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For our inaugural webinar of 2011, we had a panel discussion of what we might expect of the next twelve months. Our all-star panel was moderated by Gerry Crispin and included such thought leaders as Lou Adler, Elaine Orler, Dr. John Sullivan, John Sumser, and Kevin Wheeler. We covered such important topics as the economy, advancements in technology, trends that are reshaping the industry, and more!

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

Part 1 of a Series Related to Optimizing Recruiting Team Results

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

Silicon Valley, California is one of the most competitive recruiting environments anywhere. And if you’re a recruiter there, the competitive pressure can make you lose perspective and make you terrible at your job if you let it get to you. The opening keynote from Carol Mahoney at the Seattle SMA Staffing Symposium was both inspiring and cautioning in its message today.

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

What does it mean when a recruiter in Texas announces a line of recruiter fashion and another one in Santa Monica launches a website offering “management and employee removal services?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, then, how can recruiters add value? keep reading…

Part of any good partnership between a recruiter and a hiring manager is the exchange of information and ideas. Since we recruit all day and it’s what we know so well, I’ve realized that we consider some ideas to be common sense and something we assume our hiring managers already know. However, it is very important for recruiters to teach recruiting best practices to hiring managers.

There are heartwarming moments in every recruiting professional’s life that we store away in our minds and replay on days we need a pick-me-up. My stored moment is witnessing a room full of hiring managers shouting in unison: “I am a recruiter and I am not alone!”

And it’s not even a dream. It actually happened. keep reading…

As the nation and the world emerge from the depths of the recession, labor economists tell us that this recovery will be slower and bumpier than most Americans living today can remember. Like the Great Depression of the 1930s, this one will leave its scars on the economy and the national psyche. Employers will feel its consequences rippling through their workforce and their recruiting efforts, with effects lasting for years, if not an entire generation.

What are the consequences for employers? What are the long-lasting changes the recession has wrought on the recruiting and retention of workers? There are several, say industry leaders, vendors, suppliers and individual recruiters.

Foremost, probably predictably, is the need to rebuild recruiting programs. Beyond that, there are almost as many opinions concerning the recession’s impacts as there are people I asked about it. Some predict that the cuts to job board spending will be permanent; others say social media recruiting will become a key sourcing tool, others suspect it will never amount to more than a minor tool; most expect that recruiting will be held to a higher standard of performance and economy.

Out of all the predictions and expectations — those I solicited and those I came across in discussions and blog posts and even tweets — I distilled four broad trends. You can read about these in more depth in the July issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. For now, here’s a brief look at these trends. keep reading…

Mike Nale is a victim of the recession. In less than three years he has gone from promising founder of a recruitment marketing agency in Oahu, to living in a pay-by-the-day room. Having long ago sold off his possessions and swallowed his pride, Nale depends on handouts from friends and the rare odd-job.

A few weeks ago he took the desperate step of sending a plea for money to his LinkedIn network.

“It was a slow, downward spiral,” he told me recently. “I could see it happening, but I thought, ‘It will get better. I’ll find a job. Something will come through.’”

At 6.9 percent, Hawaii’s unemployment rate is among the nation’s lowest. For Nale, though, it hardly matters. “I don’t know where the jobs are,” says the one-time Manpower recruiter who two short years ago was being interviewed for his launch of a jobs TV show for the Islands. “I was a recruiter. You would think I should know how to find a job.”

His last TV appearance was as the central figure in a news story about Hawaii’s unemployed.

Nale’s story may among the more desperate, but his difficulty in finding work is not at all unusual. keep reading…

Looking for a job as a recruiter? After a long lean period, things are looking up. The long night has ended and we’re still here. It’s over. After two years of layoffs the economy is now creating more jobs than it’s losing. In March, the economy created 162,000 new jobs. The Dow is 70% of the way back to where it was before the recession started. Retail sales are up. Housing starts are up. The ship has righted itself now that the storm has passed.

After two years of decline, any good news will do, but let’s not get carried away. 162,000 new jobs given that 15 million Americans remain unemployed is barely a drop in the bucket. About a third — 48,000 — of those jobs are result of the census. They’ll go away in a few months. 150,000 new jobs are needed per month just to keep up with growth in the population. Since December 2007, the economy has shed 8.4 million jobs and failed to create another 2.7 million, for a total of more than 11 million jobs that are missing. So even with a recovery that was producing 300,000 jobs per month it will be five years before we’re back to where we were before the start of the recession.

How is that supposed to happen? keep reading…

We received such an overwhelming positive response from our ERE webinar — “Going from Good to Elite” — that I think we struck a cord!

Even through our economic woes, downsizing, right sizing, decentralizing, centralizing, compartmentalizing . . . there are still recruiters out there who are proud to be in this profession and passionate about doing things “the right way.”

For those who missed it, we discussed the competencies/skills of Elite Recruiters and the journey to go from good to “elite.” We announced the results of our Elite Recruiter Self-Assessment Benchmarking Study in which over 1,000 recruiters have participated!

In conducting research for this webinar, I asked every recruiter who participated the question “What do elite recruiters do that average or good ones don’t?”

Shamelessly stealing from Jeff Foxworthy’s “You know you are a redneck if …” comedy routine, this question quickly evolved into: “You know you are an elite recruiter if …”

The feedback I received was not only inspiring, but also challenged me to reflect on what it truly means to be an elite recruiter, and what I need to do to be one!

Performing at an elite level doing anything is very difficult. Recruiting is no different. Documenting these attributes/competencies/skills, in a fun way, helps keep this passion burning and top of mind. Pick a few that are new to you or ones in which you know you haven’t yet achieved elite status and make it your goal to improve in these two or three areas over the next quarter. Picking even just one will no doubt increase your performance overall.

Outlined are some of my random thoughts on this topic!

You know you are an “elite recruiter” if . . . keep reading…

You love your company. You love its culture, its people, its products. And you feel great coming to work every day.

But would you get the company’s logo tattooed on your arm?

Michael Long did. And he only officially become an employee at tech hosting company Rackspace this month.

Here he is, though, at last week’s South By Southwest getting his tat as bemused onlookers take pictures. keep reading…

SourceCon is underway and in the spirit of this event dedicated to the art of finding a certain needle in a haystack loaded with other needles, I should probably not tell you who was named the 2010 Grandmaster Sourcer this morning.

Instead, follow these clues: United Kingdom, Sourceress, and laundry, cheese, Star Trek, Tea, and Tweetups.

keep reading…

Recruiting is clearly not for everyone. Its demands can be extraordinary and its customers unrealistic. Its candidates not entirely truthful and its reward often just the self-satisfied glow of a job well done.

By its very nature, recruiting often creates a sense of contrast and contradiction. Hiring managers want the perfect candidate for the lowest price; candidates want the perfect job for the highest price and the government attempts to legislate a fair and level playing filed. Stuck between these conflicting forces, egos, and politics, is the recruiter: a person who is charged with the overwhelming task of identifying, attracting, and hiring the people required to create a great organization. (What is a great organization?)

Here are a few characteristics required to successfully do this job? keep reading…

One of the things I hear often, in many places I go, is that people tend to describe the downturn and the potential of the upturn in extreme terms. The downturn has been “all bad” and there’s “nothing good that’s come of it.” Similarly, when others talk about the upturn and 2010 (and beyond), I hear a lot unbridled enthusiasm and optimism.

To me, the truth lies somewhere in between. keep reading…

If Jenny DeVaughn hadn’t fallen in love with recruiting a decade ago, we might be calling her Madam President. Instead, you can still call her Jenny even as she trades her Chief Enthusiast Officer title, today, for the more prosaic director, social strategy for Bernard Hodes.

Last week, as she was looking forward to her first day on the job today with the international recruitment advertising and acquisition firm, DeVaughn was all excitement and, well, as befits a CEO, enthusiasm.

“My heart is in social media,” she says. “The people at Hodes are incredibly smart about using social media and they are working with some of the biggest and best companies. That’s what’s so exciting about what I’m going to be doing. I can have a bigger, broader impact and work with really great people.”

She actually said a lot more about her new job, but, like trying to sketch the scenery from a bullet train, the best I could do was catch every third or fourth sentence. It was enough, though, to get a sense that DeVaughn preaches what she practices. keep reading…

The first decade of the 21st century is ending in a few days, and what a ride it has been! It opened with the gloom of the dot-com bust and Y2K and ended with the gloom of a banking system bust and a major recession. It was not a good decade, as decades go.

How did recruiting fare over the decade? Did things get better for recruiters and candidates? keep reading…

It’s hard to argue against the fact that 2009 has been a rough year for corporate recruiters. Budgets have been slashed, training has been all but eliminated, and even with reduced recruiting activity, requisition loads are still onerous.

Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but as it falls at the end of the year, it is an opportune time to take a minute and to thank those who have helped you throughout the year. While executive recruiters used to get huge paychecks and bonuses, corporate recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as under-appreciated.

Hiring managers, often busy trying to meet end-of-year deadlines, rarely find the time to send out a well-written thank you or take you to lunch to express their gratitude for all the work that you’ve done on their behalf.

New hires are acclimating to their job, which more often than not isn’t exactly what they thought it would be, so thanks are not on the top of their minds.

Every year come December, I start to envision what it would be like in a perfect world where the efforts of corporate recruiters were recognized with a real thank you. Recruiters may not get as many “thank yous” as they deserve, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that recruiters have a profound impact on people’s work and private lives.

A “thank you note” from a grateful new hire… keep reading…

In what is by now an open secret, Google is hiring 200 recruiters and sourcers for a one-year gig.

Details are sketchy, but Dave Mendoza did post an email about the hire to his site Six Degrees From Dave. The email is from a recruiter for Nelson Staffing and says the firm got a contract from “A Major (and pretty exciting) employer in the South Bay here in N. CA.” The email doesn’t name the employer, but it says Nelson needs to find “200 upbeat and enthusiastic recruiters and sourcers for them — by next week.” keep reading…

Steven Toole doesn’t seem as high on social media recruiting as we are. But he is upbeat about employment, saying that a “perfect storm” is brewing for recruiters in 18-24 months as Americans begin a game of job-hopping musical chairs.

Below, Toole talks about these job-market trends, and the upcoming need for a lot of recruiters who have left the profession to come on back.

keep reading…

Warning bells are ringing. The emerging economy will be quite different from the one we have come from. There are signs of change everywhere. General Motors breaks down, and Tesla, Phoenix Motorcars, and Detroit Electric begin to make electric cars, changing the paradigm about what a car manufacturer should look like. Companies like IDEO are organizing themselves differently and deliberately to foster innovation. They are small and look for capabilities and interests and passion in the people they hire — not degrees and pedigree.

Rather than a focus on rapid growth, companies will look for sustainable growth. To achieve this, many more workers will be contractors, consultants, or work as temporaries or part-time. The average age of the workforce is going to get older as Baby Boomers stay longer and fewer young people seek regular corporate jobs. Learning to re-use and find new positions for internal talent will be important.

Many economists are worrying that we may have a jobless recovery, which means that rather than hire lots of people, companies will not seek to fill the jobs eliminated in this recession. They will try hard to maintain a small, highly productive workforce. Today’s BLS figures indicate that productivity is at an all-time high, despite the layoffs and slower economy. That means we are all working harder (and maybe also smarter). So CEOs may be asking: why do we need to add more people and lower our productivity?

What Does This Mean for Recruiting?

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.

For many organizations, this can be outsourced. A solid, well-chosen RPO can take over the transactional side of recruiting and provide the people you need. It may cost a bit more than the internal recruiter and may not always be as tuned-in to the environment, but they will be capable and offer flexibility in times when hiring is slow.

As I have written many times before, internal recruiters will have to become competent in thinking more broadly about talent. Here are five things you can do. keep reading…