over-specify skills, experience, academics and industry background.

• Application process is too long and top candidates opt-out.

• Managers don’t spend enough time clarifying real job needs.

• Managers refuse to see good candidates, because they don’t have exactly the right background.

• Managers exclude good candidates due to incorrect assessments.

• Managers don’t respond quickly enough when resumes are sent to them.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with our interviewing process.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with the hiring manager.

• Good candidates want to know the comp before talking.

• Passive candidates want to know the details of the job before even talking.

• Recruiters over-rely on skills and experience to screen candidates.

• ATS system is cumbersome to use.

• Candidates increasingly are rejecting offers or accepting other offers or better offers.

• We can’t attract the best people with our comp packages.

• Recruiters can’t smoothly handle most candidate concerns.

• Relocation is a problem.

• We can’t move fast enough to decide & make offers.

• Managers aren’t responsive or involved enough.

• We never have enough time to do it right.

Avoid Preventable Issues

How many unnecessary extra candidates do you need to find to overcome all of the good candidates who were lost for the above preventable reasons? Many of these non-sourcing problems are attributed to weak planning, lack of training, dumb policies, bad processes, and inadequate technology.

When viewed from this perspective, it’s apparent that there is a lot of non-sourcing stuff that can be done to help reduce the need to see more candidates.

But this is still only half of the problem. If you have more than 10 of the following sourcing-related problems, improving your scrap rate will help, but not enough to solve the problem completely.

Sourcing-Related Problems

• The quality and quantity of candidates from job boards is declining.

• We use the same sourcing methods every year.

• Our advertising is boring and out-dated.

• Our job ads are just cut-and-paste versions of our boring job descriptions.

• Ads are hard to find by top people who are casually looking.

• Ads are found, but top candidates don’t apply.

• Our ads don’t describe a compelling value proposition.

• Our ads are filled with disqualifiers and little about what’s in it for the candidate.

• Our ads are written to exclude bad people not attract good people.

• Our career website is difficult to navigate and search for jobs.

• We don’t use web analytics to track response by ad.

• We have not search engine optimized our site or our ads.

• Our ads don’t always come up first on the job boards we use.

• Good candidates say they’re “not interested” early in the process.

• We don’t get enough high-quality referrals.

• Too many voice-mails are needed to get callbacks.

• We make too many cold calls to passive candidates.

• High-potential candidates with slightly different skills would not naturally apply to our ads.

• Our CRM system and resume database is difficult to use and not very effective.

• Our employees don’t proactively seek out great people to refer.

Too many companies try to solve their hiring problems with a new sourcing-idea-of-the-month program. This is like applying a Band-Aid when major surgery is required.

Instead, think big and fix your scrap rate problems first and then start posting compelling ads in exactly the same places. Before you know it, your talent factory will be humming along.