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I recently posted a contract recruiter position and within four days I got over 400 submittals. Ugggggh.

Unfortunately, here is a look into what I saw: typos and misspellings on resumes; zero mention of accountability; inconsistent information; absent information from previous jobs; half-completed resumes; and six out of seven resumes were from recruiter wannabes. The sad part is that some of the wannabes took more time to position themselves than some of the veterans.

If you are a serious player, and you want to separate your candidacy from the sea of competition, I suggest you take your job search seriously, even if it is for a contract recruiter role. Take your time. Who you are being in your job search is a reflection of who you will be on the job.

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Highly paid corporate recruiters working in the financial-services industry and recruiters who spend the day mining job boards will face an uphill battle landing a new position. As the financial services industry goes through another round of crises and hiring slows throughout the country, recruiter job security is waning. Some suggestions:

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In recent discussions with recruitment leaders, they have conveyed their frustration around motivating/encouraging their team members to implement new recruitment tools and techniques learned from reading articles, blog posts, recent training events, webinars, etc.

While I’m sure we all aspire to have the discipline to implement new things that will ultimately make us better recruiters, it’s easier said than done.

To help with this dilemma, a lot can be learned from our friends at Seattle’s Pike Place Fish market. For those of you that have studied the Fish! Philosophy, you learned that the employees at Pike Place Fish Market created a super satisfying work environment by implementing four key ideas (aka The Four Steps of the Fish! Philosophy):
• Play
• Make their Day
• Be there
• Choose your attitude
While all are very important and excellent steps, incorporating “play” within your work day can dramatically improve implementation of new ideas/tools/techniques and, most importantly, overall improvement.

Let’s face it: playing and contests are more fun than work.

In spirit of recruiting performance improvement, here’s an example of a contest you could implement with your recruitment team to help improve their sourcing and time management skills. While the playful contest outlined below might be a little wordy and a tad cheesy, it could be a lot of fun and drive a huge ROI for the time invested by you and your team.

Recruitment Decathlon

The Recruitment Decathlon is a contest combining 10 recruiting events. Events will be held over the next 90 days and the winners are determined by the combined performance in all events. Performance is judged on a points system outlined below.

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A great recruiter should have the same skill sets and qualifications of a great salesperson. All of the great sales visionaries including Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins have taught these steps to sales professionals around the world, yet few recruiters today understand or use any of these available resources.

So much emphasis has been placed on prospecting or sourcing potential candidates that recruiters are not taught the basics of the sales process that follows the sourcing function. Having listened to thousands of third-party and corporate recruiters over the past 15 years, my sense is that less than 10% of recruiters understand basic sales principles.

Although the terminology may differ, the following are the critical steps to every successful sales professional or recruiting professional.

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We don’t usually think of anyone in our profession as heroic, yet there are recruiting leaders who have achieved amazing results.

HC is one of those whose modesty means he remains anonymous. He took over a recruiting function that was stumbling along, filling positions only after lengthy delays. Job requirements were not communicated clearly to candidates, hiring managers assumed the poor performance they got was normal, and senior leaders put all their positions out to search.

The career site was hidden, not engaging, and listed positions as “open” long after they had been filled. There was no sourcing function and no applicant tracking system.

Warning bells were ringing throughout the company, but no one heard them: engineers, the key to this organization’s success, were getting old.  The average age was close to 50 and there was no college hiring program.  Many critical positions were going unfilled for over 90 days and then were often filled with people who left within a year.

Everything in the recruiting function was reactive.  There was no talent community, no proactive sourcing strategy, and not much awareness of their own weaknesses.

While this sort of recruiting function is not all that unusual, this one was part of a well-known organization that has a high public profile and is considered a leader in its products and services.

Although no one knew it when he was hired, HC was going to turn this situation around. And he did it without firing any recruiters and without a lot of fanfare.

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On the last day of the ERE Spring Expo, over drinks in the Sheraton San Diego lobby, someone mentioned that we’re a few years away from a time when everyone will have access to all the candidates who exist.

This is not a stretch by any means. Subscriptions to the major boards and sites like Zoom and Jigsaw already guarantee that a recruiter has access to the most active candidates and the names of millions of others.

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Every industry and profession carries with it its own distinct jargon. In fact, it is the measure of recruiters’ worth to be able to pick up on the unique lexicon of the positions for which they recruit.

Being able to spout off the verbal equivalent of Google Adwords also preempts most candidates’ assumptions that as recruiters, we’re slightly above amoeba but slightly beneath bonobo monkeys on the evolutionary ladder. (The monkeys do admittedly win by default, though like recruiters, they have been known to eat their young, although most of us do this figuratively through the invention of the concept of “entry-level” employment.)

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I’m not sure why, but I’m fascinated by cons and confidence games. When I lived in New Jersey, I loved walking around New York City just south of Times Square because I was always sure to see some tourist happily handing over his vacation money to a Three Card Monte gang.

I’d stand cautiously and observe as a team of experts would masterfully lure a “Vic” to the game, peek into his wallet to figure out how much money he had, let him win a few games, block his wife as she desperately tried to talk some sense into him, and finally go for the big payoff.

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After reading Howard Adamsky’s article entitled “Something On Your Mind?” I decided to take him up on his challenge. After 14 years of recruiting, I have much to say, and ERE is a great place to start. (Besides, I’m tired of Howard taking my angst and turning it into his articles, so it’s time I did one myself.)

I have been a recruiter most of my career and my work has been project-oriented; sometimes working with Howard, sometimes not. He was the one who introduced me to this profession, but I am the one who had to make the decision as to whether this was something I could be passionate about. I soon came to realize that I love recruiting and feel what I do is very important.

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One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practices at the best firms. Fortunately, it’s a little easier to learn about the emerging benchmark best practices as a result of ERE Media’s Recruiting Excellence Awards, which honor the most strategic and innovative global recruiting practices developed throughout the year.

The awards banquet, which usually kicks off the Spring Expo, was an excellent start to the event that has become the pinnacle meeting point for the best and brightest in the profession. This year, more than 1,100 recruiting professionals and vendors descended upon San Diego, California to learn about organizations that are breaking new ground by becoming more businesslike and analytical.

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Recruiting is not always easy. The working hours can be long, and the stress may seem never-ending, but when you have a superb team with an excellent manager, those negatives can turn into positives.

So how do you produce this superb team? The answer is great leadership, and though it may seem simple, there is a lot more to it than just having an experienced manager. The tools to be an effective and successful recruiting or talent-management leader can be broken down into three categories: attributes, association, and application. Or put another way, this is the “triple A” approach.

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If you ran a construction company and had a world-class bricklayer, would you make him carry bricks? More than likely, if you have a world-class bricklayer, you would probably have one person carrying bricks to him and another mixing mortar.

By doing so, the world-class bricklayer can ply his trade more efficiently and make a beautiful building, wall, etc. This would also save your construction company a great deal of money, as the bricklayer is paid three to five times more money than the laborers carrying bricks and mixing mortar.

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Innovations in recruiting have been occurring for over several millennia. I recently wrote about some in an earlier article about the Roman army. The Romans were by no means alone. Other societies (the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Chinese) also contributed to the developing recruiting practices, some of which are still with us today.

These practices almost invariably developed to support the recruitment of soldiers, since the army was the only formal organization of any size and consequence. These societies faced many of the same problems we have today: a shortage of talent, laws, and regulations that attempted to benefit one group over another, and the need to have a reliable mechanism for keeping their armies at the level of readiness they needed to achieve their goals.

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I still remember my harsh introduction to the concept of having my performance as a recruiter measured.

I had joined a company to support a functional area that had lots of needs. Jobs were open for unacceptably long periods of time, and hiring managers were questioning the candidate slates that were being presented. I had been hired by a fantastic manager, and that person was incredibly supportive as I worked with my sourcing partner to find new and innovative ways to identify and attract candidates.

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I know you almost never have the time nor the resources to do the things ERE writers, including myself, suggest you do. I know that you are thinking that many ERE writers don’t run talent functions, don’t understand the pressures you are under, and have unrealistic expectations. But there are ways to get stuff done, even when the going is tough and the workload high.

I was speaking with the VP of recruiting of a very large organization a few days ago. This person’s company is being acquired and is in a geographical location where recruiting is competitive and the cost of living is high. On top of that, he has over 800 open professional positions with hiring managers pushing hard to fill them. Budgets are tight and the focus is on getting jobs filled. Now that’s real pressure.

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Over the past 30 years, I’ve worked with thousands of managers, executives, and recruiters. While many things have changed involving recruiting over these years, a few things have stayed the same. Here’s my short list of the best things I’ve learned about recruiting, sourcing, and hiring top talent that seem as true today as they did when I first started as a recruiter.

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by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

The U.S. economy is like a sprinter trying his best to run a long-distance race. It takes off at full speed until it burns up its resources and has to slow down while it recovers, only to take off again shortly thereafter. Time and time again, companies in the U.S. have weathered periods of economic expansion and contraction, but for the first time in recent history (since the Romans ruled civilization), the circumstances are a little different. The conditions are so different, in fact, that the recruiting profession may avoid being decimated this time around.

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There are lots of jobs to fill; not enough candidates, and many are poorly qualified; arcane laws around hiring; and fierce competition for talent. Sound familiar? You could be a recruiter for the Roman army in the 4th century B.C.

In the collections of the British Museum, there is a decree signed by Julius Caesar in 55 B.C., promising a reward of 300 sestertii to any soldier who brought another to join the Roman army. This is the first known example of an employee-referral program. And, it’s a generous one at that: The amount represented a third of a soldier’s annual pay. It reflected how serious the Romans were about finding soldiers. They had the first known recruiters and faced many of the same challenges we have today.

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In my previous article, “The Naked Truth about Recruiting at Diversity Conferences,” I focused on how companies could achieve a return on their conference investment by implementing a detailed process. We now need to look at a more elusive problem and understand how it impairs the recruiting initiative. That problem is called Business Process Interoperability. (Stay with this folks, it’s brilliant…)

When you really think about it, recruiting is a fairly simple process that deals with moving information and events from one stage of the process to the next: getting a candidate’s resume into an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), submitting a candidate to a hiring manager, or closing the candidate after an interview. The problem with its successful execution is not always the completion of the obvious major steps of the process, but often the communication gaps that exist between these steps in the process.

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Please allow me to take a quick breather from my writing so I might ask you a question: Isn’t it time you wrote an article?

Surely you must be tired of my face by now, perhaps even what I have to say and how I say it. (Just wait until you see my new pic; Mac glasses and all…) Tell me, are you tired of any of the others as well? Truth be told, at times, I also get so weary of the same people writing variations on the same things (e.g., 8 Ways to Do This, 4 Things to Get That, and How to Supercharge Your Whatever).

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