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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the ad or job posting in full. If asked, answer the questions concisely and accurately; in recruiting, time is money. If there are instructions to follow, don’t demonstrate what a rogue you are. These days recruiting has lots of processes, and the bigger the company, the more risk involved. If you cannot follow the application instructions, you are sending a message that you can’t assimilate to their ways of doing things.

On the other hand, if you follow the instructions verbatim and don’t do anything above and beyond — like using some creativity in your communication or application — you may be sending a message that you give just what is asked and nothing more.

If you are applying for a job with me, look me up, find me on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and talk to me in my language. Don’t address me by Dear Sirs when my name is Margaret. When I get resumes like that, I can them immediately. I have never met a ‘Sir’ named Margaret. And it tells me you don’t care.

Typically a person hiring a recruiter is someone who has done the job before, and done it well, so they are expecting you to blow them away with knowledge, pizazz, terminology, and technology. If you are applying with me and I am a recruiter and we both share a common recruiter language and use the same type of vernacular, I expect you to use that to your advantage. Recruiting is a form of sales; show you know that by positioning yourself in the right manner.

Do your homework. Find out what company you are applying with, go to your browser, type in the company’s site, and look at who is requesting your services. Tailor your application and response to the buyer.

Job searching is a sales process. You are selling me on why I should invest in you.  That takes positioning, discernment, listening, questioning/probing, and salesmanship.

Remember, who you are being in your own search process is indicative of how you will conduct your searches for your new client, or if you are a rookie, who you are being in your job search is an indicator of how you will function in this role for others. This seems easy enough to understand; however, sometimes when we are too close to something, we catch a case of running on automatic, or a case of entitlement. We forget the game we are playing. We also forget that in this game, it is always about winning. Winning the game means working. Losing the game means keep looking, or keep on trucking to the next gig, until that gig runs out.

A real recruiter in 2008 lists accomplishments, numbers of jobs filled, time-to-fill measurements, submittals, or interviews to hire. Great recruiters know their retention rates and their percentage of good hires. In third-party recruiting, a successful recruiter knows their billings, per month, per quarter, if not per week. They also know their sendout-to-placement ratio and their job order-to-fill ratio. A solid recruiter knows their fill ratios and their (fall off ratio) misery index.

As with every profession, people are evaluated by their performance; our performance in this industry is about quality of hires within a given time frame. There are a few other important metrics, yet none as important as whether this person filled the jobs with good people and whether the hiring manager/new employee was served within an acceptable time frame.

Another element of taking your search seriously is the level of effort you have put forth in personal competency development. What have you done to increase your awareness of the marketplace? What have you done to improve and expand your capacity to identify passive talent? If your biggest claim to fame is running an ad on CareerBuilder, scanning the resume and forwarding it to your client, you are in a bit of a pickle. While that sometimes might work, it is nothing to be all that proud of, unless you are spending a significant amount of time screening, assessing, and evaluating that talent, with considerably more tools than your gut instinct.

If you know how to and enjoy sourcing passive talent through using social networks and Internet mining tools, like Broadlook or Jigsaw, brag about it. Include your percentages of hires using passive candidate streams and social networks.

If you are a farmer of people and you use your personal and business community to continually generate passive candidate flow and you have your very own ‘affinity network,’ then brag about that as well. If you have a list, a database of candidates, live and usable candidates, hell that is something to brag about. You come armed and prepared to generate maximum results in a minimal amount of time.

Taking your job search and your career seriously means continually upping your level of service offering and depth of service. If your thing is sourcing, do it fabulously. Invest in your own development, learn the systems, learn the technology, and apply it. After all, you buy clothing, fine wine, and jewelry, so go buy a new way to source candidates, sign up for that $500 training, and then learn everything you can and apply it the second you get out of training. Brag about the results you produced.

If your bag is full-life-cycle recruiting, take that seriously and learn about the new wave of candidate selection tools that are being adopted into many company’s hiring processes. At the Onrec conference, a group of English business folks told me that 85% of all companies in their countries use behavioral interviewing, as well as competency and personality assessments to validate their hiring choices and create new employee development programs. I do not think the U.S. is there yet, but due to the financial and business strategy consequences of poor hiring practices, I believe many more are on that path.

If you are not getting better, you ought to get out, because before you know it you will be replaced by someone who is a lot more willing to do the same job for a lot, and I mean a lot less. If you like the business, live like you will be engaging in a job search, and stay ahead of the curve. Keep track of your results, operate with integrity, don’t make placements you know won’t work out, create solid contacts and networks, and learn everything you can. Always position yourself the way you want to be perceived.

• Show off creative sourcing techniques. According to a talent acquisition leader at a major New York bank, some of Lehman Brothers’ top talent was off the market before the ink was dry on the bankruptcy papers. Recruiters will need to demonstrate that they have a network of contacts in competing firms and can reel them in.
• Provide metrics showing your value. Corporate recruiters from the big Wall Street firms will need to demonstrate their value or be willing to take a haircut to land a new job, especially if they relocate. New York salaries outpace the rest of the nation, according to Crain’s, and the current shakeout is certain to drive those down.
• Explain how you can hold the line on costs. “Businesses are looking for cost-of-hire reductions,” says Kevin Huston, director of service delivery for TalentFusion. “Corporate recruiters will need to show that they have successfully driven down the cost of hire to be marketable.”
• Go where the jobs are. Healthcare, education, and government have been stable throughout the economic slowdown, and the mid-size suppliers of goods and services to companies within each industry have also been hiring. They require aggressive recruiters who can deliver candidates without the benefit of a powerful recruitment brand. Life sciences and renewable energy were hot industries for executive search firms during the first quarter of 2008. The security and logistics industries are also projected to continue hiring. The outsourcing industry is stable right now because some clients haven’t been hiring, but RPO bid activity is robust and the industry may pick up some new contracts from reorganizing financial services firms. Huston says that sometimes RPO firms absorb the company’s corporate recruiters when they land a new engagement, but those decisions are contract-specific. He cautions that salaries are often lower than at corporate recruiting jobs. Staffing firms are always eager to land a hot recruiter, but if you want to work in search, you’ll need contacts because you’ll be expected to bring in job orders and candidates. “Search firms expect you to work a full desk, so recruiters will need to come in the door with clients in their pockets,” says John Pelconin, a contract IT recruiter assigned to State Street Bank. “Information technology is pretty hot, but it’s saturated, so you’ll need some good skills to compete.”

And then there is financial services. Not every bank is in trouble. Some regional banks and commercial banks are still doing well, and accounting firms have been hiring. The government’s mortgage bailout operation may also offer some opportunities for recruiters who want to stay in the industry. The Wall Street Journal lists the projected industry survivors.

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

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

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

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

Recruitment Decathlon

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

Traditionally, the title of “World’s Greatest Recruiter” has been given to the person who wins the decathlon.

• Employee Referrals — Each recruiter picks 25 top performers within the line of business they support. They have two weeks to engage these employees for specific referrals for openings within the organization.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for most qualified referrals.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for regions with most referrals per recruiter.

• Hires from Referrals (maybe break out exempt/non-exempt) — Person who hires the most people from referrals gathered during the Employee Referral contest (see above) by a certain date (say December 15, 2008).
o Gold, Silver, Bronze to the individuals with most hires.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for regions with most hires per recruiter.

• Association Membership Lists — Person who harvests the most qualified association membership lists from/using your Centers of Influence (hiring managers, peers, employees, etc.).
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for regions with most lists per recruiter.

• College Alumni Directories/Passwords — Harvest the most qualified college alumni directories and/or passwords to get online access to the directories from your Centers of Influence.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for regions with most directories/passwords per recruiter.

• Hires from References — Most hires from qualified references from applicants/candidates/new hires.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for regions with most hires per recruiter.

• Most Innovative Sourcing Tactic/Story that leads to a hire — By a certain date (say Nov. 15th), we will accept nominations for most innovative sourcing tactic that leads to a hire.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Region picks up points for having a gold, silver, bronze winner.

• Best ‘Attention Grabber’ email — Winners for best attention grabber email voted/judged by leadership/management team.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Region picks up points for having a gold, silver, bronze winner.

• Best ‘Attention Grabber’ voicemail — Winner for best attention grabber voice mail voted/judged by leadership/management team.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Region picks up points for having a gold, silver, bronze winner.

• Best Perfect Week/Perfect Day Routine - Winners will be awarded for demonstrating their weekly/daily planning process and how it makes them a productive/efficient recruiter.
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Region picks up points for having a gold, silver, bronze winner.

• Best overall success story from participating in this Recruitment Decathlon — Winners will be awarded for sharing their success story (how this decathlon improved performance, customer service, etc.).
o Gold, Silver, Bronze for individual winners.
o Region picks up points for having a gold, silver, bronze winner.

Point System:
Gold = 3 points
Silver = 2 points
Bronze = 1 point

• Individuals will be awarded a Gold, Silver, Bronze metal for each of the 10 contests.
• The individual with the most points will be crowned the winner of the decathlon!
• Each region will receive points for individuals who are awarded gold, silver, and bronze in each event.
• In addition, region will be awarded points for each event as outlined above.
• The region with the most points will be crowned the top region!

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

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

1. Developing the Relationship: This is the time that the warming-up events occur before the serious selling begins. This includes how you introduce yourself and how you begin the conversation. Candidates have stated that it’s during the first two minutes of the call that they form crucial initial impressions that influence the rest of the recruiting process.

2. Creating/Identifying the Need: Every sale involves identifying a need that the candidate is often unaware of by asking questions. This is much more than a simple collection of data. Identifying or creating the need is the most important of all selling and recruiting skills. Recruiters who are the most effective during this investigative stage are most likely to be the highest performers. Recruiters with poor investigative skills generally create candidates who ultimately do not accept the position once offered.

3. Preventing/Overcoming Objections: Although objections are inevitable in any sales process, the key for successful sales professionals/recruiters is actually preventing objections. By asking the right types of questions in step 2, many objections that would have arisen in the process are addressed before the candidate has an opportunity to bring them forth. Keep in mind that some objections are inevitable, that they are often training responses, and that most are emotional and not practical.

4. Filling the Need/Providing Benefits: Identifying the need is considered the most crucial skill in sales or recruiting; filling the need is the second-most critical step to ensuring success. Often recruiters and sales professionals alike pay little attention to step 2 and focus solely on step 4. Like many sales professionals, recruiters often focus on what is commonly known in sales language as their “product knowledge.” They have an in-depth understanding of the organization they are recruiting for, they understand every detail of the position and its function, and they completely understand the requirements of the role. Armed with all of this product knowledge, these untrained recruiters contact potential candidates and attempt to “tell” them about every benefit of the position and company they represent, never addressing the real needs of the candidate. This is a common mistake that is made by most sales professionals and is illustrated further in this article.

5. Advance/Close the Sale: In recruiting and sales, advancing the sale is the final objective throughout every step of the process. By filling the need in Step 4, you are in a position to advance the sale to the next step. In recruiting, closing is most commonly compared to presenting the offer and gaining acceptance from the candidate. At this stage recruiters often focus on the practical aspects of the offer being made: compensation, benefits, perks etc. Effective recruiters and sales professionals alike understand the importance of re-emphasizing the emotional drivers identified in Step 2 of the sales process prior to presenting the practical aspects of the solution.

Although these 5 steps are critical to the success of every recruiter, most focus and are trained only on steps 1, 4, and 5, skipping the most important step: Identifying the Need.

Recruiters like to tell about the great position, company, and opportunity that they currently have without having asked any questions to identify the needs of the potential candidate. This “telling” versus “selling” approach continues to be prevalent among the majority of recruiting organizations, minimizing the benefits of sourcing tools, branding, and recruiting technology available today.

The profile of today’s recruiter must also change. An effective recruiter should be seen as a sales professional who exemplifies the ability to develop candidate relationships, identify candidate needs, overcome or prevent objections, fill the candidate’s needs, and advance the sales process. Recruiters need to be given the appropriate training to move from “telling” about their opportunity to “selling” their opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining Leadership

One might say, “I know it when I see it, but I can’t tell you exactly what it is.” We have all probably worked for good leaders, people who inspired us, excited us, or challenged us. And we have also all worked for good managers, people who carefully directed us, followed the process, met the numbers, and always followed through. Both are good. Both are necessary. And rarely do they come combined in a single package.

Recruiting is full of managers. These are the people who run their recruiting organizations efficiently and effectively. They implement processes, cautiously install technology, focus on customer satisfaction, and stay within their budgets. As long as the world doesn’t change too much, they thrive.

But HC was no manager. He was a true leader and almost from day one began to steer his function in a different direction.

It didn’t take super-human effort or superior intelligence, but it did take a thoughtful approach. Once HC came on board, he did several things that began the transformation of the recruiting function.

• Step #1: He listened and learned and he was realistic. During his first month on the job, HC went to every hiring manager he could reach and spent an hour asking them what they thought about the recruiting function. He probed both their level of satisfaction and their level of awareness of the talent issues they faced. He also met with senior management and asked them similar questions. He learned that they did not really believe that talent shortages existed nor were they as aware as they should have been about their own aging workforce. He knew it would be a challenge to convince them.
• Step #2: He got his team engaged, focused, and involved. Using what he heard and what he had observed, he began meeting with his team every week for half-days to listen to them and begin educating them on talent issues and possibilities. He assigned recruiters to various taskforces to work on executive communication, to start identifying the most useful sources of engineers, to analyze the career site and suggest improvements, and to suggest ways to shorten time to fill. He encouraged them to include hiring managers on their teams and to bring in anyone who could add support or ideas. The teams were asked to spend a half-day a week on these task forces, and he added a few contract recruiters to help make up for the time lost. Fortunately, the recruiting budget for search was large enough that he could divert some to pay for contract recruiting.
• Step #3: He vastly increased communication. One of the task forces he set up decided to begin sending a weekly briefing to senior management on staffing changes, improvements, and successes. Whenever a position was filled, they made sure everyone in management knew how quickly it had been filled and which hiring managers had filled it.  This set up a gentle competition between hiring managers to improve their time to fill and got them more committed to interviewing candidates in a timely way and in making decisions. He always included some information about talent shortages, trends, demographics and other related data that helped reinforce the need for urgency and change. In fact, management began looking forward to his weekly updates and items in them began appearing as discussion topics in executive committee meetings.
• Step #4: HC began lobbying for a college recruiting program. Within his first 60 days, HC realized that in order to have any lasting impact on the aging workforce, he would need a vigorous college recruiting program. One of the task forces he had set up laid out the basic requirements for a program which HC took to his management. The fact that the suggestion came from a team of recruiters and hiring managers carried a lot of weight. One of the hiring managers actually presented the recommendation to the VP of HR and agreed to help promote the idea with technical leaders. This approach was very influential in getting final approval for a small pilot program.
• Step #5: He focused on leadership issues, not tactics. What really separates HC from so many others who take over a function like this is that he focused on longer-term strategic issues and not on day-to-day activities. He did not start questioning recruiters about their number of requisition, their skills, or their sourcing techniques. Each recruiter sat down with him and set personal goals which he held them accountable for. He assumed they would figure out how to meet those goals and amazingly, every one of them did.

By setting up task forces and by focusing on a few critical areas, he improved the overall credibility of the recruiting function and energized the recruiters. He got them involved and made them an integral part of his success. He shared the glory, so to speak, and was respected by both management and his team.

This is what leadership is all about: educating and setting expectations, engaging people to achieve goals, and then getting out of the way. As Benjamin Disraeli said, “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

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

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

Companies like Acxiom claim to have details on 97% of the U.S. population. Today, few can use all these, but it’s not hard to envision a time when all that data will be available through some combination of tools to anyone willing to pay for it.

What Then?

Candidates have always been only fodder for recruiting processes. Having access does not mean getting hires. Until now, many recruiters have been able to exploit imperfections in the availability of information to get an edge. It used to be that search firms and recruiters kept databases (file drawers) with details on candidates they largely had exclusive access to.

Job boards and resume databases started to erode that advantage. We’re almost to the point where there is almost no exclusivity of information. What little gap is remaining will close soon.

Now it becomes a game of being able to leverage that information. When there is no advantage to be gained from information, those who will succeed are the ones who can execute the best.

Recruiting is a combination of art and science. Successful execution requires knowing how to combine the two.

This is best illustrated by the stock market, where there is near-perfect information available to everyone. Yet there are winners and losers. Size, experience, and resources are no guarantee of success. Just ask the people at Bear Stearns!

Similarly, for recruiting, the winners will be those who can best combine the artistic and scientific elements.

Define Your Process

The first, and perhaps most critical, factor for employers will be their staffing processes. I recently dealt with a company that was struggling to fill jobs, despite having lots of qualified candidates. The problem was that they have no process, relying almost entirely on their corporate brand’s drawing power to find candidates. While that may work in terms of generating volume, the lack of process effectively neutralizes any advantage the brand provides.

A good process means having a rigorously defined and managed supply chain that segments sourcing, assessment, and selection. The first stage, sourcing, should provide a reliable, repeatable mechanism for delivering candidates who meet the most well-defined requirements, in volumes that the next stage can handle.

Sourcing consists primarily of lead generation and screening, in numbers adequate to fill the initial pipeline in a hiring process. It includes targeted research (lead generation), phone calls (screening), and continuous feedback on the quality and quantity of candidates fed into the pipeline.

It is highly repetitive work, with efficiency gained from ongoing feedback further refining the research, and reducing the number of phone calls needed in the screening process. This feedback-refinement loop creates a higher percentage of acceptable candidates presented for interviewing.

Sourcing efficiency improves proportionally to the quality and timeliness of feedback. The key here is feedback. Quality control without feedback is not possible. Delayed feedback wastes time, but inaccurate feedback (or no feedback at all) dooms the effort entirely.

In particular, feedback fills the gap between the initial spec and what the hiring managers really want in a hire. As the spec changes, each bit of new information is detailed and added to research or screening criteria and shared across teams. This feedback-adjustment loop continues until a high percentage of candidates are acceptable to hiring managers. This codification is also critical if a process is expected to scale. This is neither art nor science, but the ordinary activity of constructing reliable, repeatable processes.

Getting Realistic

In their book Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan write that strategic plans need to reflect the real world and link to operational plans. They also need to be tested for feasibility in the context of the organization’s capabilities. The point the book makes, unfortunately buried under a mountain of gibberish, is that organizations need to make plans that can be realistically supported with available resources.

“Realism is the heart of execution, but many organizations are full of people who are trying to avoid or shade reality.”

How many recruiting efforts fail because of unrealistic assessments of the capabilities of recruiters, access to talent, and the employer’s ability to manage the process in a time frame consistent with hiring needs? The recruiting infrastructure should support the strategy. The combination of recruiters, ATS, agency relationships, and boards should emerge from an evaluation of the organization’s goals.

All too often, decisions related to infrastructure are made piecemeal, using criteria unrelated to the needs of recruiting. A common example is selecting an ATS because of the vendor relationships in IT, not because of functionality.

Charan and Bossidy also advise striving “for simplicity in general.” Recruiters and recruiting organizations have a tendency to overly rely on technology and jump on every new fad that comes along because of the hype rather than any known or likely value.

For example, social networking and blogging may work for some people on some occasions, but many have little appreciation of how much effort is required or if the likely payoff justifies it. With blogging, most people don’t have enough interesting things to say on a regular basis to make writing a blog worthwhile, one that candidates would be interested in reading.

For most recruiters, the effort does not justify the value gained, except as an ego-stroking exercise. If the purpose of the blog is to provide candidates a realistic view into the workplace, then it would be the rare organization that has the courage to allow it to be written. Otherwise it would just be the usual drivel put out by most organizations that fools no one. Blogging makes for an interesting conversation and conference topic (how many sessions on employee referral programs and ATS implementations can you attend?) but it’s hardly a solution.

Keeping it simple means knowing what works or is likely to work and using that to maximum benefit. Recruiting success is not a function of how many tools are in use, but of using the right ones appropriately. Using something new just because it’s new is often a distraction that drains energy from other efforts, especially if it has not been preceded by an assessment of the likely benefits.

Putting the Recruit Back in Recruiting

The supply-chain analogy works up to a point for recruiting. Unlike a production process best managed with a just-in-time approach to raw materials, recruiters taking such an approach can only hope for the dregs left over in the talent pool.

With no information advantage, some recruiters are going to have to learn to recruit, perhaps for the first time. That means not expecting much from boards and getting more active. It also requires having a reliable supply. That means maintaining good metrics on sources of talent so you know what will work.

Joel Cheesman and a few other authors have recently written about the struggle that most employers have with leveraging even rudimentary Web functionality, let alone Web 2.0.

The tools and functionality will improve to make this all much easier, but these are just enablers. Without an understanding of what would make them useful (as opposed to just interesting) for candidates the impact they will have on recruiting will be little.

In a blog posting, Kari Quaas discusses the need to simplify processes, communicate with candidates, and use the golden rule: treat your applicants as you would like to be treated.

This is good advice, and it was true long before anyone heard the terms job board or ATS.

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

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

There’s been a lot of attention paid to the banalities of “corporate speak,” those words such as synergy, deliverables, scalable, and, my personal favorite, paradigm shift, which sounds suspiciously like a Led Zeppelin cover band or a Tom Clancy novel.

Additionally, there is a preponderance of words that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever to anyone outside of a specialized functional area.

As an accounting and finance recruiter, I am able to speak quite convincingly about Tier One ERPs, f(x) hedging, and econometrics. In fact, I can come across sounding a bit like a wonk, which I will consider a professional asset, given my inability to do simple arithmetic.

I feel a little bit like an expatriate; I’m able to speak the language with some proficiency, but throw in an idiom or colloquialism, and I’m rooting around for my dictionary.

Meaningless Catch-Phrases Take Off

Slowly but surely, these buzzwords have trickled into the public consciousness because most of these words are reserved for candidates specifically. The overwhelming majority of our etymology, in fact, was specifically created for less-than-desirable candidates.

As recruiters, it is vocational anathema to create a negative impression on a candidate, or to in any way create a negative reflection on the organization we represent. A successful recruiter strives to make each candidate feel like his or her interaction with the company was a successful one, even if it was, in fact, the worst disaster since the Hindenburg.

To prevent further confusion, I’ve provided a quick guide for candidates to decipher recruiter-speak with the hope that it eases the search process by providing the subtext of the terminology recruiters use the most.

While corporate recruiters are honest, we are never brutally honest. Our errors are of omission, and we tend to accentuate the positive, whether in presenting an opportunity, rejecting a candidate, or even closing an offer.

A Growing List

This list is by no means definitive, but it is a start?any suggestions or additions are greatly encouraged.

• Sourcing (v) Usage: “I sourced your resume and thought that you might be a great fit?” Definition: The entry of keywords onto a job board.
• Exciting (adj.): Usage: “We’ve got an exciting opportunity currently available?” Definition: An open headcount that needs to be filled as quickly as possible.
• Prescreen (n) Usage: “I’d like to set up a brief, exploratory prescreen.” Definition: The conversation by which recruiters ascertain if they can afford the talent in question.
• Visibility (adj.): Usage: “This role has high visibility to all levels of management throughout the organization.” Definition: The phrase most often used to describe a position with the smallest margin for error and highest turnover rate in the company.
• Growth (n): Usage: “This position is really a great growth opportunity.” Definition: The naturally occurring phenomenon by which workers find fulfillment doing exactly the same job in a different company.
• Ad-hoc (adj.) Usage: “There will also be some ad-hoc projects required.” Definition: A catch-all phrase used by corporations to describe the countless hours of manpower invested in activities unrelated to one’s job function, generally evoked at the whim of departmental heads.
• Expectations (n) Usage: “What are your expectations for your next position?” Definition: The test commonly used during the screening process to see whether the candidate is capable of reading a job description and changing tense from third- to first-person.
• Stable (adj.) Usage: “It’s a very stable business unit.” Definition: When the collective tenure of a department’s employees preempt any consideration of change or improvement upon the status quo.
• Reinventing (v) Usage: “We’ve had challenges in the past, but we’re reinventing ourselves and our processes.” Definition: A commonly used tactic employed by recruiters to explain recent or forthcoming layoffs (see: derecruit, reorganization, shared services, offshoring, outsourcing, et al).
• Competition (n) Usage: “You’ve got some pretty stiff competition for this position.” Definition: A word used by recruiters to preempt disappointment for the candidate by establishing expectations upfront. Alternative definition: A tactic employed to make an extremely undesirable position appear more enticing.
• Team (n) Usage: “We’re looking for a team player.” Definition: The intangible qualities associated with a candidate who will not make waves and demonstrates the willingness to accept abuse by supervisors and fellow staff.
• DOE (acr.) see also depending on experience.Usage: “I am unable to provide a salary range for the position as it is DOE.” Definition: Whereby a company unable to pay market rate for a position compensates by placing the blame on candidate deficiencies.
• Best practices (n): Usage: “We’re a best practices organization.” Phrase has not yet been defined. See meaning of life, UFOs.
• Work-life balance (phrase): Usage: “We put a real premium on work-life balance.” Definition: The ratio of one’s time at home to one’s time at work. The smaller the ratio, the more likely the employee is paid on an hourly basis.
• Overtime (n) Usage: “There may be some slight overtime involved.” Definition: An institution imposed by corporations to increase shareholder value without increasing headcount by maximizing working hours of employee population, up to and including Saturdays, holidays, and seminal life events.
• Feedback (n) Usage: “I’ll provide feedback from my hiring manager as soon as I get it.” Definition: Generally construed as a one- or two-word answer by which hiring managers summarily reject top candidates.
• Next steps (phrase) Usage: “We’ll be in touch regarding next steps.” Definition: A phrase used to put off rejecting marginal candidates for as long as possible until an offer is accepted by a more qualified party.
• References (n) Usage: “We’re going to begin checking your references.” Definition: The process by which a recruiter contacts previous coworkers of a potential hire from a list provided by the candidate in an attempt to bring objectivity to the hiring process.
• Background check (n) Usage: “You’re our final candidate, but I can’t extend an offer until your background check clears.” Definition: A control imposed by corporations in order to slow recruiters’ ability to extend an offer for a period of time that perfectly coincides with a candidate’s extension and acceptance of other offers. Alternate definition: An industry whose practitioners continue to thrive despite the Internet’s abilities to perform the same functionality at a fraction of the cost.
• Benefits (n) Usage: “We are proud to offer a comprehensive, competitive benefits package to all employees.” Definition: A tactic used by corporations to attract full-time employees and entice temporary ones into menial labor.
• Offer letter (n) Usage: “Congratulations on joining our team. I’m sending over an offer letter that contains all the information you’re going to need.” Definition: A document or set of documents that contains all information relevant to one’s employment with a company, denoting the last communication between recruiter and candidate until the candidate becomes eligible for transfer consideration.

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

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

It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who actually believes he’s playing a game with any chance of winning! No matter how many times these old ruses are exposed on television, you can always count on a new set of suckers to fall for a well-executed shell game, or some other old carnival leftover.

Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of taking advantage of innocent people, but I have a strange admiration for those who make a living skillfully pulling these tired old cons. The only one that fails to draw much admiration from me is the “bait-and-switch.” It’s really not even a con at all, as it requires absolutely no skill on the part of the perpetrator.

Car dealers used to be famous for this one, advertising a car at an unbelievably low price in the weekend newspaper. Lured by the notion of a fabulous deal, customers would show up at the lot, only to be told that particular car was already sold, but wouldn’t they like to see something even better? As unsophisticated at that old bit of business is, it’s still around.

A few years back I was contacted by a friend who works for a well-known company. They’d been doing some phenomenal work in the area of employment branding and attracting Millennials to the company, two areas of great interest for me.

My friend made small talk for a few minutes and then asked me outright: “Michael, how would you like to run talent acquisition at this company?” I was stunned (and delighted!). This was a phenomenal organization, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

In order to save time, no requisition had been created. Further, so as not to raise the suspicions of the recruiting team, my interview schedule had no title. I came in several days later and met with company leadership. The position was not well-defined, but I was assured that was because I was expected to develop a new talent acquisition process myself. I returned home and waited.

First, my friend called and asked how I liked my visit. I told him I enjoyed it very much. Some weeks later, I was asked to have a follow-up phone call with several more people, which I did. Several weeks later, another set of phone calls were arranged, and finally, a third set. At the end of this process, my friend called back and offered me a position two levels below the one I thought I was interviewing for.

Don’t feel sorry for me! I might as well have been walking around some used car lot with my checkbook looking for the “cream-puff” I saw in the Sunday paper. I’d been the willing victim in a classic bait-and-switch!

As organizations begin to really struggle for talent, they’ve dreamed up all sorts of ways to get job-seekers in the door. Every way, that is, except being clear about their hiring needs.

Some people will do just about anything to attract candidates, even at the cost of losing them in the long run. I could have easily figured out what was happening to me, and you can too if you look at the clues I missed.

Wake Up and Smell the Signs

This is useful information for anyone: whether you’re a corporate recruiter trying to manage a panicky hiring manager, a third-party recruiter trying to figure out what your client really wants, or even if you’re one of the thousands of people who plan to look for a new job in 2008.

• No clear job description. At no point in the interview process was I ever presented with a job description. People can argue back and forth whether they’re sufficient for recruiting a job opening, but I believe they’re definitely necessary. Beware any hiring manager who won’t discuss specific job responsibilities with you, but instead just asks you to “find talent, we’ll put them in the right job once we get them here.” That’s the mark of an organization that doesn’t understand its talent portfolio.
• No title on my interview schedule. More and more recruiters I know are reporting that hiring managers and human resource partners are asking them to leave job titles off of interview schedules. The reasoning goes like this: if someone takes a vacation day or two to come out for an in-person interview, they’ll accept a lesser offer because by then they’ll have fallen hopelessly in love with the company and the hiring manager. By then, the title and salary will no longer mean anything to them. Again, insist on clarity from your hiring partners. If they have an opening for a Director of Marketing, then presumably they’ve done an analysis to determine that a director-level hire is critical to the successful operation of the business. Trying to hire at the manager level means one of two things: either they didn’t scope the job out correctly in the first place, or they want a director but only want to pay for a manager.
• Dragging out the process. People who study behavioral economics love to point out the fact that human beings are fundamentally lazy. Indeed, as the recruiting process draws out, and a job-seeker feels like he or she has already invested opportunity cost into the process, he or she might be willing to take a job they wouldn’t have taken if simply presented with it upfront. I imagine it’s a bit like buying a car or a time-share. Do you really believe it takes hours and hours for a salesperson to come up with the forms and approvals they need to sell you a high-value item like this? Of course it doesn’t. Time is on their side, and the longer you sit in that sales office, the more likely you are to sign the papers just to end the agony!
• Emphasis on “great things to come” instead of the job that’s open. As a recruiter, I’ve spoken to candidates hundreds of times about the up-side to different jobs. Candidates are sometimes disappointed by the salary the company can pay, or wish they’d had a bigger title. It’s a recruiter’s job to help the job-seeker see the whole picture and present a realistic and objective perspective. Recruiters who know their companies well can talk about how past candidates have used a particular role to advance their career, or provide insights on titling within the organization. This is appropriate and ethical. What was interesting about my experience was that the “great things to come” were all anyone talked about! Again, with no job description to work from, it was easy for people to weave an entire world of possibilities with no basis in reality. A related tactic is to belittle someone’s credentials: “Well, you didn’t exactly graduate from Harvard, you know. Also, your company is well-known for title inflation.” Both tactics are used to make someone believe they’re making a move to something of higher relative value.

Matching job seekers with opportunities is hard work, and it requires honesty and authenticity on the part of all participants. Your organization should have a crystal-clear idea of what types of people are successful in it, and it should be honest with those who invest time in your recruiting process.

Hiring managers are learning that talent isn’t so easy to find these days, and good candidates are commanding higher salaries. HR partners are scrambling to figure out why entire departments are walking out the door. Recruiters are being called upon more and more to explain the new realities of the global employment marketplace, and the implications of a multi-generational workforce.

Getting someone to sign an offer letter is no longer a guarantee that they’ll just “stick it out” for a few years. I’ve seen people leave in under a month once they decide that they’ve been had.

(By the way, bait-and-switch is NOT the same as an exploratory interview. They often look similar from the outside, but they couldn’t be more different. I’ll discuss exploratory interviews in another article.)

These are challenging times for those of us in talent acquisition. The temptation to lure candidates into your organization before they have a clear understanding of the job that’s actually open can be powerful.

Does it work? It depends on your outcome. If your outcome is to attract the right person, get them into a job they feel great about, and watch them deliver long-term business results, then you’re out of luck. That happens about as often as a tourist outsmarting a “friendly” Three Card Monte hustler!

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

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

The question I pose is simple: Do you feel the same way?

Over the years, I have worked with many different recruiters and I often wondered what made them decide to get into this profession. Nobody says, “I want to be a recruiter when I grow up.” So how did they get here? Frankly speaking, it has been my experience that quite a few of them really shouldn’t be doing this, but since there is no bar to entry, our profession takes all who wish to be here. That is not always a good thing.

If, for example, you are one of the many people who jumped on the bandwagon to become a recruiter during the dot-com era because there was a lot of money to be made, you might want to rethink that decision.

Truth be told, I was not altogether unhappy when things started to go downhill in the last bust. Why? Because in many ways, it was akin to a forest fire, or a natural phenomenon that would burn off the deadwood (i.e., recruiters there for a quick buck who do not care and never will).

I see what we do as important. As recruiters, we not only have the responsibility of filling positions with great employees but we have the added responsibility of helping our candidates make decisions that affect their futures and their lives. That is a big responsibility, and I take it very seriously. On some level, it’s almost like helping someone find their mate and this is a huge deal.

Realizing the important role we play in other people’s lives as a recruiter is key, because people’s jobs are one of the most important aspects of their lives. We spend some of our best, most productive time at work, so we better be passionate about what we do or we are not going to be very good at it. We probably won’t be too happy either.

My own personal choice of clients has been one of careful selection, both for me and my candidates. I have always been very selective about choosing clients. I can assure you that I discuss all aspects of the position, good and bad, with my candidates. I have turned down many projects after meeting the executive team and seeing they were not serious about the importance of recruiting or of making the right hiring decisions.

As such, I believe that if I would not work there, the candidate should not work there either. I need to sleep at night and can’t very well tell a candidate that a position is a great opportunity unless I really see it that way.

As recruiters, we can’t always be sure if this is the “right” company and if they will really take care of their employees. However, learning to ask the right questions and doing your research will help you make an educated decision. This will help you feel good that you did your best for the company and the candidate by creating a hire that is mutually rewarding and in place for the long term.

As recruiters, we have to keep that thought in mind not only for ourselves but for the candidates whose lives we will ultimately change. The decision is really theirs to make, but if you are a really good salesperson (because that’s what recruiters are) you have the power to persuade them in one direction or the other. That is a power that should not be abused.

I have recently made the decision to stop doing project work and take a full-time position with a Fortune 100 organization. I was tired of going from one contract to another, always working myself out of a job and never quite being a part of the team. I researched a lot of companies and came up with what I felt was my A list. I then aggressively pursued those companies and landed a great position with an organization I can feel good about and honestly tell candidates this is a great career environment. Can you say that about your organization?

An Honest Assessment

Having said all of this, I would hope you will take stock of how you operate and ask the following questions:

• Do I really believe the work I am doing is important?
• Do I have both the client’s and the candidate’s best interests at heart?
• Do I really understand how my influence can affect other people’s lives?
• Did I get into this profession for the right reasons or was it just the money?
• Is this really what I want to do for the rest of my career?

If you have answered “no” to any of these questions, I suspect you are not jazzed about the culture, the mission, and the opportunities you represent. This is very unfortunate because what you do as a recruiter is more than just build great organizations. You also radically change the lives of the candidates who put their trust in your honesty and in your judgment.

That power is a very big responsibility. Change can be difficult, especially if you have been doing something for a long time.

I have a son who is a senior in college, and we talk a lot about what he wants to be when he grows up. Fortunately, he has a pretty good brain and many options. The number-one thing I try to instill in his mind is that you don’t trade money for misery; you have to feel good about your job.

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

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

This year’s Expo added even more opportunities to learn from those organizations honored, as the agenda included a new panel discussion featuring selected honorees discussing their organizations’ award-winnings efforts. In addition, previous award winners, such as Michael McNeal, Dan Hilbert, Michael Homula, and Expo chair Trudy Knoepke-Campbell (all of whom have since become icons in the recruiting profession), were on-hand to chat with attendees.

As someone who tracks HR best practices (as well as serves as a judge in the awards process), I am privileged to be able to share my assessment of their innovative approaches and groundbreaking results.

Best Diversity Program: Sodexo

A leading provider of food and facilities management services, Sodexo has worked hard over the past few years to excel in all areas of recruiting and talent management, and its work with regards to attracting, developing, and retaining diverse talent is the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Whatever you are doing to promote diversity pales in comparison to the Sodexo approach, which combines extensive metrics with significant rewards for managers and executives in order to produce results.

Some highlights that led Sodexo to win the diversity award this year include:

• Sodexo developed the Diversity Index Scorecard.
  • The scorecard contains both quantitative and qualitative measures (qualitative measures look at behaviors that lead to building diversity, while quantitative measures focus on enumerating talent acquisition, development, and retention activities that drive diversity, including promotions).
  • Ninety-one percent of candidate slates included interviews with diverse individuals.
  • The scorecard tied 10-15% of the manager bonus to diversity scorecard outcomes, and it embedded diversity in the performance appraisal, which determines merit increases.
  • The scorecard tied 25% of the executive bonus to diversity scorecard outcomes.
• It set diversity and inclusion as one of the company’s six strategic goals.
• Sodexo coordinated diversity initiatives across hiring, development, promotion, and retention.
• It created a recruiter incentive system that provides rewards for diversity results.
• Sodexo established a separate diversity sourcing strategy.

The results include a 38% increase in qualified ethnically/racially diverse candidates and a 32% increase in qualified female candidates.

Best Retention Program: AIMCO

The work done by the recruiting team at AIMCO can only be described as breathtaking. Its “dollarization” of HR results, forward-looking predictive metrics, and general businesslike approach make even the iconic Google look like a has-been. I have researched AIMCO’s approach to HR, and I find it to be the one that everyone should emulate.

Some elements of its approach to retention that demonstrate its advanced thinking are:

• The company implemented a “chargeback” model, in which internal HR services must be competitive and effective in order to be utilized by managers.
• It established an extensive analytical framework to identify and predict turnover trends.
• AIMCO correlated turnover to Controllable Operating Net Income (CNOI) in order to demonstrate to managers that managing turnover is a significant contributor to meeting budget goals. Related findings include:
  • Properties could expect to gain an average of over $16,000 in CNOI improvement per retained employee.
  • Properties with less than 25% annualized turnover could expect 60% higher CNOI performance versus those with greater turnover.
  • Salary waste alone can account for up to 3% of a property’s annual CNOI.
  • On average, for every Community Manager who exits the company, eight additional employees will leave that property before it normalizes its operations.
  • Every 1% increase in retention is equivalent to over $403,000 in recruiting and training costs, salary waste, and operational performance.
• It launched EE surveys at all stages of the employee lifecycle in order to collect information on turnover drivers and to drive predictive modeling efforts.
• For some jobs, it has reduced the time-to-fill by 10 days down to an amazing 20-day period by anticipating future needs and starting the recruitment process before an actual requisition is issued.
• AIMCO created an online card game for employees that assesses what is important to them individually and determines whether or not those preferences are strengths or weaknesses of their current jobs. A report is provided at the end of the game that provides each employee with an individualized action plan to drive engagement, productivity, and retention. (This innovative approach for identifying what motivates each individual employee in order to improve his or her productivity and retention is the best that I’ve seen anywhere in the world.)
• It developed a retention toolkit for managers.
• The company integrated retention-goal planning into each manager’s performance goals.
• AIMCO measures turnover eight different ways, including:
  • Pre-productive turnover (its concept of demonstrating salary waste when losing an employee is an excellent example of dollarization). Working with the COO, it helps determine the point in an employee’s career when he or she begins to make a positive ROI. Individuals who leave before that point cost the firm and cause salary waste.
  • Short-term turnover probability (predicting who’s at risk and where turnover is likely to occur is something that few firms have even attempted).

Most Innovative Employee Referral Program: AmTrust Bank

Clearly AmTrust Bank has demonstrated that a relatively small financial institution headquartered in Ohio can do some world-class work. Up to 78% of its hires come from employee referrals, which has allowed the bank to both reduce agency fees from 21% of budgeted recruiting expense down to about 3% and to avoid spending money on newspaper ads. The bank has found that these referral hires have no negative impact on diversity while excelling in on-the-job performance and retention.

Some compelling program features and results include:

• AmTrust Bank created the LINX referral program in 2006, which deputizes all employees to play key roles in recruiting.
• Its service level agreements guarantee response to all referrals within three business days. (I have found that responsiveness is the number one factor in successful employer referral programs.)
• It correlated turnover by department to staffing concentration by source. When ERP was revealed to produce lower turnover, it focused the sourcing strategy on referrals, which not only saved money, but drove company-wide turnover down by 18%. (It’s also important to correlate hiring sources with on-the-job performance in order to make your workforce more productive.)
• The company created an Employee Referral Advocate position solely dedicated to managing the program, which serves as the central point of contact for all employees and referrals.
• Referrals and referring employees are updated with quality feedback following each stage of the process. (Individual feedback to individual employees who make weak referrals is far superior to implementing onerous program rules.)
• Every company employee is provided with employer referral cards. But its program has an innovative element that randomly stops employees and asks them to produce a referral card. If they do, they are given a $50 reward for carrying them around.
• Leveraged monthly prize contests drive program participation.
• Total recruiting program savings total more than $500,000.
• AmTrust Bank established referral relationships with local diversity organizations to drive uptick in bilingual candidates.
• Program introduction is embedded in new-hire orientation.
• Referral bonuses are paid within 30 days of a candidate starting. The standard bonus is $500, although some hot jobs can receive up to $2,000.

Recruiting Department of the Year: Intuit

Once again, Michael McNeal has put together an outstanding team that continues to innovate, especially in the areas of workforce planning and statistical modeling.

Highlights of his team’s recent efforts include:

• It created an analyst position to develop predictive models that have been up to 98% accurate.
• The company centralized the sourcing function with its business unit, which aligned recruiters and program management teams with employment branding, employee referral, diversity, early-career talent pool, internal and external networking, candidate experience, and Internet sourcing.
• The separate Talent Acquisition Logistics team owns the post-hire, pre-start timeline to ensure new hires transition from candidates to employees smoothly. (Its broad view of the candidate experience lifecycle is the model to follow.)
• It established a talent acquisition planning model in which unit-aligned recruiters help managers determine what type of talent will best meet their operational needs. During this process, managers have access to workforce information regarding compensation, talent pools, diversity, alumni rehiring, referrals, and internal mobility.
• Talent Acquisition (TA) created a customized database that they call the “Bat Computer.” Just as the Batmobile allows Batman to respond quickly and save the day, the TA “Bat Computer” has drastically increased their productivity and efficiency. The tool takes information from their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), budget forecasts and actuals, hiring forecast and trend data, and other information to address business goals. This tool allows them to monitor TA performance, recruiter productivity, and candidate generation strategy performance, and highlight best practices immediately.

The results are reflected in its recent employee survey, which shows that overall employee satisfaction at Intuit is 4% higher than Sirota’s best-in-class rankings. For the seventh consecutive year, Intuit has ranked on Fortune magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” in the U.S. Since 2005, its revenue per employee has increased. It is also spending less money to fill vacancies from voluntary and involuntary attrition.

Best College Recruiting Program: Ernst & Young

Ernst & Young (E&Y) once again demonstrates its leadership within its industry by updating one of the largest college recruiting programs (over 5,000 hires per year). By treating campuses like business clients, it has produced significant results.

Highlights of recent innovations include:

• Its program now touches over 300 business-school campuses in North America.
• It leverages former interns in their senior year as campus ambassadors. (This is a best practice that everyone should copy.)
• Ernst & Young used an online video development contest to get current students to write and produce videos starring themselves and talking about what was important to them in a career in professional services. The winning video team won a trip with E&Y’s CEO.
• The company leverages a campus-centric team approach to ensure strong relationship standards are fostered and maintained. Each campus team is comprised of:
  • A campus coordinating partner, campus recruiter, campus champion (senior manager), and a diversity champion.
  • Each team is also supported by additional professionals representing lines of service, geographies, etc.
  • On average, large schools have teams ranging between 15-20 core members.
• E&Y chairman, executive board, and all vice chairs lead campus recruiting efforts by attending faculty conferences and speaking to student groups on site.
• Each business unit has five strategic goals related to campus recruiting in their balanced scorecards; many business units have now added campus recruiting goals into managers’ personal development plans.
• It established a recruiting strategy that embeds brand building into all student touchpoints throughout the academic lifecycle.
• E&Y is the most thorough corporate user of Facebook to enable delivery of targeted messaging to students and student groups using a channel/forum that students prefer. Its policy requires that all posts made by students on Facebook are responded to within 5 business days.
• It holds numerous conferences aimed at attracting diverse college students.
• Intern to full-time hire conversion rate is more than 90%.
• E&Y ranked as the #3 most desirable employer among business students according to Universum and #3 on Business Week’s “Best Places to Launch a Career” list. It has also been named to Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For” list 10 years in a row.
• It reengineered its campus careers website to support a segmented-by-invitation application model (students who receive an invitation to apply are redirected to a customized online application). Highlights of its careers site include:
  • It has vanity URLs for each major campus.
  • There is a “Picture Yourself” tool that lets students see where in E&Y their majors and personal interests could take them, complete with real video interviews of people in those roles.
  • The “E&Y 360″ lets students see day-in-the-life scenarios of actual employees.
  • The website was rated #8 on Universum’s “Most Impressive Overall” ranking of employment websites among undergraduate students.
  • Its careers site now accounts for 60% of all EY.com traffic.

Best Employer Brand: Ernst & Young

E&Y also won the award for the best employer brand, demonstrating once again that organizations with a strong heritage and conservative business standards can excel at innovation when the business demands it.

Highlights of its approach to employment branding include:

• Its brand is based on three pillars: inclusiveness, flexibility, and continuous learning/development.
• There are monthly e-mail opt-in news blasts.
• Its extensive Facebook profile, group, and messaging allow students to dialogue with one another and current E&Y employees about careers in professional services.
• The Facebook profile is refreshed weekly with new content.
• There is extensive leveraging of the business press and PR to position E&Y as a progressive employer capable of launching a phenomenal career.
• It built a culture campaign featuring stories of E&Y employees that replaced stale corporate policies. The stories were chosen to emphasize the “people first” culture elements once defined by policies.
• E&Y participates in corporate recognition contests like Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” ranking, in which E&Y is the only “Big Four” company and one of a tiny handful of companies overall to be ranked consecutively for 10 years.
• Notice its recruiting stats regarding boomerangs: 24% of all managers and senior managers; 40% return within one year and 29% within 1-3 years. Plus 27% of professional hires come from employee referrals.
• Its world-class alumni program features a dedicated website, monthly newsletter, and a series of national, regional, and local events.

Most Effective Use of Staffing Metrics: Wipro

Around the globe, Wipro is cementing its position as one of the largest and most successful IT service and business process outsourcing companies. Once again this year, Wipro demonstrated that when it comes to building world-class business processes, its own HR organization is not exempt. This past year, the Bangalore, India-headquartered company:

• Leveraged risk auditors to associate the benefit/risk of recruiting performance to its bottom line. (Risk analysis is absent from most recruiting departments’ analytics.)
• Leveraged in-house quality analysts proficient in Six Sigma, LEAN, and TRIZ to continuously monitor and establish business performance-oriented metrics.
• Implemented a performance-management model that evaluates staffing function performance both pre- and post-hire.
• Segmented staffing metrics to focus on actives, passives, seniors, and alumni.
• Migrated all HR/recruiting data to an enterprise data warehouse, enabling extensive data modeling (predictive, associative, sequential, etc.).
• Created visual dashboards for all key stakeholders, including third-party vendors.

Best Corporate Careers Site: KPMG

KPMG is another firm that is innovating in a traditionally conservative industry. This year, it focused on revamping its corporate careers site to allow anyone to explore how its education and personal interests relate to opportunities at KPMG.

Some highlights of its new approach include:

• Employee Career Architecture allows visitors to explore career options with an interactive “build your own career path” mapping tool. (Interactivity and personalization are critical factors in careers website development.)
• A “matching majors” function allows college students to see what careers at KPMG leverage their majors and vice versa in order to explore what types of courses are required to pursue a career path that interests them at the company.
• A quick poll with live results features a periodic question about candidate-job expectations. Visitors who participate can see the results immediately.
• Its Career Journey video series profiles real KPMG employees ranging in roles from interns to partners.
• Weekly Web design and content refresh meetings ensure that the site content is always fresh.

Most Strategic Use of Recruiting Technology: TruGreen

The design of this company’s process demonstrates deep insight into the future of recruiting, in which statistics and modeling will help firms predict business problems and opportunities utilizing people-related data. When it comes to organizations demonstrating that HR can not only partner but contribute directly to the business, this national landscaping arm of Service Master leads the way.

Groundbreaking efforts taken this past year include:

• It architected a Recruiting Decision Support System to enable the recruiting function to answer several key business strategy questions related to talent, such as: Does the talent actually exist in all markets? Within the allocated compensation levels, can the talent be acquired? Will recruiting resources be required to support regional operations?
• The system enables TruGreen to proactively and scientifically assess the probability, risks, and strategic impact that hiring will have on planned capital expansion and growth.
• The system leverages millions of records of procured data on occupations, skills, competencies, wages, and demographics to predict using a single numerical, indexed value for the availability/scarcity of talent pools to meet growth predictions in 229 defined expansion markets.
• The predictive model is used to drive all elements of a geographically-segmented recruiting strategy.

Final Thoughts

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I would like to thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR. It should be obvious from both the record attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the war for talent is still going strong.

Everyone should also take note that the rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing and that the one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more businesslike. More and more recruiting functions are leveraging statistical modeling and heuristics to anticipate and manage future events. This trend means that more and more decisions in recruiting will be made based on data and facts, rather than on intuition and tradition. If you’re behind in developing advanced metrics, you will soon be non-competitive.

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

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

Breaking Down the AAA Approach

Attributes provide you with the leadership acumen necessary to manage a specific group or team, and in our case, we are dealing with recruiting teams. Why are attributes important? Consider this example: recruiters often use the art of psychological reciprocity, which states that if you give somebody credit for his or her intelligence, they are mentally and morally bound to give you credit for yours. This is a common tactic used by Type A recruiters to probe for a close or even draw out feedback to their own accomplishments. It sounds a little like reverse psychology.

Type A personalities are highly competitive, so it is important that you develop effective attributes in order to successfully manage your team and common behavior patterns associated with it. So use the following:

• Consistency is important when you are managing a recruiting team. You are consistent in your decisions, your attitude, and how you manage individually as well as collectively.
• Vision matters. I remember Michael Jordan saying during an ESPN interview that he envisioned himself winning a championship, completing a shot, and reaching all of his goals before he ever did it. The same applies when you are managing the recruitment process. You must envision the success of your team first.
• Flexibility is very important, especially when you have an office full of type A go-getters. If you provide flexibility to your team, you have essentially created trust. This goes a long way from the traditional hands-on approach, which can be taken in a negative way. You are flexible and encourage communication, not intimidation. You are flexible with ideas and strategy or you’re open to change (also called adaptability!). This attitude encourages open communication.
• Focus keeps your team on track and whether it is a weekly production review or mentoring a junior recruiter, your focus must always be consistent so that your team will stay on track. As managers, you are always being looked at by the team above you and the one working with you. Your focus and determination is infectious.
• Commitment will provide continuing reassurance and confidence in your ability to provide support to your recruiting team.

Association gives you the ability to network with your team in as many areas a possible. As a manager, it is important that you encourage and allow the association of your team in as many different areas as possible collectively which will not only increase your marketing but showcases your organization as a team or brand, not an individual. A great example of this would be having your entire team register online with many of the different networking sites, as well as local organizations like SHRM. Your role as a manager is to coordinate these associations in a positive way, not as an inconvenient task. Your team will soon see the value of association and the benefits because of it.

Association has a lot of branding characteristics as well. You can measure the brand equity within your own recruiting team by the total value of the brand to your team. Are they passionate and proud of their organization and eager to be associated with it? Do they feel your passion and are you able to inspire them to do better? These questions will give you an idea of your association and its brand equity.

Application is how you apply your management skills successfully in order to achieve the recruiting team’s success. How you manage your team is important because everybody on your team has a different level of skill or experience. In combination with the five attributes discussed above, you are developing your team to achieve more by focusing on each individual’s strengths and encouraging them to develop more. This is called application. Example: If you have a recruiter who is excellent on the phone but is not a strong interviewer, then you need to mentor and coach this recruiter in a positive way while recognizing their strengths as well. Sound familiar?

Successfully applying good leadership and management skills through positive reinforcement reduces stress and inspires others to do well. The best way to incorporate application is to let each member know what they can do in order for the team to be successful and how their strengths are helping everyone reach that goal. If you allow each team member to apply his or her strengths while mentoring and coaching any weaknesses, you will develop a much better team overall.

If you are having difficulty producing that winning team, then I urge you to use the AAA approach. Get your team on-board and explain what you are doing. It is easy for a manager to think he or she is doing the right thing. But if you have a plan and focus on your own attributes as a leader, your association as a group or team, and your application of your management style, then you will see a noticeable difference in your relationships at work and the attainment numbers at the end of the year.

Aloha!

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

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

In corporate recruiting departments, are we applying the same logic? I have asked many in corporate America what makes a “good” recruiter. The overwhelming response is that a “good” recruiter is someone who handles candidates well and develops strong relationships with the hiring managers. It is a rare response that even includes anything related to sourcing or screening.

From a behavioral perspective, working well with people (candidates or hiring managers) falls into the people-skills category. Putting a finer point on it, the best recruiters are generally speaking, good salespeople. In other words, their genius is closing deals: selling the right candidates on the company and the hiring managers on the right candidates. Persuading, influencing, and convincing people to do something are the basic attributes of a salesperson.

Finding the right candidates in today’s world is long on process/procedure and short on persuasion/influence. Sourcing is highly process-driven, mundane, and repetitive work. Even with the best tools in the world, this job is about 90% sitting in one place reviewing resumes to select the best few candidates who match the job description or profile. Up to this point, there is virtually no people-interaction involved at all.

The next step in the process is to reach out to the best few candidates and attempt to screen them over the phone. The screening process is also very repetitive and mundane, where you have to ask all the candidates the same questions and document the answers consistently so that the appropriate candidates are moved through the process. Of course, there is also the need for OFCCP compliance and other legal issues.

Once you find the appropriately skilled and screened candidate you must then get them into the ATS; either by having the candidate apply or by entering them into the ATS directly. This too, is a very administrative, process-oriented activity. So, sourcing is more of an administrative or process-driven job, where the ability to stay in one place and work for hours without interaction with people is required.

Separating and Defining the Roles

Over the years, I have found the separation of these two major functions in recruiting to yield far better results at both ends than asking one person to do both. Sourcing, to be effective, has to be closely watched, measured, and tuned to produce the most effective results.

It is far more difficult to apply clearly defined, accurate metrics in recruiting. We all try to measure the source of hire, time-to-hire, submittals-to-interview ratio, interview-to-offer ratio, cost-per-hire, and myriad other measures of recruiting metrics. Asking a salesperson to keep track of these is difficult at best, impossible at worst. Asking administrative people to track these items makes them feel comfortable.

Another major benefit of separation is the ability to scale the sourcing function. At times of highly active hiring, the sourcing team needs to be able to step up and produce large volumes of candidates. When hiring slows or stops, this group will have to reduce the team size, and maybe even eliminate the group altogether depending on the conditions your organization faces.

After that, determining what to track, how to track it, and who is responsible for monitoring and correcting problems is also important. Is sourcing centralized or decentralized? There are arguments for both. Where at all possible, centralizing is the most cost-effective because you can more easily track the metrics and performance of your team as well as shift work load around more easily. Company size and complexity may require more than one sourcing group.

Another benefit to this structure is to handle the specialized, highly difficult sourcing projects. Generally, these are passive in nature and require a very sharp, first call in order to have a chance at convincing the target to consider a job change. With this structure, you can either have the senior sourcing team manager do this work or even better; put your top-notch recruiters on these types of direct-sourcing projects to add spice to their life and put the best person on the phone with the passive candidates. These types of searches happen but are rare. Therefore, they are best handled as the exception rather than the rule.

What about the very important candidate referral program? Again, this is a very critical program long on administrative process that fits well in the sourcing team purview.

Getting the referred candidates into the system and added to appropriate requisitions or other referral-specific processes is vital if this program is to be successful. Many of these programs operate below acceptable levels because the referred candidates are never talked to or given the top priority they deserve. Further, there is little or no communication to them letting them know where they are in the process.

Administratively oriented people will follow the process and make sure this function works to maximum advantage when the process exists to do so.

In the world of corporate recruiting, are we asking our bricklayers to carry bricks? Recognizing that the two major activities in the full life-cycle of recruiting are two totally different job types is a first step in building a more effective recruiting organization. The next step is determining what ratio of the two types of skills your organization requires.

The volume of hiring, availability of talent, complexity of the jobs, among many other factors, will determine the ratios. Once you have established these, you can then scale much more easily with the administrative talent, plug new people in more quickly, and greatly enhance the efficiency of the entire recruiting group.

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

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

As a consequence, they also developed practices around compensation, evaluation, and sourcing, to enhance the effectiveness of their recruiting efforts.

My earlier article on this subject was not meant to be the start of a series. The title was borrowed from the Mel Brooks movie History of the World, Part I. Apparently, hardly anyone picked up on that. I did receive a deluge of email from ERE readers who asked for a follow-up piece, and so I decided to write one.

Ancient Egypt

Formal recruitment practices existed as far back as 2686 B.C. in Egypt during the period known as the Old Kingdom. There existed a system for recruiting a militia from the nomes (tribes) and there were officials responsible for training and for logistics, which already displayed a high level of organization. By 1550 B.C., the period known as the New Kingdom, recruiting had become part of the formal duties of the king.

An inscription from the reign of Amenemhat II from Memphis (in Egypt, not Tennessee) included the requirement that the king was responsible for recruiting manpower for the kingdom’s needs. This required the Pharaoh to ensure that there were enough men of appropriate talent for an expedition to destroy Syria and other enemies.

Formal recruitment had become a necessity because the system of the tribes providing soldiers was unreliable in terms of both quantity and quality of talent.

Ancient Greece

The Greeks had huge needs for recruitment for their armies. The Hellenistic states were small, with small populations, and frequently at war. They relied heavily on mercenaries, which had to be recruited from elsewhere. By 35 A.D. large numbers of non-Greeks were being hired as soldiers.

Two types of recruitment were common in this period. It was either carried out by recruiting agents or through diplomatic channels and interstate treaties that included clauses allowing citizens to serve as troops for the contracting parties. These mercenaries were well-paid, and usually only hired for nine- or 10-month contracts.

The Greeks limited the term of the contracts of mercenaries because they did not want non-citizens getting too deeply involved in their society. It was the first guest worker program. But reality proved otherwise. Mercenaries were just that, mercenary?hired guns. Their loyalty was questionable, readily undermined by more lucrative offers. Integrating them into the regular army without proper training limited their effectiveness. There was a constant need to acculturate and train them, which was expensive given their short tenure. This ultimately forced a situation where these “temps” were more or less permanently domiciled within a state and given grants of land to keep them there. It was a way of securing a supply of troops and linking them to their employers.

Recruitment was a serious business. For many of the Greek states, their survival, and the lives of their citizens, literally depended on it. In one instance, in 318 A.D, Eumenes of Cardia, being faced with an advancing enemy, sent out a force of recruiters with large sums of money to hire soldiers from surrounding states.

To ensure the success of this effort, much publicity was given to the high pay offered and particular groups were targeted to hear about it. One recruiter went to Crete, because the population on that island was isolated and poorer. In a short time they had recruited over 2,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry.

Part of the reason the Greeks were short of soldiers was because of some restrictive laws and unusual practices. Laws in some cases limited much of the citizenry to working in only police roles. One of the more interesting practices was the requirement in ancient Sparta for a soldier to have an older male lover as his mentor! He was even fined if the older lover was not a reputable sort. Plato had made the case for this in his Dialogues that the best army of all would be made up of pairs of male lovers who “…when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world.” Apparently the policy in the Spartan army was “do ask, do tell.”

China

The contribution of the Chinese to recruiting was the development of formal employment testing. The Chinese had introduced a system of examinations for entry to the civil service as early as the seventh century A.D., but it was used to only hire a very small number of civil servants, and then only from the aristocracy. Starting in the 10th century, during the Sung dynasty the system was expanded to fill most positions and to recruit commoners.

The tests were long. First a candidate had to take the regional examination. It was closely proctored, recopied, assigned a number, and then graded. Only a very small number of candidates passed. Next came the metropolitan exam, taken at the capital city, which was also closely proctored, recopied, assigned a number, and graded. About 15% to 20% of the candidates passed this second exam (around 200 per year).

The exam was based entirely on the Confucian Classics. The candidates had to memorize the Five Classics, interpret passages, master their literary style, and use Confucian philosophy to interpret the Classics and construct political advice. The tests were so rigorous that the candidates who passed represented the very best minds in the country.

Statistically, it would be far easier for a person to be admitted into Harvard than it would be to pass the civil service exam in ancient China. The government bureaucracy represented the top one percent of the top one percent of the population in terms of talent, education, intelligence, and, above all, ethical training. Contrast that with what government bureaucracies are today, anywhere in the world. We’ve come a long way.

Conclusion

In researching this article, it has been interesting to learn how ancient societies developed recruiting practices. The reasons for these were not always the right ones, and in some cases, the effects were not positive. For example, a lot of labor law developed in response to problems with recruiting.

During the Middle Ages, shortages of talent and the problems with finding qualified workers gave rise to the first employment laws. The Black Death had ravaged Europe, with some countries losing as much as half their populations. This caused massive shortages of labor, and the survivors found they could charge a premium for their work and choose what to accept.

The result was the creation of the first labor law in 1350 that set wages and restricted mobility. Touted as a way to maintain stability, it was nothing but an attempt to reduce competition for talent and keep the working class in its place. Europe is still dealing with the legacy of that law seven centuries later.

Still, much of what occurred in recruiting was of positive value. It’s humbling to think that centuries ago, recruiters were doing what we do today. The next time you have a difficult recruiting assignment, think of that recruiter setting off across the Mediterranean to recruit soldiers on Crete, sending out town criers ahead of him to drum up interest. We have it easy.

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

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

It was a really exciting time in my career, and I remember the thrill of filling jobs with the great candidates we’d found. Each month the recruiters would compete for small awards: “Most jobs filled,” “Shortest time-to-fill,” etc.

My sourcer and I certainly didn’t win every month, but we did win. More exciting to me, though, was watching that backlog begin to disappear, and walking though the building and seeing all the great people we’d hired.

Then my manager was promoted. I didn’t do anything different, but my monthly one-on-ones with my new supervisor weren’t fun at all. My first manager liked to review my dashboard metrics with me, and we talked about what I was doing to improve my recruiting efficiency. My new manager never talked about metrics; instead, she would open a file folder filled with emails she’d printed and notes from phone conversations.

“I heard from a very senior-level person that you were kind of slow in returning a phone call a few weeks back,” she’d say.

“Gosh,” I’d stammer, as I opened my notebook. “Who was it? I take notes whenever I return a call.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she’d say. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Our conversations moved away from reviewing statistics and metrics, and I began to feel more and more like I was testifying in front of a congressional subcommittee! Our meetings would always end the same way.

“How am I doing?” I’d ask.

“You’re doing?ok,” would be her even-toned reply. She never elaborated, and that was all she’d ever say.

How successful are you as a recruiter? It’s a simple enough question, isn’t it? Surgeons measure their performance by how many people got better under their care, and how they minimize morbidity and mortality. Professional athletes measure lots of statistics, and compare their performance against their peers, their competitors, and against historical data. Businesses measure sales, income, and volume. It seems as if nearly all professions have a standard way of measuring performance, but for some reason recruiters don’t always seem to measure success the same way.

Perhaps this is because ours is a profession in transformation. It wasn’t that long ago that companies hired talent by simply running advertisements in the local paper, or even hanging a “Help Wanted” sign in the window. Success was measured by how many people sent you resumes (on nice paper, no less, and we even checked to make sure they had the watermark aligned properly!).

Now we target job-seekers with employment branding campaigns, by pushing them emails and multimedia pieces, and seeking them out on social networking sites.

Job-seekers have changed, too. People used to look for a job with a “good company” where they could work for decades and build a nice pension. They now look for places to build their skill sets and enhance their resumes in preparation for their next job.

Rather than sit politely and list all the reasons we should hire them, they come with a list of their own questions, and quiz us mercilessly about our tuition reimbursement programs, medical plans for domestic partners, and what we’re doing to reduce our carbon footprints.

Different organizations measure recruiter success in many different ways. This can be confusing, especially if you get a new manager who measures success differently (like I did). Since our role in competing for talent will only get more significant, it’s important to understand the differences in how performance gets measured.

In talking with peers at lots of organizations, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are essentially three ways recruiters are measured. It’s important to know how your performance is being tracked, and to make sure it’s aligned with your own professional philosophy and supports the long-term goals of your organization.</