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Unemployment is an ugly thing. It not only injures people financially, but socially and emotionally. I was reading a fascinating article by Arthur Brooks entitled “I Love My Work.” He chronicles what happened to a small town in Austria in the 1920s when the local factory closed and most men were unemployed. Despite being paid unemployment insurance, their lives began to take on a very different — and not a happy — shape.

Many of us may have had a bout of unemployment and know how empty a day becomes when it is without purpose or goal. We miss the social interactions, and the distractions and diversions from our own problems. Employment, even when people are not really pleased with the work they are doing, gives meaning to life. It provides a reason to get up, to join social events, and is a primary source of happiness. Certainly, there are many people who for a while enjoy the leisure of unemployment, but almost all eventually became bored, dissatisfied, and start looking for something meaningful to do. Recruiters know this is true because every day they see people who may have the resources to not work but are seeking a job. When we ask candidates what they are looking for, they almost always, somewhere in their answers, mention the desire for a challenge or for social interaction and always for meaningful work.

Ultimately, unemployment becomes an issue that can threaten the stability of governments and lead to riots and worse. Germany’s Nazi government was partly an outcome of the unemployment created by the Great Depression, combined with massive inflation. Organizations are always caught in the space between wanting to be good citizens and keep good people employed, and the need to generate profit and increase stock prices. Many of us work (or have worked) for organizations that had every intention of not laying anyone off, yet in the end succumbed.

Yet, as the United States and other countries struggle to keep people employed, they often forget that the solution is not always about preserving the jobs that already exist. The solution to unemployment is keep reading…

“It’s a really unique situation where you have someone who is at a crossroads personally and professionally.” — Elliot Wilson

If living and working in this economy of disappearing jobs, tiny budgets, and little recruiting is getting a bit old, then perhaps you have arrived at your own personal crossroads. This metaphorical location is the intersecting point where what used to work for you in the past ends and what you will need to change in order to be successful in the future begins. As I see it, you have only two options:

1. You can continue to do what you are doing and wait for the economy to “get back to normal.”
2. You can make some fundamental changes to your core assumptions of how businesses that survive will operate so you might survive as well.

Personally, I have grave concerns about Option 1 because no one knows exactly what the new “normal” might be, and for all we know, this aberration might be the new “normal” and will remain such for years to come. If you share my concerns, please consider the following thoughts: keep reading…

If you’re like some corporate recruiting leaders before the current downturn hit, you had your staff balanced with a solid mix of regular full-time staff, supplemented with contract staff to get you through the hiring peaks.

But maybe you weren’t quite as fortunate, and your crew was heavily loaded with regular staff recruiters, who were going full steam to keep up with the incredible hiring requisition load. Or maybe you have shed the contractors, but even your remaining staff is struggling to stay busy. Unfortunately, now that the economy has gone south, they’re running half the req loads they once did. Not only are they questioning their own job security, but you’re constantly fending off queries from your boss, the rest of HR, and maybe even the CFO as to just what the recruiters are doing, and why should you be maintaining the same staff you had when the current workload has shrunken so dramatically. Sounding familiar?

Hopefully, back in January of this year, you took Lou Adler’s sound advice that “hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.” Perhaps you’ve done just that, and are now well positioned to address any coming business increase. Or possibly you didn’t get that opportunity, or your business still hasn’t begun to bounce back.

In any event, you do have alternatives — methods you can use to gainfully deploy your staff resources in ways that clearly, and measurably, demonstrate their ongoing value to the business. The challenges will be different, depending on the size of the company you’re in. In a small firm, you are likely to have more latitude in initiating change — but possibly fewer resources available. In a larger firm with more resources, you are likely to need to build a support coalition of colleagues, business partners, or executives to create the right atmosphere for change. But in either situation, it’s critical that you build the “business case” — show the ROI through well-tracked and supportable metrics.

In my more than 20 years of recruiting leadership, predominantly in hi-tech, I’ve had ample opportunity to face this challenge, given the cyclical nature of that business. And as you can imagine, I willingly responded to a blog posting earlier this year asking other recruiting veterans for their experiences in facing the same issue. 13 of us shared our stories, from a variety of industries and backgrounds. The following are a few snapshots of some of the proven practices and strategies that have been successfully implemented by others to preserve their key recruiting assets during previous business slowdowns.

Some of these are creative twists on previous themes, while others represent really out-of-the-box thinking. [NOTE: All of them are predicated on the assumption that you know your staff --- their skills, strengths/weaknesses, and backgrounds. If you're new in the role, you might want to begin with a resume review and light career discussion with each of them.]

I do hope you find some of the suggestions below fascinating, creative, and useful. I will be presenting a seminar/workshop on this very subject, and with a lot of additional detail on implementation, at the upcoming ERE Expo in Florida in September, and we’d love to see you there. keep reading…

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

There was the “CIO” position calling for a high school diploma and two to three years of experience. He actually emailed the company and found out it was a startup with fewer than six employees. They were really looking for a network admin and thought a flashy title would attract someone entrepreneurial. OK, this is obviously an amateurish company that has no clue how to write a job description to save their lives.

But what about the global telecom company that was looking for a software manager who had a requirement of “5-7 years experience using .NET 2.0 or above.” In Seattle, I can tell you exactly when .NET became “the platform.” In 2004. My friend spoke to the recruiter, and she told him that he didn’t have enough .NET 3.0 experience; the hiring manager wanted someone with at least five years of experience with .NET 3.0. But 3.0 has only been around for three years or so. We are only on version 3.5 now. My friend tried to explain that to the recruiter, but she obviously had no understanding of the technology she was recruiting for.

As a recruiter, I have friends and colleagues constantly asking me “why do companies do this?” keep reading…

What does a modern recruiter need to be good at? Is it all about knowing how to leverage social media, or are the traditional skills of cold-calling, screening resumes, conducting interviews, and closing candidates more important?

I have just been at the Australasian Talent Conference in Sydney, Australia, for the past week and what was most interesting was to listen to the issues and concerns of those recruiters who have not been laid off and whose organizations are still hiring.

They are faced with challenges that many of the ERE writing team have talked about over the past year. keep reading…

I saw a list that Publishers Weekly ran of publishing-industry employees who’d been laid off. And I thought: we need to do this. For recruiters.

There’s no need for anything fancy — we know that a lot of people are recently out of a job and want to make it easier for as many recruiters as possible to find a new gig.

So let’s do this super simple. If you’re a recruiter and you’re in the job market, leave a comment with your:

Name

Email address

Former title

Former company

Location

Feel free to leave additional details as well if you’d like.

We are getting emails and calls every single day from very capable friends in the industry who are being laid off or having contracts come to an end. There’s no shame in looking for a new job in this economy.

keep reading…

About 25 years ago when the self-help gurus came on the scene, I heard Jim Rohn say something that still sticks:

Things will get better for you when you get better.

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

Times are tough. Even those companies that are doing reasonably well are cutting their recruiting teams by a minimum of 30% to a maximum of 90%, and tightening up expenses to the absolute barest minimum.

Half of these cuts are probably necessary anyway, the balance most likely an overreaction to the dismal economic conditions most companies are now facing.

There is an expectation that along with the cuts these recruiting departments need to drastically improve their productivity by 30%-50%, almost overnight.

The good news is that while most corporate recruiters are working hard, the majority are not working smart.

As a result, getting 50% or 100% productivity gains isn’t that hard to do. With this in mind, here are some things recruiting leaders can do to increase overall productivity by at least 100%.

keep reading…

When I saw Jill Geisler at Poynter, a site covering the journalism field, do the Ten Reasons You Should Hire a Journalist (I’ve pasted the beginning of her article below), I thought, “someone’s got to do a list like this about recruiting.”

Recruiters who leave (or get new jobs within) the profession have more to offer than most prospective employers probably realize. For that matter, they have more to offer their own companies than their own employers probably realize — for example, during tough times, a lot of recruiters have research skills that could be put to use in the sales department.

Perhaps we can get a reasons-you-should-hire-a-recruiter list going (post in the comments section). keep reading…

Co-written by Shally, Maureen Sharib, and Glenn Gutmacher.

Have you noticed a slew of emails lately for free or cheap training? Is it tempting, when budgets are being cut back, to say that having everyone pick some of those and/or sending a handful of staffers to a conference and report back to the group, is how your team will fulfill its training goals this year? Exactly what goals will you fulfill that way?

Maureen Sharib

We in recruiting can learn something from sales training programs and organizations — a near-ubiquitous category. The good ones from major firms like Miller-Heiman to boutique firms like High Probability Selling (Jacques Werth), and tons of programs ranging from specific skills (negotiations, closing, communication) to entire approaches (customer-centric selling, target account selling) are promoted as means to help salespeople identify the right prospects and ultimately close more deals. The effect should be more revenue to the firm than the cost and time devoted to learning, justifying the training’s ROI.

keep reading…

Back in 1992-1993, during the last serious recession, I got laid off. I was out of work for approximately 13 weeks before being hired as a recruiter. My job was focused on hiring sales representatives and I had more than enough candidates for the role. Perhaps because of that, I was arrogant. I let many candidates whom I had contacted or interviewed for the role simply slip away, without calling them or following up. Not long after that, I was at a job fair and some of the candidates I had interviewed for the sales rep role came up to me. In front of my relatively new colleagues, they pulled no punches in criticizing me for not following up and getting back to them.

As embarrassed as I was to hear that then, my accusers were right! I had dropped the ball and not gotten back to them. What I had not realized (even though I had experienced the same thing during my own period of being laid off), was that during recessionary times, everything we do as recruiters gets magnified.

As a result, to me, times of difficulty do put us under a microscope in which perceptions are skewed. However, so too do they present great opportunities to build even better relationships with candidates and third party search providers, to sharpen our skills and give ourselves greater tools as recruiters, and to further enable us to be unique professionals who stand out from the pack.

But to begin, let’s be clear: It’s an ugly world out there. Your company may have gone through layoffs and decimated its recruiting department. And now you’re the one that’s left — and you still have to fill requisitions and hire people.

keep reading…

“I don’t have to tell you that things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody is out of work or scared of losing their job…banks are going bust.”
–Peter Finch, “Network”

Can you hear that sound? It is the groaning reverberation of a deep and protracted recession. It is the sound of layoffs and loss. Of homes foreclosed, 401(k)s decimated, and of violent shifts in the professional and financial worlds. It is the sound of unsinkable companies … disappearing. It is deep and it is wide and it is ugly, and it has either already affected you or it will. No matter; Les Brown said it best. “It does not matter what happens to you. All that matters is; what are you going to do about it?”

So let me ask? What are you going to do about it?

I will tell you what most recruiters I am communicating with are currently doing. keep reading…

Tough times offer opportunities that cannot exist in good times. The brightness of good times means that shadows are deep and lots of creative ideas and innovations lie in the dark shade cast by the glow of success.

But when clouds roll in, suddenly many things are revealed. We are now in such a time. keep reading…

I just got off the phone with a recruiter who had been let go on Monday of this week. Like many in this situation, he wasn’t surprised, but always “kind of thought” there would be another position in another division of his company to segue to.

Not this time.

One month severance pay plus a couple of weeks unused vacation puts six weeks between him and reduced living. His wife works, and her job looks “pretty secure,” for now.

But he needs to find a job. Immediately interviewing, he’s finding that departments are looking for a new kind of recruiter — one who can do their own sourcing on the front end as well as bringing up the rear in hiring. It seems to me like a lot to ask, and maybe one of management’s forays into “let’s see all we can get” while the “gettin’” appears to be good. It smacks of greed to me but maybe I’m just sensitive on the issue, sensitized as I have been at all the recent media coverage of excess and waste among those with influence.

keep reading…

Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

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

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

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

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

keep reading…

Corporate recruiters are certainly not the most praised employees in any firm. During tough times they are laid off in numbers, and even during high growth, blame is frequently heaped upon them for not producing miracles.

While external third party recruiters at least have a chance of making “big bucks,” corporate recruiters all-too-often can only be classified as under-paid and under-appreciated.

Given that it’s the holiday season, now would be the opportune time for recruiters to receive thank-you cards from the many people they’ve helped throughout the year. Unfortunately, the majority of recruiters won’t actually receive one, but if you did, here’s what I hope it would say.

keep reading…

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

A comparable situation exists in how most corporations have designed their hiring processes.

In this analogy, this means the needs of top candidates must drive every aspect of a company’s hiring processes, not the ego of managers, nor the bureaucrats in legal and HR. Your company falls into this category if you worry more about preventing average people from applying instead of figuring out how to attract more top performers. You’re equally culpable if hiring managers won’t see someone without all of the skills listed on the job description, if these same managers think they’re great interviewers, if they won’t spend time discussing real job needs with their recruiting team, or if they expect candidates to be enthused during the first interview.

I neither like nor dislike unions, but I do believe that they can make companies uncompetitive if they restrict management’s hand in optimizing business performance. However, I also believe that employees, whether unionized or not, need to be given a certain set of rights to protect their collective interests. Too much power in the hands of anyone unlevels the playing field. As a result, some regulation is required to preserve an appropriate balance of power. Finding this equal balance is pretty tricky, and history doesn’t offer many good solutions.

Now what does this all have to do with sourcing and hiring more top performers?

The idea behind all of this is something called sub-optimization. Sub-optimization occurs when the rights of a sub-group override what’s best for the primary group. In essence, the sub-group can’t see beyond its own self-interests. I’d suggest lawyers, government regulators, corporate bureaucrats, and academicians prevent companies from hiring the best people because they don’t see the bigger picture. Include here untrained interviewers, managers who rely on the gut, and recruiters who act more like vendors and car salesmen, than consultants.

In sourcing, a top candidate perspective is necessary when designing hiring processes, not some power grabbing bureaucrat or unsophisticated neophyte. Some examples will help clarify this cynical viewpoint:

keep reading…

“Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.”
Sloan Wilson

“Try not; do.”
Yoda

We recall a time back in late November 2002 when, out of shear pain and frustration, Howard wrote Recruiting Today: Good People in Difficult Times.

As we read it now, its content and tone seem strangely familiar. We hear the same fear and grief from so many today as in those miserable days gone by. Lost again, adrift in a sea of uncertainty, anguish, and doubt. Revenue, stability, normalcy — once again threatened as we seek a road out, a spit of land where we can rest and think of why so many of our lives have been disrupted. First-time angst for newer recruiters; multiple times for others.

As with most misery, there is pain and that sense of unfairness. The feeling of “why me?” comes to mind. Yet entitled as we are to these dark feelings and tendencies toward self-pity or rage, good news looms in the distance, and his name is Barack Obama. Seeing him just before his victory speech, we could not help feeling that in just the right light and posture, our soon to be president smiles the same smile with which Jack Kennedy warmed, charmed, and challenged us in 1961. That might seem like long ago, but time is meaningless when you are in trouble, and make no mistake — as a country, we are in big trouble.

So despite all that is broken, we have much to celebrate.

keep reading…

As we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner (here in the United States), let us be thankful for the new era that is dawning.

This economic slowdown is not just about the failure of our banking system or of the credit markets. This failure is a symptom of the major changes that are occurring as we enter a new century. The Depression of the 1930s redefined the agriculturally based banking and finance world and made it competitive and efficient for an industrial age.

We are now in a similar period.

keep reading…

Wharton Prof Peter Cappelli hit this one out of the park.

Although “I’m betting that this downturn will become nasty fast,” he says, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a recruiting department that could have too much time on its hands should be axed.

He argues that before recruiting-department pink-slips get printed, companies should:

• Figure out what the chances are that next year they’ll need recruiters who really know their company.
• Then calculate what it’ll cost to hire such recruiters next year if the company has laid off its critical recruiters and needs to start from scratch.
• Lastly, decide whether it might be better off just keeping who they’ve got.

It’s an exercise that could and should be done in another departments on the proverbial chopping block.