Within each of us, in the collective unconscious, there lies a hero — an archetype that Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed lies dormant until called to action. Studying world mythology, Joseph Campbell built upon Jung’s work, discovering that no matter what the myth, a hero’s journey remains the same. All heroes must leave what is familiar, venture forth, do battle, and then return, forever changed, with new talents and gifts to share. For those of us in talent acquisition, that means we deal with something far more important than recruiting metrics and candidate tracking systems: with each and every recruiting engagement, we bear witness to the hero’s journey.

Each senior executive, each technologist, each professional in some way is forever changed by his or her search for a new opportunity. If that involves unemployment, and even homelessness, the bravery and determination required of our hero is the stuff of which legends (and movies) are made.

The film The Pursuit of Happiness captures that heroism. Will Smith and his son Jaden star in the true story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman who rises above homelessness and poverty to become a Wall Street legend. The movie reminds me that we need to remember we are not always aware of the random acts of courage required of the candidates with whom we interact every day.

The Hero’s Journey is a story lives in the subconscious — one that speaks to us, that moves us, and inspires us as human beings. As recruiters, we would do well to reexamine the recruiting lifecycle to discover the archetypal phases of the Hero’s Journey contained within. A candidate’s subconscious may influence his actions and decision-making as much as conscious reason. To start, we need to learn to recognize the classic markers of the epic tale. The story always begins in the ordinary world, until something triggers the first phase: departure.

Departure

The Call to Adventure: For executive search and recruiting, the call to adventure comes when a candidate first discovers that the ordinary world at work is going to change. It may be that an executive has learned that his company has been acquired or is going through a massive reorganization. It may be that the boss who hired him has left, or that there are rumors of impending layoffs. It may be increasing unemployment or outsourcing of his work. Whatever the call, the effect is the same; the landscape has changed. The Hero’s Journey has begun.

Refusal of the Quest: The next step is often refusal to heed the call. Candidates may not be ready to leave their current roles out of a sense of duty or obligation. They may fear leaving what has been so familiar. They may worry that they simply won’t measure up in their next place of employment. And so the candidate stays, as other workers depart.

Supernatural Aid. Once the hero has committed to the quest, a magical guide or helper appears — cue the recruiter. The most gifted search consultants naturally assume a Sherpa-like role, reassuring candidates as they make the decision to begin the journey. In recruiting, it may simply mean that we convince a passive candidate to consider the extraordinary opportunity that lies beyond the four walls of their current employer and to agree to exploratory conversations.

The Crossing of the First Threshold. As supernatural guides, recruiters help usher candidates across the threshold to enter the world of the unknown. The candidate submits his resume, reviews a job description, and journeys into the field of adventure for rounds of interviews with your team. In doing so, he leaves behind the employer that is familiar, and ventures into a strange and dangerous place — your company — because the rules of your corporate culture are not yet known.

The Belly of the Whale. This is the final separation from the hero’s known world and former self. Often it is a dark, unknown, or frightening experience to triggers a metamorphosis. They may enter the belly of the beast when they are handed a pink slip or are fired. It may be simply painful recognition that there is no future where they currently work and that they are undervalued. There is no going back.

The second phase of the hero’s journey is that of initiation. Our hero has left what was familiar and finds himself a stranger in a strange land. He has things to learn about himself and about his new world.

Initiation

The Road of Trials. Candidates, particularly those who are actively looking, experience a series of tests and ordeals that force them to undergo a transformation. Whether it is failing to obtain interviews or failing to obtain an offer after being interviewed. In The Pursuit of Happiness the test is being unable to show up for an interview properly dressed. Still he shows up.

The Meeting with the Goddess. The meeting with the goddess represents a time when the candidate experiences unconditional love. That would be the moment we introduce the perfect candidate to the perfect opportunity — the moment the hiring manager and applicant each recognize they have found “the one.” The opportunity is not “just a job,” but rather a calling that embraces all that we are meant to be.

Woman as Temptress. Inevitably, a counteroffer is made by the candidate’s employer or another company vies for your perfect candidate, tempting him or her to stray from the quest. But while the compensation package is impressive, it is more a material temptation. It lacks a spiritual connection with the work. Why did it take the current employer so long to realize the candidate was worth keeping?

Atonement with the Father. The candidate seeks the blessing of his boss or someone with incredible power. It doesn’t have to be male. In fact, in recruiting, candidates often seek the atonement of their spouses who must sign off on the decision. These are delicate conversations for families as they consider whether they wish to be uprooted yet again, only to leave friends and their community behind.

Apotheosis. An offer is being readied and the candidate is deified, entering a state of divine knowledge and bliss. This is also a period or rest and fulfillment in preparation for the return home to a new workplace.

The Ultimate Boon. The candidate receives an offer and achieves what he set out to accomplish on his quest. All of the steps up until now have prepared the executive for this transcendent moment. In other words, jackpot!

The third and final phase of the journey is the return. It represents a coming home when there is no coming home. It will never be the same because the hero is not the same. He has been transformed.

The Return

Refusal of the Return. The candidate refuses the offer, at least initially. Either it is a negotiating tactic or it is a reluctance to return to office life and all the stresses that come with it. It is intoxicating to be courted. It is quite another thing to commit to one’s next employer and the challenges the new role brings.

The Magic Flight. Sometimes it is difficult and even dangerous for candidates to escape with offer in hand. Current employers may threaten legal action, reminding candidates of non-compete obligations and other contractual ties that bind. Often, they must struggle to break free.

Rescue from Without. Sometimes the candidate needs guides and assistants to help them return home to their new place of work. In addition to the executive search consultant or recruiter, the dream team may also include an employment lawyer, a CPA, as well as a realtor and relocation expert. For proper onboarding, the worker may be assigned a mentor and executive coach.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold. The day the candidate becomes an employee, the start date — that is moment the Hero crosses the threshold. To complete this step successfully, the Hero must remember all that he or she has learned on the journey. The Hero must harness that wisdom on the job and then to share those insights with the rest of the world – not an easy thing to do.

Freedom to Live. It is now a year or two later, and the candidate has achieved mastery on the job. He no longer fears death by downsizing, so he is free to live. The hero’s journey is complete, at least until the next recruiter calls.

I remain humbled by the power those of us in executive search and recruiting hold to transform the lives of the candidates we touch and of their families for generations. We are the door through which an executive or professional must pass for a working wage or wealth creation. In large part, we determine who gets in and who does not, decisions that shape the futures of those with whom we interact virtually every day. It is so easy to take that for granted, but I try never to take it for granted because our smallest actions have the most profound effects on people who just as easily could be you or me.

So often, in so many ways, our candidates are legendary. A hero is defined is someone who is admired and idealized for courage, outstanding achievements and noble qualities. Each and every day, let us remember the hero … and then, let’s recruit him.

In my upcoming workshop at the spring ERE Expo, we’ll be discussing many of the common issues that are faced by those who manage and hire recruiters, and will share some of the most groundbreaking research in this arena.

For now, let’s discuss one issue in the hiring of recruiters, and one issue in the performance of recruiters and talent acquisition professionals.

Hiring Recruiters

It is safe to assume that most professionals enter the recruiting industry into highly transactional positions where performance is mostly measured by how much they “do.”

For example, how many calls they make per day, how many e-mails they can send, how many interviews they can set-up, and how many people they can get hired are core methods of measurement. This is especially prevalent in entry-level agency recruiting environments where most recruiters are brought into the industry.

Of course, recruiting is not the only profession where this is the accepted method of hiring new talent, but it is the most essential, simply because recruiting is not, in its core, about transactional items. The argument that is used to justify giving new recruiter incentives to engage in more “doing” or transactional activity is that activity is correlated with results. But the truth is that activity does not guarantee good results.

This matters because to many recruiting professionals, recruiting is about the process of recruiting and not the larger picture of acquiring talent. In entry-level and junior-level positions, this is not an issue of contention. But when recruiters become managers and directors they are unable to provide the strategic value that top organizations need.

For example, high-volume recruiters sometimes fail to understand the relative quality of talent needed by internal corporate recruiting professionals, because they have not been developed and trained into thinking about the long-term goals of the business. They may see a job description as all the necessary requirements on which to hire someone for, but focus less on soft items that are increasingly important as that candidate moves up in the organization.

I believe that this is because of how they were trained and developed — to focus more on prioritizing fast hires over quality hires (within reason of course). This is not a criticism of agency or “fast” recruiters. This is a criticism of how their managers and leaders develop them.

In an organization that has a strategic plan to move overseas, for example, it will fall upon the strategic recruiter to ask the question (for each position): “Will this person possibly go overseas when we expand there? And if so, where?” to which she/he may receive a response: “That’s a great question John/Jane. Yes, they may have to go overseas to China in about two years when we move our operations there.” To which the strategic recruiter may respond: “Excellent. I’ll try to recruit someone, based on our conversation and the job description who may also have some experience handling Chinese businesses or something related.”

The transactional recruiter, because she/he has not been developed to think strategically over the years would likely not gear his/her questions in such a way. They’d would focus more on questions that would allow her to make the most efficient hire possible. Although both recruiters will get the job done, one will bring long-term value that cannot be measured, and which she is not being assessed on.

Hiring recruiters in the right way is an issue of early training and development. Recruiting leaders and managers are entirely responsible for this phase.

We will discuss how to develop your recruiting staff (in the early phase of employment as well) to suit your overall needs, as well as when process execution is more important than strategic thinking.

Performance Management

Typically, recruiters are measured, assessed, and evaluated based on hard data (which for some organizations is still a step forward) in some of the best organizations. This is an excellent start, and any performance management system should include process-oriented data as part of an overall performance appraisal.

However, where the industry falls short is in developing enough career development as well as leadership opportunities to augment that appraisal. In fact, only a minority of recruiting professionals actually receive an opportunity to expand their academic, professional, or social knowledge either on or off the job, which in turn, never allows recruiting leaders to develop career paths, professional specialties, succession management, or leadership development opportunities for their employees.

To add, the best most organizations will do is send a small number of their internal talent staff to external training programs, without any thought or planning on how that new knowledge could be disseminated and integrated into leadership development opportunities. In short, even this potentially expensive training is done in a very tactical way and is not sustainable.

The importance of getting this right is paramount: Performance management is one of the main reasons that CEOs of major organizations throughout the entire world rarely (if ever) come from a talent acquisition background.

In addition, there is new and groundbreaking research that top performers in recruiting environments are not necessarily the most independent individual contributors, but individuals who manage internal relationships and social connections with stakeholders.

In fact, social dynamics are better predictors (statistically) of recruiter’s performance than human capital metrics and measurements.

We’ll talk about all these challenges in detail in my workshop at the spring ERE Expo.

The Staffing Management Association of Seattle (one of the nation’s most progressive professional associations for recruiters) has selected this topic for the closing keynote session I will deliver at its seventh Annual Symposium on November 9.

I’ll incorporate your views into my presentation and share my final list with the ere.net community following the event. Helping rank my list and identify missing things shouldn’t take more than five minutes and could prove very helpful to the entire recruiting community. Look through my list of 30 dumb things and select the five that you see as the most common and most egregious.

Use the comments functionality following this post to share your answer and also let me know what things I overlooked.

My Starting Point (please select the top five)

1. Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — it’s a mistake for recruiters to use the same search process, search tools, and sources for every job; tailoring the process to the job is more effective.
2. Using “active” approaches to recruit “passive” candidates — most who apply for jobs are active candidates however, many recruiters make the mistake of using the same active approaches to find the currently employed who are not looking for a job.
3. Not taking advantage of employee referrals — referrals almost universally result in the highest quality and volume of hires, so it’s a mistake for recruiters to discount them. A related problem is spamming employees with referral requests.
4. Not learning the business — top talent thrives in most organizations because they understand how the organization makes money (hint, it’s not selling a product). Recruiting top talent requires recruiters who can articulate the value the business creates and link specific roles being recruited for to that larger picture.
5. Not checking if a competitor is also hiring — recruiting is a zero sum game, so it’s a mistake not to know whether your talent competitors are simultaneously hiring for the same job.
6. Failing to identify and use the best sources — it’s a universal truth that if you don’t have top candidates in your applicant pool, you cannot hire a top person. It’s a major blunder for recruiters not to use metrics to identify the very best sources for each job family.
7. Underusing mobile — it’s an error to underuse the most powerful unified channel communications platform both to reach and support talent engaged in the recruiting process.
8. Trial-and-error social media use — social media is powerful but can produce mediocre results if not proactively managed and focused on the most impactful activities. A related error is spamming jobs on social media.
9. Mistaking software as systems or solutions — software is a tool that supports or automates process, but by itself it accomplishes little. Great efforts require that tools be wrapped in well-designed processes and procedures, which combined make up a system or solution.
10. Not quantifying the impact of great/bad hires — failing to make hiring managers aware of the financial difference of great hires and the negative cost associated with a bad hire can make hiring managers less engaged.
11. Not prioritizing  jobs — it’s a major mistake not to differentiate jobs and to focus on those with the highest business impact.
12. Failing to develop a business case because the organization doesn’t require one — developing a business case forces you make sure all the pieces of plan fit together, and that you haven’t overlooked components. Failing to develop a plan because the funding is easily available leads to ad hoc program development and inefficient use of resources.
13. Not learning fast — recruiting is a fast-changing profession, so it is an error not to continuously learn and adopt new approaches.
14. Not preparing for innovators — innovators are increasingly important, so it is a mistake not to change processes so that they effectively attract and select innovators.
15. Overemphasizing generic competencies — lots of organizations are guilty of this error. In a fast-changing world, competencies by design maintain the status quo. In addition, most are defined so loosely that they mean little.
16. Not identifying  job acceptance criteria — accepting a job is a major life decision, so it’s a mistake not to identify the factors and the criteria that top candidates use to decide whether to apply for and accept a job.
17. Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews contain many possible “error points,” so it is an error to overly rely on their results without secondary assessment.
18. Assuming resumes are accurate — almost everyone agrees that more than 50% of resumes include misstatements or major omissions, so it is a mistake to rely exclusively on the information in them. Doing so will result in some serious screening errors.
19. Assuming that recruiting tools work — it’s a mistake to use the approaches that “everyone else is using,” good recruiters assess on their own what tools work and what tools don’t work.
20. Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — if position descriptions don’t excite, you’ll miss many top applicants, so it is a mistake not to compare them to competitors and not to make them sales documents.
21. Not managing the candidate experience — it’s a mistake to treat current applicants and candidates poorly because it will negatively impact the willingness of future candidates to apply. It’s also an error not to sample candidate satisfaction.
22. Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are snapped up quickly, so slow hiring can dramatically decrease a recruiter’s results.
23. Dropping the overqualified — prematurely dropping candidates who are overqualified can cause you to lose some superior talent.
24. Dropping  job-jumpers – prematurely screening out job-hoppers can cause you to lose some ambitious and rising stars.
25. Dropping  rejected candidates – it’s a major mistake to discard the resumes of top candidates who were not hired, rather than shopping them to other hiring managers or revisiting them later.
26. Not measuring the quality of hire – even if your organization doesn’t do it for you, it’s a major mistake for recruiters not to check to see if their hires perform better and stay longer them the average hire.
27. Overemphasis on the past — it’s a major mistake for assessment to focus exclusively on past performance without also assessing how the candidate will handle current and future problems.
28. Being a requisition coordinator — it’s an error to focus too much of your time and effort on requisition approvals and administrative matters, rather than sourcing and selling.
29. Allowing hiring managers to hire for their needs — hiring managers can be selfish and hire for their own immediate short-term needs, so it is a mistake not to provide direction so that the resulting hires are also the best ones for the future needs of the organization.
30. Investing or developing brand positions that fail to differentiate — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that most of the employment brand positioning content developed to date makes all organizations seem pretty much identical with the exception of what it is the company does. Most brand positions are overly generic.

It’s Your Turn!

Tell me what you think the top five are from this list or what you think I have missed using the commenting functionality below.

• Requisition load — Most corporate recruiters cover between 20-40 openings, with some supporting up to 100 positions. As a result, recruiters don’t have the opportunity to spend the quality time recruiting that they would like. A recruiter can’t effectively and proactively support 40 openings.
• Incentive structure — Incentive pay on the corporate side does not reflect the impact that a top-notch recruiter can have on an organization. As a result it becomes nearly impossible to attract top agency recruiters to the corporate side. With financial incentives (bonuses) not closely tied to results (hiring top-notch candidates more efficiently) companies will always struggle with recruiter motivation. Said another way, good recruiters are worth every penny they earn. Corporate recruiters are typically eligible for annual or quarterly bonuses, so the timing of the reward is not closely aligned to result. Several corporate recruiting departments have implemented scorecards to create differentiated compensation for their top performers; however, they need to move more closely to a pay-per-hire model in order to get the results they want. Unfortunately much of this tracking is activity-focused and not results-focused. If corporate recruiting departments could implement a similar compensation structure as agencies (lower base salary, higher bonus structure), they would definitely reap the benefit. And in the end, organizations would hire more top talent at a lower cost per hire.
• Recruiter skill set — Corporate recruiting leaders have got to get to a point where they aren’t seen as just another HR function. Good recruiters, typically, are not the best “HR people” because they like the hunt and financial rewards that go with finding the best people. Typically this is not the mentality of a good HR generalist who is typically very process-focused. Once dedicated recruiters are compensated appropriately, developing/growing recruiters becomes a much easier task. They will see that the top paid recruiters are also the ones who are best at cold calling, networking, closing the candidate, salary negotiation, etc. and will seek development opportunities out for themselves. Most training dollars are wasted on recruiters who simply don’t have the time or motivation to change their recruiting approach.
• Poor recruiting process — Too many corporate recruiting departments are still built around post and pray. I don’t think it will come as a surprise that a lot of corporate recruiters post their positions and simply phone screen those who apply. Given the requisition loads it’s understandable why many corporate recruiters take this approach. Clearly this approach does not garner top talent, but it also provides the greatest opportunity for third party recruiters to add value. And the area that recruiting leaders must address immediately.
• Distractions – Corporate recruiters are tasked with a lot more than just recruiting. They may be pulled into overflow HR “stuff” (employee relations, open enrollment, compensation studies, etc.) that takes time away from their core responsibility. As long as corporate recruiters are tied to the HR function, they will be pulled in as HR pinch hitters. Additionally, corporate recruiting departments have a lot of reporting that they must commit time to, including corporate/departmental reports, OFCCP, EEO audits, and in many cases internal audit. These reports are time killers. Recruiting functions work best when they are supported by a dedicated administrative assistant to handle the details (offer letter creation, interview scheduling, paperwork, input in HRIS, etc) so recruiters can focus their time on actually recruiting.

In closing, don’t interpret any of this article to say corporate recruiters don’t work hard. Most of the ones I know do truly work hard, but they don’t have the recruiting skill set, motivation, and focus (see points above) to truly be successful to the degree their organizations need them to be.

In full accountability, a good part of these challenges are created by the recruiting function (or at least recruiting leadership) itself. We’ve not been able to provide enough on the value proposition side to say “leave us alone” when it comes to HR distractions. We’ve also not been able to create appropriate compensation structures to attract and retain the best recruiters in the market. I’m not completely sold that recruiting should be rolled into HR at all.

sixth studio album by Elton John

I really should go to bed because I have to get up very early tomorrow (by 10:00 a.m.) but my head is still spinning from my day-long attendance at the AOEP 2011 Recruiters Best Practices Summit. My thanks to Lou Gaglini and Dan Kilgore for putting up with me.

First things first: all sessions were great, but Jeremy Eskenazi’s presentation entitled “Navigating Corporate Politics” was funny and brilliant and in a sense, heartwarming — simply the best session I have ever attended.

The things I learned at the conference are endless. A quick example is Lou Gaglini’s brilliant question from his session entitled “Anatomy of an Effective Interview:”

Question: “What is an interview?” (Not really such an easy question, is it?)

Answer: “It is a very important business meeting.” (A simply inspired answer as I see it.)

I can go on endlessly about the conference, but one concept must be spoken of here and now. And that concept is “Recruiters as facilitators” — pointed out by Jeremy.

I have been in this business for a long time. I grew up in the agency biz and later moved into consulting and project work. Endless clients later I have never quite thought of it in that light. Silly me. Recruiters as facilitators is an eye-opening concept — a realistic model of the life we as recruiters must live.

Recruiters as facilitators holds sway big time because it inserts a sense of reality and clear thinking into the hiring process by pointing out what should be obvious but often times is not — that we as recruiters are only facilitators in the hiring process and nothing more. In what can often times be a long and convoluted process (should this even be a long and convoluted process in the first place? Most often no, but that is fodder for another article) that goes from the development of a position profile all the way to a candidate’s acceptance of an offer, we can only do three things:

1. We can drive the process by always moving things to the next level through a sense of urgency and effective communication.
2. We can act as a consultant to the hiring manager as well as anyone else involved in the process to ensure quality and professionalism at each step.
3. We can do whatever is possible to close the deal when an offer is made and be sure that the candidate is prepped to start.

Read the above stated three bullets again and remember them, because this is all we can possibly do in our roles as recruiters. Often times, we can cajole, push, pull, and politic in a heartfelt struggle to do what we see as right — to hire a great candidate who can do the job we seek to fill, and create a successful employment scenario. This is easier said than done.

Sadly, corporate sensibilities or lack thereof, internal wrangling, and endless other circumstances can stand in our way. When push comes to shove, the hire we seek will at times not happen. Notice my use of words. I did not say that we failed. I said that the hire did not happen, and I hope that the subtly of my message is not lost on the reader. We can only do so much, and beyond that, we are at the fate of winds and forces far beyond our control.

Is there comfort to be taken from the realization that our good work can lead to naught? That we can go home on a Friday knowing full well a hire that should have happened did not and now we must stare at beginning anew on a cold and cloudy Monday? I think so and I urge you to consider the following thought for your comfort.

Hiring by its nature is a difficult and messy business. I have seen this to be the case with every client I have ever known. I have seen it when it is fun and I have seen it when it was heartbreaking. As recruiters, all we can do is continue to grow and to exercise our best judgment. All we can do is hold true to the standard of care and consideration we know to be the best work we can impart. Simply stated, all we can really do is to try — and amidst our best labors, flights of fancy, and visions of success, know that at times, it simply will not happen. I do not see that as my problem. I see it as an organizational problem and I simply move on. That is our reality as facilitators.

As for me, please don’t shoot me — I am just the clarinet player.

The behavior I witnessed at this event and many others is predictive of how these recruiters behave in the office and how they represent their company through other communication tools such as social media. Later as the candidates flowed into the fair to meet the companies, I witnessed these individuals sitting behind their tables, eating food, talking on cell phones, and displaying body language that suggested they didn’t want to be bothered.

Fortunately, I witnessed several individuals that did exhibit proper career fair behavior and strong recruiting traits. They were the ones that had long lines of candidates and also the ones whose companies are always recognized as recruiting industry leaders. The difference in success was clear.

We can all gain market intelligence by speaking with prospective candidates and finding out where they have applied, who they have interviewed with, and what their experiences have been like. Some of the experiences that I have heard are horrific, yet not surprising. So why do HR and recruiting leaders continually hire or put the wrong people into recruiting positions? I don’t get it.

Each year there are new tools, technologies, and platforms developed to help take “recruiting to the next level,” as the cliche goes. The problem is, all of these wonderful breakthroughs can be fruitless due to inadequate operator behavior. Moreover, if companies and organizations really want to eliminate or lower their agency recruiting spending, then start hiring similar profiles and not promoting an individual out of customer service or demoting someone from another department and sending them to recruit.

Regardless of where your next recruiter comes from, I have developed some essential skills, traits, and qualities that successful recruiters should possess. Aside from the regular “good communication, ability to work hard, team player” skills that everyone wants — here are a few of the most important must haves:

1. Strong sales skills — if you haven’t figured it out by now, recruiting is sales. If you disagree, you are in the wrong business. Not only do recruiters need to sell their clients (internal or external), but they need to sell candidates on opportunities and be able to articulate why company X is an employer of choice and why a particular opportunity is not just a great opportunity, but how it is the opportunity of a lifetime.
2. Ability to cultivate and build relationships — anyone can pull a name out of a database and place a call. It’s another thing to actually cultivate and build relationships with the candidates we recruit. Perhaps knowing a little about what makes them tick, what their hobbies are, engaging in a conversation rather than just following a script, etc. Social media, smart phones, and other communication platforms have built bridges straight into our personal lives. By creating a more open, friendly, and communicative relationship with candidates, the candidate experience will increase, making the recruiter and company stand out professionally and as an employer of choice.
3. Hunter’s mentality — there are so many ways to source for talent these days. There is an abundance of sites, networks, tools, and platforms all built in some fashion to make a recruiter’s life easier. But it is how each recruiter uses these tools that will make the difference. It all starts with the mentality of the individual. Recruiters are big-game hunters, and having the mindset to hunt and be relentless until the hunt is done is a priceless skill set. If a recruiter is going to sit at a desk, log in to Monster and keyword search all day — that is not the hunter mentality you want. You want someone who will use cold calling, social media, Boolean searches, networks, etc. in order to find the strongest and most-qualified individuals.
4. Big-picture thinking — simply focusing on single searches each day is great, but having the ability to see how candidates can fit into an organization, the potential value they can bring, or even knowing where a superstar candidate could fit in, even if there is no immediate position available, is invaluable. Moreover, keeping an eye on future tools, technology, and best practices and knowing what is coming down the pipeline will keep your company well versed and competitive in a tough talent market.
5. Strong follow-up skills — probably the #1 topic that irks me the most about recruiters – follow-up skills. How hard is it to return a call or an email — I will tell you that it is not hard at all nor does it take a severe amount of time to update a candidate, hiring manager, co-worker, etc. on events. I have heard all the horror stories of a recruiter (agency or corporate alike) calling someone frantically, building them up and setting them up to interview, only to never reach back out to the candidate again. All that does is breed negativity and it is not part of the relationship-building process what so ever.
6. Listening — anyone else ever had the recruiter-talk-your-ear-off presentation about how great they are, the database they have access to, successful placements, etc.? Recruiters need to listen first and talk second. Recruiters must possess the uncanny ability to listen and take a proper job order. Too many recruiters run their traps to no end. It’s annoying.
7. Consultative in nature — recruiting is a science and there are methods and processes. The majority of hiring managers need to be consulted on these procedures and processes in order to build long-term success and proper process flow. Good recruiters have the ability to advise and push back on their clients if need be. A good recruiter will act as a trusted advisor for their clients, and in return, clients will respect and act on given advice.
8. Personable and approachable — how many times do candidates call or meet a recruiter at a career fair and they are nervous on the other line or on the other side of the table. I love taking an approach opposite that which a majority of other recruiters take. I answer my phone calls and return emails. People will call me and are surprised that I even answered my phone. They are even more surprised that I am in a good mood, ask them how they are doing, thank them for their call, and take one minute of my time to let them introduce themselves and follow up with me. My mother always told me that I could catch more bees with honey than I can with vinegar.

There will be people reading this that say they don’t have the time to return calls or emails, that they can’t talk to everyone at a career fair, that their clients are too tough to work with — and to me they are all excuses. No one is perfect. I have probably missed an email or call in my time; however, we can all make a better effort to be better recruiters.

The next time you are reviewing your analytics and you see a high time-to-fill number or whatever data is important to you — put the brakes on and see if what you really need to do is recalibrate your recruiting team and get the right people on board first.

The questions were as follows:

1. How do I make the switch into the recruiting industry?
2. How do I leverage my industry knowledge while I’m there to gain enough experience?
3. And eventually start my own recruiting business?

Let me begin by answering the first question and telling you how I made the switch into recruiting. I’d been in the fitness industry, both in sales and working directly with members, for about eight years and really felt like a square peg in a round hole for much of that time. I moved from job to job, both in the health club industry and non-profit sectors. While out of work in 1992 it occurred to me that I should be looking at sales types of careers. I enjoyed sales and I had always been told I had the personality for it. I had a buddy who had been recruiting on Wall Street for many years and, when I told him I was considering recruiting, he said it would probably be a perfect fit for my personality and skills.

I subsequently found four firms to interview with, not having any clue about the recruiting industry. Remember, this was a time without the Internet or cell phones so I was potentially a lamb to the slaughter. Looking back on the interview experience I now know what the red flags were in the interviews. At that time I just didn’t get a good feeling about much of what I heard. Not sure why. Just didn’t feel right. So let me tell you about three of the four companies I interviewed with. (P.S.: All four wanted to hire me.)

One company I met with was a franchise firm. Its branding was that it was “expert” in about 20 different markets. That just didn’t sound right to me. Now I look back on it as the veritable Jack of all trades, master of none. On to the next opportunity.

Another company was privately held. I interviewed first with one of its recruiters who always did first interviews. I remember him saying, “We don’t need to lock our desks at night.” I thought that was a bit of an odd comment. All he did was put into my mind the question, “Why would it be necessary to lock my desk when I’m not here?”

Now I was concerned. He also made sure I met with one of the few women in the office so I’d know that there were other females working there. I was invited back for a second interview with the VP of the company (he was #2 in charge). As with any appointment, then and now, I always leave 15-30 minutes earlier than necessary just in case there is traffic. I was 15 minutes late for the interview, as there had been an accident on the highway. Remember, no cell phones. I was upset, as I can’t stand being late. Upon being introduced to the VP, I apologized for being tardy and said I’d left enough time but still got delayed by an accident. I’ll never forget his response, “I hate people who are late.” Needless to say, I didn’t join that firm.

The third firm was interesting, but too far of a commute for me. The fourth firm, and the one I subsequently joined, knew what they were doing when it came to recruiting recruiters. I interviewed with a number of people and it really knew how to sell me. It had a training program, and once I got my feet a bit wet I would get a territory and be sharing an office with the person who would be my mentor and teacher. I liked that.

The message here is that if you want to make the move into recruiting, be sure to do research and due diligence on agencies (retained and contingent) and corporate recruiting departments. With no experience it will likely be impossible to get a job in a retained firm or even a corporate recruiting department, outside of low-level grunt work while you’re learning. Contingent firms are usually more apt to hire folks with no experience because they will most likely be paying you on commission only. Less risk for them. More risk for you.

They each have their pros and cons. They each have different comp plans. Each of the firms I interviewed with had comp plans that were very misleading for a newbie like me. Three of the four had splits. They were in the neighborhood of 60/40, with 60% going to the individual who found the candidate and 40% to the person who found the job order.

What I didn’t realize (and they didn’t offer the info) was that this was a percentage of what’s left after the search firm takes its fee. For example, let’s say the total fee for a search is 20k. The split with your firm is 65/35. Therefore your firm takes 13K (65%) of the 20k fee and your share is 7k (35%) of the total fee. So if you were in a split fee arrangement with another recruiter in your firm as I said above, you and the other recruiter would split the remaining 7k 60/40, or 4,200/2,800.

No wonder so many contingent recruiters sling spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. And don’t forget about the possible problems splitting fees inside a firm can cause. No wonder the guy at the second firm made a point of telling me about the not needing to lock their desks. The firm I joined gave me a territory and told me I’d get 100% of my search fees (100% of my split). When I first started, I got 30% of the total fee, so on a 20k fee I’d earn 6k. My contract also showed me when I’d move to the next commission level and would eventually reach a max commission of 50%. I didn’t have to worry about anyone else in the company poaching my territory or candidates.

Call people who no longer work in these organizations you’re interviewing with and ask why they left. Make sure you listen for sour grapes. Ask about their culture, the management, what type of training they provided, if they had a mentor, how the company pays, if there is a non-compete agreement and about the laws about that in your state, etc. If it’s a corporate recruiting job, also make sure you ask how the management perceives and works with its recruiters and if the management is committed to a recruiting department that works. Remember, actions speak louder than words.

In hindsight I joined the right firm for me. That said, there were things I didn’t like about it, which is why I left after nine years to work for myself. I liked that I learned so much of what I know now and kept what worked and threw away what didn’t work for me. They were wonderful at teaching both tactical and strategic recruiting methods.

I also know many recruiters who were in industry (in my case tech guys) who left tech sales or sales management and jumped right into recruiting, which partly answers both questions one and two above. How do I leverage my industry knowledge? Every guy I know who left tech called everyone they knew in the industry, starting with the companies they had worked for in the past. In fact, one buddy who has been recruiting for 10 years now said, “Most of my clients to this day are those who worked with me in the past who respected the fact that I had the strong operational experience and a reputation for reliability and integrity.” He has used his background in software to his advantage.

In and of itself, though, this isn’t enough to make you successful. You have to know how to recruit. In the case of this buddy, I’ll never forget him telling me that he had no idea how hard it would be to make the transition from software to recruiting. There was so much he didn’t know. He also told me recently that he’s “still learning. The dynamics of the marketplace have changed so much in the last 10 years, and as a result you have to adapt in order to succeed. The hardest part is learning to qualify both the client and thecandidate and making an objective assessment. The goal is to be a trusted advisor to both sides.”

Lastly, how do you start your own recruiting business? You can do it like the guys in the example above or start with a firm that trains you. The latter is my recommendation. How many years will it take for you to learn enough to go out on your own? I’m sure I’d get almost as many answers as recruiters I asked. So the answer is, “It depends.” It depends on whether or not you have a non-compete agreement. It depends on your relationship with your clients. Will they follow you? It depends on how much you know about recruiting, so that when you leave and are on your own, will you be able to know the answers to the hard questions or be able to get the answers you need?

I remember a situation with a candidate after I was about 12 years in the industry. It was something I’d never dealt with and was blindsided by it such that I lost the deal. You will run into situations that are new; maybe you’ll figure them out or not. I can only hope that when you do make mistakes you will learn from them so as not to repeat them again. Do you want to work by yourself or build a firm? There’s much less to deal with if you just hang up a shingle. If you have interest in people working for you, then there’s much more to consider, like training, payroll, splits, collecting fees from clients who don’t want to pay on time, etc.

The bottom line is that recruiting is a great industry. Ask yourself why type of recruiter you want to be. Do you want to be a recruiter who slings spaghetti or one who becomes a trusted advisor to your clients?

First, let me first define a real recruiter:

1. They have excellent relations with the hiring manager and the hiring team. As part of this, 100% of their candidates they present are interviewed by the hiring manager, and none are bad.
2. They understand what it takes to maximize quality of hire, and achieve it on every assignment.
3. They thoroughly understand real job requirements and why the job is important to the company. As part of this they can convince their hiring managers that using traditional job descriptions minimizes the opportunity to hire top performers.
4. They are subject matter experts when it comes to knowing the company, the industry, the compensation ranges for the positions they handle, and the competition.
5. They prepare sourcing plans and programs based on how the best talent looks for work, especially passive candidates.
6. They are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to real people and getting outstanding referrals.
7. The best candidates consider these recruiters great career advisors and proactively refer other top people to them.
8. They can accurately assess competency and job fit on multiple measures including how the hiring manager and the person will work together.
9. They maximize their first contact to final close yield (candidate opt-out rate) by recruiting at every step in the process.
10. They can close the deal by emphasizing the career growth opportunity, not the compensation.

Being a real recruiter is less important if cost per hire is more important than quality of hire, and your management team is comfortable with hiring average people. However, if you want to implement a raising-the-talent-bar strategy, or facing a situation where the supply of talent is less than the demand, you need a real recruiter to pull it off, and in most cases they’ll need to target passive candidates. (Here’s a “real recruiter” competency model we created, if you’d like to rank yourself or your teammates. You need to score at least 35 out of 50 points to be considered a “real recruiter.”)

From a “let’s get real recruiting” standpoint, LinkedIn has a major edge over its current rivals. This is important since 82% of the professional fully employed categorize themselves as passive candidates. With real recruiting in mind, here are my top reasons why LinkedIn has a significant edge over Facebook, Google+, and those newbies who think they offer a better solution.

It’s about strategy, not tactics. Hiring top talent is not the same as filling positions with good people. Unknowingly, most companies employ a “candidate surplus” hiring model to fill their open positions, even the most critical ones. These means their hiring processes are designed around the idea of getting lots of people to apply, with the hope that a good person emerges. A talent scarcity model is totally different. In this case the hiring process is much more focused, designed around the concept that great talent is much more discriminating and a career opportunity discussion/decision dominates every step, from first contact to the final close. When viewed from a quality-of-hire perspective, LinkedIn’s advantages and options in the hands of a recruiter who actually recruits, rather than just screens, are far superior.

LinkedIn is a network, not a list of names. As mentioned in an earlier article, LinkedIn is not just a list of names to find and send emails. Instead it’s a 360° dynamic network of smart connections. Compare the flat list of Facebook to a clumsy hub-and-spoke distribution system (a one-to-many network) vs. instantly connecting everyone with everyone else by one degree of separation. This is almost equivalent to a point-to-point (everyone directly connected to everyone else). It’s this multi-level interconnectivity that allows a recruiter to Cherry Pick, PERP, and hopscotch (some advanced recruiter networking terms, see point 4) around his/her first degree connections and find a slate of pre-qualified candidates with a few phone calls and emails.

The short summary: a network is for networking, and real recruiters know how to network. On this basis LinkedIn is far ahead of its rivals.

Sourcing is not recruiting. If you have an excess of top talent to choose from who apply to your ads, you don’t need real recruiters. Microsoft was in this enviable position in the ’90s and Google claimed this space in  the ’00s. But selecting from a pool of top applicants is not recruiting; it’s screening and assessment.

Equally important, getting a list of names is sourcing, not recruiting, no matter how clever you are at Boolean searching. For example, there was a recent blog about how cool it was to be able to find primary school teachers in Ireland using state-of-the art Boolean terms. As a comparison test, I found pre-qualified candidates for the same job by calling up three headmasters at private schools in Ireland whom I found using LinkedIn’s seemingly prosaic advanced search tool. Even better, these candidates were all pre-qualified (I asked who the best primary school teachers they would want to hire again were) and they all called me back right away because I mentioned the headmaster’s name.

Navigation and the UI is critical. If you’re going to use a network for networking, LinkedIn has no peers. It was architected with this in mind. Real recruiters are as interested in finding hot prospects as they are in finding a person directly connected to a hot prospect. Getting referrals who have already been vetted and will call you back is the key to maximizing quality (see point 3 for an example), time to fill, and recruiter productivity (number of searches handled). You can accelerate this benefit by asking your employees to connect with the best people they’ve worked with at all of their prior companies. This is a PERP (proactive employee referral program). Then, when you have a search, search on their first-degree connections (LinkedIn easily allows you to do this). This is a high-yield effort. You can also Cherry Pick these connections by asking your employees (or any of your first-degree connections for that matter) about specific people in their first-degree connections. While you’re at it, using LinkedIn you can easily hopscotch around any profile you find by clicking the “Search for Similar People” button, the “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature, and even a person’s Recommendations. A multi-point network like LinkedIn allows you to do this stuff instantly. No other social media provides this type of interconnectivity.

Sourcing passive prospects and sourcing active candidates are not the same, nor should the choice of tools be. At the root of much of the LinkedIn vs. Google+ vs. Facebook vs. whatever debate is the fact that finding and recruiting people who are not looking requires a fundamentally different process than the one used for screening and selecting candidates who apply for your jobs. LinkedIn is great for real recruiters who are willing to pick up the phone and network. If you have plenty of great people to choose from or you’re willing to settle on the quality-of-hire metric, LinkedIn is probably not the best choice for you. On the other hand, if you’re a real recruiter you know it was designed with you in mind.

Long before I became a recruiter (I was an engineer working on inertial guidance systems), my first boss asked me to explain how these two concepts relate and why they were important to understand and apply: “Energy = Mass times the Speed of light squared and you can’t push on a rope.” I guess I was slow, since it took me a few years to figure it out. For a good engineer, knowing both is essential. The same principle can be applied to recruiting. If you think sourcing is recruiting, or that LinkedIn is not the primary platform for recruiting, you’re stuck on only half the solution to any complex problem.

(Hint: it relates to the adage – to a person with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)

Your value — what you can get done — depends on increasing your influence and strengthening your reputation. And part of that is presentation: not so much what you say but how you say it.

Presentation skills, or a person’s “presentation” is a package; a combination of tangible and intangible behaviors and skills, including:

• How you perform “on your feet”
• Appearance
• Poise
• Knowledge
• Preparation
• Value

How are you known in your organization? Are you known as someone who:

• Gets things done?
• Challenges the hiring manager to think about what is needed, what skills are required, what skills are nice to have, and what skills could be important that the hiring manager hasn’t considered?
• Presents candidates that match the considerations presented above?
• Is confident and behaves as if the hiring manager was a peer?
• Is as impressive “off-stage” as “on-stage”?
• Demonstrates emotional intelligence?

How you are known molds your influence and reputation. And how you establish and reinforce how you are known is through your presentation.

Some recruiters we’ve talked to don’t believe this is possible. They believe their job is only to find and recruit good candidates. Well, there is one thing about beliefs: what you believe is what you are. This is more than pop psychology because we have seen and worked with some very influential and highly successful recruiters.

To further explore and develop your presentation, it is beneficial to understand that it includes four skill domains:

• Business Skills
• Leadership Skills
• Interpersonal Skills
• Intrapersonal Skills

Business Skills include: general knowledge of recruiting, talent management, the industry, and the developing trends. It also includes a knowledge of how business works, both yours and others in the industry. The value is to be able to talk with the hiring manager about business trends, how recruiting fits in, how other firms are handling their recruiting challenges, and how to explain the imbalance in talent availability across different industries.

Leadership Skills include your ability to influence the hiring manager and the organization and the ability to think and present a big-picture, high-impact or more strategic approach to recruiting. Such as, why talent management is important and why such issues as the connection between onboarding and employee satisfaction with their supervisor impact retention. Also, leadership skills include how to deal with a hiring manager who has a poor retention record. Recruiters do not have positional authority, so their leadership skills are developed through and applied in their ability to influence.

Interpersonal Skills include: how you communicate with peers, candidates, vendors, hiring managers, and your boss. It also includes your relationship and social skills. Interpersonal skills are the window through which others see you.

Intrapersonal Skills are basically self-management skills. From how you direct and correct your thinking, to your day-to-day practices in accomplishing tasks to how you run your day and take care of and handle yourself in the process.

Strengthening presentation starts with awareness: being aware that presentation is important and is larger than a one-shot deal and being aware of what constitutes presentation. But change doesn’t happen with awareness alone. Change happens when awareness meets caring (enough to do something about it) and right action.

We can be aware, we can care, but perhaps we may not know what to do, or more importantly, what is preventing us from taking action in the first place. In our work, we have found there are nine common behavioral categories that impact our ability to take action:

• Fear
• Relationship-building
• Responsiveness
• Overselling
• Quitting
• Perfection
• Personal Beliefs
• Focus Management
• Impression Management

These behavior categories are distributed across the four skill domains; however, a lion’s share sits in the intrapersonal domain, which predominantly reflects our personal habits, patterns, and preferences as they converge in our work.

Take a personal inventory. Assess how you believe you are seen in the organization and consider yourself in each of the behavior categories and across the four domains. And understand that improving your presentation skills is a process, not an event. It starts with awareness and a sincere desire (and belief) that your presentation skills can be improved. The benefit will be more influence and a stronger reputation, which will enable greater results and increase your value to others, both inside and outside of your organization.

To learn more, join us at the ERE Fall Expo for our Pre-Conference Workshop, September 7 at 10 a.m.: Strengthening Your Presentation Skills to Increase Your Results.

That’s according to a study by a company called NetProspex. In short, its criteria was 1) The number of people with social media profiles on Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook using a company email address; and 2) The number of connections people had on those three networks.

The end result is what the company calls a NetProspex Social Index.

Here’s what it came up with for the “most social” jobs (click graphic to enlarge).

Meanwhile, the survey also came up with a number of other fun lists, including:

• The jobs most likely to use Twitter: creative and advertising, followed by finance jobs, marketing, CFO, CTO — with recruiting coming in ninth.
• The most-social companies: the New York Times, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Adobe, Limited Brands, Cisco, Amazon, and Google.
• The least-social industry: libraries, followed by Emergency Medical Transportation & Services, Mining, and Auto Parts.
• The most social areas: Silicon Valley, followed by New York, Ventura, California, Austin, Texas, Stamford, Connecticut, Seattle, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Boston.
• And the least social: Tacoma, Washington, and Honolulu.

The top three percent? The top three is a small core team that is absolutely essential to set the stage for the next 10 years of a company. The remaining 97 percent? Increasingly becoming a commodity. Recruiters must develop a process to find the “best of the best” who can focus on short-term quarterly goals and drive the company on a daily basis. The key to identifying this ever-changing, fluid group of individuals is to use both global and local social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) effectively. Recruiters will need to use these tools to identify, track, and be ready to reach out and entice individuals to join their company.

With these changes, the question remains: how can recruiters stay on top of their game? I have the inside track of the CEO perspective and his/her needs from its corporate recruiters. I see three reccurring trends:

First and foremost, corporate recruiters are salespeople. Today’s professional corporate recruiter needs to be more strategic, have a keen business orientation, and more importantly, have the ability to really “sell” prospective employees on the company. Recruiters must understand the corporate culture, the business goals, and talent needs of the company in order for it to attract the right individual.

The corporate recruiter’s role is being elevated to talent management. HR is changing, and many of its functions are being outsourced.  The corporate need to recruit and retain employees is growing in value exponentially as companies seek to hire the best and the brightest to join the company. As hiring begins to increase in the post-recession economy, the skills and experience of a talent manager are critical. Recruiters will be judged on who they invite to the corporate front door and how they contribute to the company.

Developing new data analytics is required. Yesterday’s cost-based data (how recruiters show their value and progress) are being replaced with “quality-based” cost analytics. How many recruiters did it take at what price to hire X number of employees is not as important as the percentage of new hires are performing at or above average (based on peer review) and how many are still with the company after one year. The new data should reflect how the performance of new hires and their longevity within the company push the company closer to achieving its business objectives.

If you want to hear more, I’m speaking at the Fall ERE Expo in Florida. My topic “How to Make Recruitment Relevant When Only Talent Matters” will discuss the art of recruiting and retaining great talent as a business objective and how to keep a company competitive as recruiting evolves into a more strategic role for the company.

I pose this question because I see a multitude of job postings for “experienced” recruiters with five years of experience. To me, this is an oxymoron. I had extraordinary search training, broke the 100k barrier in my third year, had lots of clients, and I was just beginning to really know what I was doing in year six.

Each year I learned more and got better at my craft. Recruiting is highly complex, when done properly, and it concerns me that companies that wouldn’t consider hiring a sales rep with five years of experinece would hire a recruiter to build a talent process who only has five years of experience. There seems to be a considerable disconnect here and I’d like to try to get to the bottom of it.

Since this is my assertion, I posed this question to a number of recruiters I consider “experienced” to determine if I was barking up the right tree. One of them has six years, one has 10, and the rest have at 15-30 years in the industry. They do retained and contingent work. Here are the three responses I found most interesting and believe they say it all:

• That’s a good question. For me it feels like I am still not an “experienced recruiter.” Mainly because I truly am learning new things and meeting new people every day. But a basic level of experience for me came somewhere in my seventh and eighth year. That’s when I went on my own. From that point on it seems like I am tweaking and learning incrementally with no end in sight to being completely ”experienced.” (He has almost 30 years in the business)
• That is a tough question because there are so many variables. I will say it is a lot tougher and more complicated than most people think.
• Having real impact on the process and recognizing where the hard problems lie and chasing those. The experienced recruiter relishes in addressing and fixing any high-impact problems that exist.

I received one telling response I think may be a contributing factor to my original inquiry. It was from the retained recruiter with six years of experience, the first year and a half of which she worked for a staffing company doing technical recruiting. She was the only one who didn’t have the time for a thoughtful response. I’ve had a few conversations with her and she feels like she knows much more than her responses to me indicate. I think, looking back on my own career, I probably thought I knew “everything” at six years. In hindsight, of course, this was not the case. Maybe the more we know, the more humble we get? Maybe the more experienced we become, we realize how little we actually knew in our past? Maybe the reason for this is that we are more secure in who we are and our craft.

At five years, could I have implemented a talent process? Yes. Would it have been successful and effective? Probably not. My concern is that companies think they can hire recruiters low on experience and training to implement complex processes and to find and attract high-level candidates. It’s imperative that organizations get clear on what they want to accomplish with respect to talent, that this process is aligned throughout the organization, and then hire professional recruiters high on experience. And remember, you get what you pay for.

At DaVita, our recruiting team has crafted a strategic intent that states, “We create competitive advantage through recruiting excellence, ultimately reflected in leading patient & financial outcomes.”

Additionally, we focus on five core areas to implement this strategy: Alignment with Operations, Top Players, Clear Brand Differentiation, Relentless Sourcing, and Service Excellence. These five core principals drive our team’s daily recruiting practices and project assignments. As a recruiting leadership team, we check back regularly to ensure that we don’t lose sight of our strategic intent and make sure these are still the right areas of focus. Below is an explanation of our five core principals.

Alignment with operations: We understand the goals of our operational lanes and build a recruiting team that is reflective of their needs. As a recruiting team, we know where the business plans to grow, needs to upgrade/ replace current talent, and where we need to actively pipeline talent. This understanding provides me with the ability to work with our operational leaders on their terms.

Top players: In order to provide the best talent possible, we also need to focus on finding and developing the best recruiters. We provide our recruiters with the opportunity to grow their skills and continue to develop their careers. Additionally, we use a recruiter competency model that clearly states what we expect from recruiters. Lastly, we believe in differentiated compensation, so the quarterly recruiter scorecard drives bonuses (with a number of other factors). Those recruiters who contribute the most should be rewarded accordingly.

Clear brand differentiation: Does our target demographic know what DaVita represents? Through constant refinement (social media & upgrading our careers website for example) we have focus on what makes DaVita unique and how we need to best represent that message. In all accountability, we have room for improvement in this area, but we’ve made tremendous strides.

Relentless Sourcing: The best recruiters continually find and pipeline talent. We expect our recruiters to spend a certain amount of their time each week sourcing for new talent. In the corporate setting dedicated time for sourcing often gets moved to the bottom of the priority list. We expect our recruiters to adjust their priorities accordingly and make time to source for new talent.

Service Excellence: We want our recruiters to be the champion of the DaVita brand to our internal customers as well as to candidates. We strive to provide a candidate experience that is transparent and avoids the “black hole” of communication. With our operational leaders we work to provide continual and consistent feedback on the recruiting process. We also proactively communicate challenges early in the process so there are no surprises.

DaVita’s strategic intent statement and five core principals may not be the right fit for your organization (at the fall ERE conference, I’ll be leading a working session to guide you the process of creating your own vision statement & strategy). However, by being intentional about your strategy and laying out steps to accomplish this goal, your recruiting team will have a clear understanding of how their daily activities tie to the mission of your organization and department.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

If you take the time to talk to recruiters who have garnered a reputation for success, you will discover that they share a few traits in common.

It is these common interests, inclinations, or skills that differentiate them from all the others. It would be useful to look for these traits whenever you are trying to find more recruiters or to identify those most likely to add the most value.

These recruiters are not real people. They are composite people that I made up from some of the best I have seen and worked with.

Trait 1: Great at networking because they have a strong interest in people

I know this sounds trite, but it is true. Every great recruiter has a need to be around and with people. They like to meet new people and seek out opportunities to do that even when they are not recruiting.

Bill Warren is a great example. He began recruiting when he was just 23 and a new college hire. The college team asked him to help out on campus and he immediately put the network he had developed in his fraternity and social activities to work. As he worked in a technical industry, he put together an on-campus special interest group sponsored by his company. They sent engineers to talk and demonstrate uses for their products in applied situations. With the blessing of his boss, he was able to spend several weeks each semester in campus building the reputation of his firm and their research. Recruiting was easy after the first year and remains that way today. Bill, meanwhile at 28, has become a full-time recruiter, where he is quickly becoming a star. When you ask him why he is successful, he just says: “I like people and want to help them do what they want to do.”

His networking skills are massive both in person and online. He cultivates relationships and understands that all solid relationships are built on quid pro quo: doing something for someone who, in turn, does something for you. It is this give and take that makes for success, and he is willing to share his career advice, mentoring skills, and technical expertise. In return he gets the loyalty and commitment of many candidates.

Trait 2: Marketing and influencing skills

Sue Smith is ranked as the top recruiter in her retail organization. Hiring volume is aggressive and needs are changing all the time. Turnover is often high and seasonal hiring presents many challenges. She has to recruit contingent as well as full-time staff, and is involved in lots of internal politics.

Yet, Sue is able to ride these waves and still make progress. While she is a good networker, where she really shines is in influencing and selling. Sue aims to get candidates interested in the work, project, and hiring manager by identifying and communicating their positive aspects, pointing out challenges when appropriate, and generating excitement. She presents well-vetted candidates to the hiring manager whom she has “presold.” Through Facebook, email, and phone calls, she uses her networks as marketing channels and targets them for specific functions and sometimes even for specific hiring managers.

Trait 3: Personalizing and leveraging uniqueness

They transcend brand by personalizing each hire and each hiring manager. Each of these recruiters has found the power and importance of personalization. Rather than rely on a generic recruiting brand, they instead brand every job and manager as unique. They know how to steer the right candidates to the right managers because they have deep knowledge of the needs and capabilities of each through their networking skills and ability to influence. While each takes a different approach, there is lots of overlap and commonality between them. They can push and pull candidates and managers toward a mutually desirable end.

Trait 4: They use technology; they are not consumed by it

Neither of these recruiters is a technology nerd. They use what works for them and whatever they can understand. They make sure both candidates and hiring managers also understand and are willing to use the tools.

Bill does this by creating special interest groups that can be either virtual or face-to-face. He lets candidates and managers gravitate toward those that match their interests and abilities. He has leveraged more technology than Sue because his primary candidates are dispersed and distant, but he is not a “techno freak” in any way.

Sue uses technology to enable communication. She has the amazing ability to implement a technology seamlessly by starting out small, experimenting with a few candidates and hiring managers, and growing it slowly when it works. She probably spends no more than one or two days a month where technology is her focus.

Great recruiters are focused on getting results, but what is more important to them is that both the hiring manger and the candidate feel that they have had a real exchange of information and that both are comfortable with the decision. I am amazed that their candidates have few regrets about accepting a job and the short-term turnover is remarkably small. Hiring managers, too, are content and pleased with their hires.

The recruiting process is not about individual recruiters, though. It is about making good matches in a seamless and efficient way. Great recruiters figure out how to do this while appearing almost in the background. The greatest praise you can get is when the hiring manger says, “Wow! Did I make a great hire last week.”

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Let me start by saying I am biased with regard to recruiter training. Beyond that bias, though, it is clear that providing development opportunities for people to improve their skills is certainly worthwhile, but in most cases it only holds true provided the training is implemented correctly. But there are countless occasions when I observe recruiter training initiatives deployed incorrectly, so the topic warrants discussion, particularly given that one of the common themes prevalent in today’s workplace environment is cost-containment, and the goal of doing more with less. Indeed, “doing more with less” has probably never been more pressing than in today’s economic climate and is particularly true of human resources and talent acquisition departments across most companies.

I talk with a large number of recruitment leaders who, like many others, are asking, “But how can I do more with less?” As a result many of them are seeking to improve business results by developing their staffing teams. Just last week I was talking with the staffing leader of a large, multinational corporation and the primary mandate for 2011 was to develop her recruiting team capabilities.

I have delivered a large quantity of recruiter training, have also led very large teams of recruiting professionals, and have been required to improve their capabilities through coaching and professional development, including training. I am a huge fan of developing proficiency and capabilities in order to improve business outcomes … but there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to create real results. In truth, I would go so far as to argue that in general terms, one of the primary gaps in the recruiting industry is that the skills of the average cross-section of recruiters would really benefit from significant improvement. Unfortunately, I often observe recruiting leaders investing in training, and then lamenting the fact that recruitment yields, productivity metrics, or other outputs do not show improvement.

One of the reasons for this is that doing more with less requires a systems approach when implementing changes. Recruiting team output is the dependent variable that is related to a number of independent variables that combine with different magnitudes to produce results in the system. These variables include recruiter or team capacity, incentives, motivational factors, feedback and communication systems, skills and competencies, and also environmental factors. We will look at the first couple variables in this article, and the next in the next article.

The presumption underpinning this article is that recruiter training is being implemented in order to improve business outcomes … which seems self-evident, but you might be surprised how many times I’ve observed training being delivered to recruiting (or other) teams without sufficient thought put into answering the question, “What outcome are we trying to improve with this training?” Before training is considered, thinking through the question in detail, and being very specific with regard to what goals training is intended to influence, will pay dividends.

Recommendation #1 — Do not implement training before evaluating recruiter and recruiting team capacity

The capacity variable is strongly correlated to nearly all recruitment metrics, including doing more with less. Indeed, the often-cited measure of “time to fill” is often a measure of recruiting team capacity. Many organizations fall into the Trap of False Economies … what at first seems like a cost-savings measure actually in fact increases operating expenses. For example I commonly observe organizations loading up their recruiters with far too many requisitions, but the net result is that cost per hire increases dramatically. Another example would be a lack of investment in administrative resources … some recruiting organizations “save headcount” by reducing (or eliminating … or outsourcing) much-needed administrative support such as scheduling or other logistics management in order to reduce costs.

Delivering training to a recruiting organization that is at capacity or being stretched beyond its capacity will have negative ROI — the team will just grow frustrated because it doesn’t have time to get to everything on its plate already. Instead, revisit the expectations for the role of each member on the team, revisit the capacity model, and make sure the team has the capacity to implement the behaviors that training is designed to help them improve.

Recommendation #2 — Do not underestimate the impact of incentives

If your recruiting team isn’t incented to improve results or change behaviors, training them how to do something differently or improve their behaviors or skills is unlikely to produce material results. Incentive influences human behavior. It always has and it always will. If you’ve thought through the outcomes you are trying to improve through the delivery of training, then mapping the incentives to these outcomes is relatively easy. However, many staffing organizations have not done an effective job of aligning incentives with the outcomes that drive the most business results. Don’t waste training dollars without thoroughly understanding what the incentive structure, both tangible and intangible, is for your team and whether it’s aligned with the training objectives.

But incentives can be tricky. Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Stanford professor and author of What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management suggests that incentives can and should include things other than money. A useful exercise is to have your recruiting teams define what incents them. To do so, ask them to form a small focus group of three or more people and send them off to come up with a broad list of incentives, beyond just compensation. Once you have the master list of potential incentives, share them with the broader team and have each team member force-rank them in terms of their personal preferences (what incents each individual most). You may be surprised at the results. Once completed, align the incentives (some will cost zero dollars) against your business objectives, and then evaluate training initiatives against these objectives.

In the next installment, we will examine how motivational factors, feedback and communication systems as well as environmental factors relate to recruiting team training and doing more with less.

I had the chance to catch up with Mahoney (who’s speaking this Fall in Florida) after her presentation to talk to her about recruiting in Silicon Valley, getting out of the rat race, and finding perspective to recruit better.

How the Recession has Impacted the Valley

Mahoney, who was the VP of talent acquisition at Yahoo, said that the first part of the recession locked up talent in their current companies, but after that, an infusion of venture capital started getting people moving from their companies. “After that, the dominoes started following and people started moving,” she said.

Even being a big brand has its challenges. While smaller companies sometimes disregard the results of large, recognizable brands, the recruiting atmosphere in Silicon Valley is so competitive, there are no guarantees. “These people might be getting picked up by Google, Yahoo, and Facebook,” says Mahoney. “And there might be smaller companies that can offer more as far as equity or experience. It’s still a horse race.” The best part about being a larger brand, she says, is that you will get a call back; you still have to make the hire.

Losing Perspective

We also talked about how small to mid-sized firms (the size of firms she works with at her company, Talent Acquisition On Demand) have a hard time looking past the challenges of today. “Emerging technology firms are looking for talent that can fulfill their need to ship,” Mahoney says. ”They aren’t looking past that.”

But even larger technology firms can push your perspective. Mahoney said during her presentation that she had a hard time getting her head above water when she worked as a corporate recruiter. For 11 years, she never took more than a week off from work (and even then, she was always connected).

When she realized she needed a break from the rat race, she realized how the constant push-push nature of the tech scene had pushed her out of balance and made her a worse recruiter for it.

Finding Balance

Mahoney doesn’t believe you need to take a sabbatical or a long break to find this perspective. She presented the way she daily keeps things in check through planning her schedule to start the day, reading the news, and getting social media updates before she starts working. “It takes discipline to do it,” she said. “But it’s possible.”

She feels as if recruiters get stuck in this rut easily as well because they can be so focused on what is in front of them. And especially in the hyper-competitive tech industry, recruiters have to find ways to get the broader perspective.

That we are in the dog days of August? That we’ve been in the summer sun too long? That I’m being Punk’d?

Turns out the press releases about these ventures are for real.

The LeafBuilder clothing line is an assortment of T-shirts that you use to flaunt your recruiting prowess. The number of maple leafs on the shirts corresponds to your placements — and the price. The entry-level T with a single leaf (corresponding to between 1 and 1,999 candidate placements) is $21.95.

Make it into the agency ownership ranks and a seven leaf, long-sleeved version will set you back $293.95. Somewhere on the site there’s a product that will run you over $1,500.

Founder John Sudds (I’m not kidding about his last name, but you can understand why I thought I was being punked) insisted recruiters will spend the money and wear his stuff because of the pride in their accomplishments. “It gives recruiters something to shoot for,” he tells me during our conversation. “It gives the industry a sense of inspiration.”

After that, it was TalentHole, and that line about removal services, that inspired me to think of those  few people from my past life I wished I could have had removed. Permanently. If you catch my meaning.

So I was a little disappointed, though not unexpectedly so, to discover that TalentHole.com’s idea of removal really means outplacement. Its founder, an independent recruiter who wants me to call him Carlos, sees this project of his as something of a holy mission.

“There are so many bad employers now and they are asking employees to work their — I’ll use “behinds.” Carlos had a different noun — off, that I wanted to do something to help,” he says.

And then there are employees with attitudes that would scare away Atilla the Hun, but whose work quality is good enough to keep them from getting fired. “A person is a Talent Hole, when he or she makes everyone else miserable by the very nature of their actions and in-actions.” It says that right on the website.

Tell TalentHole about them and maybe Carlos can help them find another job.

He works splits, fills reqs, sources candidates, and might just be able to facilitate the divorce in a way that is speedy and amicable.

If he earns a placement fee, great. He doesn’t charge otherwise.

But Carlos, I asked him, what recruiter wants your loser candidate with the bad attitude?

Reasonably enough, he explained that not every worker who wants out has an attitude problem. Many just don’t fit the company or the boss. “75 percent of the time,” he says, “that Talent Hole, somewhere else, is a super star.”

Maybe. Me, I’d ask questions if a Carlos from Santa Monica were to pitch me a candidate. On the other hand, if my boss is a Talent Hole, I’d at least be comforted to know I have a champion in Carlos at TalentHole.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy Warhol

It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally successful in procuring high-performing employees.

Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools starting with applicant tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is deluged with unqualified candidates.

It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire recruiting process. Let’s start by asking dumb questions: why does recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact through the products and services you offer, through fellow employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location. What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably minimal.

So, then, how can recruiters add value?Automation and Process Simplification

The recruiting process is made up of somewhere around 10 sub-processes which include employment branding, communicating with a hiring manager and developing a position description, sourcing, screening, assessment, candidate communication, and marketing (CRM), offer negotiation and presentation, closing, and in some cases onboarding.

Each of these sub-processes need to be examined and assessed for their efficiency and value. You should ask yourself whether that process needs to be done at all, and if so should it be done by a recruiter, and if not, by who? You should also ask whether that step could be automated, even partially, and even if it would be less than ideal. You need to apply the 80/20 rule to recruiting automation: if a tool, system, program, or application can do at least 80% of what a recruiter does, than you should switch to the automated process.

I believe that much of what the average recruiter does can either be simplified, eliminated altogether, or be done by automated systems. For example, is it really necessary to interview all candidates? Why can’t you develop and use a screening test of some sort and rely on that alone? Why does every potential candidate need to complete the usual intensive application process when all you need to know are one or two things in order to move the candidate forward? Why can’t you develop and use good CRM techniques and processes to ease the communication problem. There is a lot of room for improvement in the basic processes we follow rather blindly. By adopting a simplified and more automated approach, you free up recruiters so that they can really add value and improve the reputation and significance of the recruiting function.

Redefine the Need

Recruiting should not be a reactive function, only responding to the mandates of hiring managers. Recruiting needs to be the talent partner within the organization. It needs to have the labor market and available skills knowledge to help managers make the best decisions of the type of people to hire.

The model recruiting functions should work very closely with hiring managers, human resources, and other internal professionals to redefine the positions most commonly open. One method is to interview good employees, as defined by hiring managers and performance reviews, and then construct profiles of these employees that can, in turn, be used to construct screening questions. Building a profile of success saves hundreds of hours of recruiting trial and error. This process also affirms which roles are really important and which ones may be less so. Less-critical positions can be outsourced or put on a lower priority. Many times this process identifies changes that need to be made in the skills, competencies, or experience required for a particular role. Looking at the positions that you are being asked to fill in a constructive but positive way, adds to your credibility and aligns the needs more closely to the market.

Workforce Planning

The next step has little to do with traditional recruiting and is usually called workforce planning. It the skill of building forecasting capability and ensuring that the organization has, or can quickly get, the talent it needs to achieve its business objectives.

It requires some knowledge of demographic, economic, and business trends. It also requires a deep knowledge of the talent marketplace and familiarity with the level of education and experience available in the appropriate geography. It means collaborating with the internal training function, senior management, compensation, and human resources in general to agree on which talent is best sought externally, which is best sourced and promoted internally, and which needs to be developed by the company, because recruiting them is difficult and expensive. These tradeoffs and discussions have almost never happened in the past, yet they are becoming what differentiate a great recruiting function from an ordinary one.

Predicting who you will need, what skills will be important, or what experience will be best aligned with needs is not possible. What you can do by combing workforce planning with a talent community is build the potential — a capability to meet future needs — that did not exist before.

Building Talent Communities

Following all of this, only then is it productive to start sourcing and attracting potential candidates to a talent community. My article last week pointed out how a community differs from a talent pool or a database, and the distinction is significant. Talent pools are inefficient and in the end leave you where you started — with a large pool of unknown people who need to be further screened and qualified. A true community screens by the way people interact, by how they communicate, and by who they are connected to.

When an organization has a talent community, it has a dynamic and ever-changing pool of talent, skill, and experience to meet almost any need that might arise.

Recruiting is in dire need of change. Disruptive recruiting will showcase technology and apply it in a practical way toward improving and simplifying the processes that make up recruiting. Disruptive recruiting will also mean that recruiters need different skills, including those of networking and community-building.