That’s a remarkable number, which, even if is skewed by respondents with very in-demand skills, would still go a long way to explaining why you’re not getting calls back. In fact, the survey shows that IT professionals are picky about whose call they will return.

The best thing a recruiter can do when leaving a message or speaking with a potential candidate is to be as detailed about the job as possible. Hearing details about the specific job, the team, the nature of the work, and the company culture is the kind of information that would lead 88 percent of the survey respondents to return the call.

Less important, but still high on the list for the IT professionals surveyed, is the professionalism of the recruiter and the reputation of the company.

“The best recruiters take the time to get to know the client and the candidate in detail. He or she with the most intelligence wins the matchmaking process,” says TEKsystems Director, Rachel Russell.

The findings come from the company’s quarterly IT Professional Perspectives Survey, which surveyed 2,424 IT workers last quarter about how they look for jobs. First, when a tech worker begins to consider a new job, they take stock of their skills, goals, and interests. Then, 96 percent say they hit the job boards.

“Job boards are the quickest way for IT professionals to feel like they’re getting out there and searching for a job,” says Russell. “But given that so many people are on the job boards, it’s a hard place to stand out.”

Perhaps knowing that, once a tech job seeker finds interesting opportunities, the next step for 72 percent of them is to network with other professionals. At some point, many will work with a recruiter. According to the survey, 59 percent say a recruiter is the main resource; 54 percent say colleagues; 53 percent say friends; and, 46 percent rely on their networks.

Recruiters who help job seekers, even if they don’t end up placing them, may still reap rewards. With 45 percent of the survey respondents saying they have 10 or more top professionals in their network, recruiters who remain accessible, helpful, and professional may be able to get a referral. The survey found 65 percent of IT professionals willing to share names if they had a positive experience with the recruiter.

But do you have a plan that will enable you to explode out of box immediately as the downturn ends?

If you don’t have a feasible recruiting turnaround plan, you may be hurting your organization.

Research shows that the majority of recruiting organizations don’t have a documented recruiting strategy, let alone one specifically developed to deal with a recovery of the macro-economy. While one could argue that it’s difficult to plan when you don’t know exactly when things will improve, such an excuse is just that, an excuse.

Scenario planning, or a what-if analysis, prepares you to handle the turnaround no matter when it occurs.

As a recruiting manager, ask yourself — before one of your senior executives asks you first:

“What exactly needs to be done in advance so that when the time comes, the recruiting function has the capacity and capability to dramatically ramp up recruiting?”

Benefits of Having an “Explode Out of the Box” Strategy

Whether the turnaround in your industry comes this year or next, it’s critical that you have an operational plan and strategy to prepare for it when it does come.

The reasons why it’s critical for you to develop this “explode out of the box” strategy include:

• Competitive advantage. During economic recoveries, organizations that can react quickly can pick up market share from competitors not quite as agile. This is especially true if your organization isn’t the largest or the most well-known in your industry.
• “Right time” advantages. The key is to “ramp up” recruiting at the “right time,” rather than being too early or too late. If you start active recruiting too early, you’ll leave a large number of recruits waiting in limbo before you can take action. If you start too late, you’ll miss out on the first movers (i.e., forward-looking talent who is among the first to be willing to assume the risk of a new position and firm).
• Free time. Although your budgets might be lean and hiring may be frozen, this “lull” is a great time to rethink your past approach. Once the frenzy of new hiring begins, there will be little time to think strategically and to develop a workable plan. This lull time will also allow you to identify new and emerging tools (mobile phones, Twitter, social networks, talent communities, etc.) and to adapt them to your company’s needs.
• Recruiter availability. If you plan accurately and act quickly, you’ll have your pick of the top available recruiters. Having a well-designed plan might, by itself, attract some of the best recruiters who have been frustrated when they had to operate in an ad-hoc environment.
• Lower costs. If you plan in advance, you will be able to attract some of the best recruiters at relatively low salaries. In addition, you might be able to secure low-cost deals with vendors before increased demand drives up their prices and limits implementation availability.
• Training and education. It is certainly true that hiring managers and some of your recruiters might be a little rusty. A great plan will allow you to improve your training and education processes so that everyone “gets up-to-speed” precisely at the right time.
• It’s a global competition. If your company is one of the many that has a global reach, it’s likely that the talent wars will heat up in certain geographic regions (or product areas) long before an overall turnaround occurs. If your plan includes elements that allow you to “explode out of the box” in these hot areas, you can help your company much sooner. You can also use these micro-targeted areas as a testing ground for your new plan.
• Strategic image. By being forward-looking, you might improve recruiting’s image as a strategic function.

Elements of an Effective “Explode Out of the Box” Recruiting Plan

If you’ve been a manager in recruiting for any significant period, you’ve already been through one or more up-and-down cycles. I’ve been through a half-dozen of them and from my experience, it is relatively easy to identify the elements that must be upgraded following a prolonged downturn. The key elements of a great turnaround plan include:

• Strategic goals. Revisit your current recruiting goals and make them more business-like. That means narrowing your goals and making them more focused on business impacts. These goals should include ramping up from little activity to maximum capability in 30 to 60 days; prioritizing jobs based on their business impact; hiring more top performers and innovators; improving the employer brand; and making managers more effective at hiring while reducing the time they must devote to it. Whatever goals you develop, make sure they are strategic and measurable.
• Strategic metrics. Shift the recruiting department’s focus away from operational metrics and toward business-impact metrics. You will need a metric for each strategic goal that you have set. Focus on these six strategic business-impact metrics: Quality of hire; innovation from new-hires; revenue loss due to position vacancies; the cost of new-hire turnover; diversity in management positions; and employer brand impact (you can’t attract the very best without a consciously developed and effective brand image).
• Executive buy in. Because recruiting doesn’t operate in a vacuum, recruiting leaders must realize that their plan needs to be developed with input from HR, executives, and hiring managers. Of all the executives, the CFO and COO are the most important because they control requisition freezes and recruiting budgets. The CFO must also be involved in developing the process to calculate the potential revenue loss that could result if the recruiting function is not adequately prepared with an “explode out of the box” plan.
• Prioritize positions. When hiring is “unfrozen,” it unfortunately often follows an illogical pattern. In some cases, the number of “low business impact” positions that are opened up may exceed the number of mission-critical openings. If this happens, it’s imperative that you have already prioritized business units and positions to ensure that you focus the most resources and your best recruiters on the high-impact positions. If you do this in advance and make it well-known, politics and loud “whining” will have less of an impact on your efforts.
• Competitive analysis. A critical part of the plan is to analyze your “talent competitors.” This includes forecasting when they are likely to ramp up, which jobs are likely to initially focus on identifying, and what tools they are likely to use.
• A timetable. An effective plan includes a timeline with key milestones and accountabilities. As a result, everyone knows “what to do” and “when to do it” after the “explode out of the box” recruiting plan is activated.
• Prepared managers. Even though recruiting designs the hiring process, it is a fact that managers do the actual hiring. If you expect your managers to be more effective at hiring, include an element that demonstrates the dollar impact of weak hiring. Once you get their attention, you need a process and support material that painlessly educates them about best practices among hiring managers; they will have their own “turnaround” issues in addition to recruiting, so begin this effort before the turnaround begins.
• Identify precursors to a turnaround. Part of your turnaround plan should be examining past turnarounds in order to identify warning signs which would allow recruiting to more accurately predict when hiring within your firm is most likely to open up. Work with the CFO and COO to identify those early warning signs.
• Identify applicants’ expectations. Any economic downturn can have a measurable impact on the expectations of potential applicants. It’s a mistake to assume that their expectations and their “decision criteria” for selecting a job have remained the same. Instead, survey a sample of the most desirable potential applicants to identify their current wants, needs, and expectations.
• Retention. Include a retention component in your plan because as the economy opens up, you are likely to experience as much as 50% increase in employee turnover as a result of your competitor’s expanded recruiting efforts. This means that you need to identify the specific employees that are most “at risk” of leaving. Then you must develop both a retention and a “blocking” strategy to directly counter your competitor’s recruiting and branding efforts.
• Rebuild your brand. There is no more powerful recruiting tool than building your external employer brand image. Under this plan, your branding efforts should be an ongoing process that “virally” spreads your message by having your managers and your best employees talk about the aspects that make your firm a great place to work. Develop plans to spread your message on the Internet, as well as at professional conferences and in the media.
• Re-energize your referral program. There is no more effective way of rapidly ramping up your recruiting capability than by convincing your employees to become 24/7 “talent scouts” as part of your employee referral program. The best referral programs focus on proactively seeking out top performers for referrals and on educating their employees on how and where to identify the best. The best also change the focus away from monetary rewards and toward reinforcing your employee’s critical role in helping to “build the team,” so that both they and their colleagues have a continuous opportunity to work alongside the very best.
• Build a talent pool. After branding and referrals, the next most powerful tool for preparing for an upturn is to build a talent pool for key positions. This means pre-identifying potential applicants and building relationships with them, so that when a position opens up, you already have a list of names of individuals that are both qualified and interested in your firm.
• Your recruiters and tools. Develop the capability of rapidly increasing the number of recruiters you have available. This element of the plan might include options for utilizing contract recruiters, outsourcing options, the use of agencies, and finally, by getting other HR professionals within your firm to contribute a few hours per week to the recruiting effort. In addition, the plans should be “scalable” to meet the different levels of recruiting volume that you might face. You will also need to “up-skill” your recruiters, so that they know how to utilize the many emerging Web 2.0 and marketing based recruiting tools. You might also need to plan for “new” positions within the recruiting function, including experts in building talent communities, metrics/analytics, employer branding, social networking, and mobile phone recruiting.
• Recruiting territory. The current mobility of the U.S. population is the lowest that it has been in 60 years. As the turnaround begins, more individuals will be willing and able to physically move to get a great job. As a result, your plan should expand the geographic scope of your recruiting beyond what is currently feasible.
• Budget and resources. There is a significant time lag between when recruiting has to dramatically increase its capabilities and the point in time where the CFO gets around to fully funding those recruiting activities. So include numerous cheap and no-cost options for branding, sourcing, screening, and making convincing offers. Part of the plan should include leveraging other people’s time, so that your firm’s employees and managers can initially pick up some of the recruiting load (i.e., employer referrals, social networking, recruiting at professional events, and boomerang hires).

Final Thoughts

The current lull in recruiting activity is a great opportunity to develop an “explode out of the box” recruiting plan that gives you the capability to ramp-up recruiting from nearly zero to extremely high levels almost overnight. It’s inevitable that you will need this type of plan, so the only remaining question is when is the best time to develop it?

In my experience, if you wait until the day when requisitions begin to be unfrozen, it will be too late to do an adequate job. Also, don’t wait until you have sufficient budget resources to hire a consultant to help you; just having a plan will build you instant credibility within HR and among senior managers. If you develop a really effective plan, you will actually prevent a great deal of stress on both yourself and your recruiting team because you will be well prepared for any problems that might occur during the turnaround.

I’ve outlined the key elements that you need to include in the plan, so the next step is up to you. The time to act is now!

Unlike the economic turmoil following 9/11 and the dot-com bubble burst, many recruiting functions have continued to innovate and stretch the limits of what can be defined as “standard recruiting.”

If you work in an organization that has given up on innovation and instead has adopted a survival strategy, it’s important to realize that many of your competitors are not standing still. If your organization chooses to wait for an economic recovery to begin modernizing their recruiting practices, you may find it nearly impossible to catch up.

One of the challenges in the fast-moving profession of recruiting is how to keep up with the latest evolutions in best practice. In my experience, there’s no better place to learn about practical tools and applications in recruiting and talent management than ERE.net.

Fortunately, ERE Media holds a yearly global competition aimed at identifying the very best “next practices” in recruiting. Each year, ERE receives hundreds of applications in eight recruiting program categories from well-known organizations like Microsoft, IBM, Ernst & Young, Intuit, Accenture, GE, Yahoo!, and from less well-known but equally innovative organizations like DaVita, the American Cancer Society, and Tata.

Fortunately, as a judge for the Recruiting Excellence Awards, I’m given the opportunity to highlight some of these amazing practices that your organization should consider adopting.

The applications this year were so powerful that choosing a winner in several categories was a challenge. This article will primarily highlight the practices of those organizations that won, but I simply can’t resist sharing some of the practices of other companies.

Category I: Most Innovative Employee Referral Program — Accenture

While employee referral programs have always been a top source for high-quality hires, during economic downturns, they can be adapted to become the most effective low-cost/high-quality source. Accenture’s latest employee referral program is unique because it began life as a pilot program in The Netherlands. Based on the program’s results, it now serves as a model for future rollouts around the globe. The new program radically simplifies the program’s terms and conditions and dedicates resources to marketing the program internally on a regular basis.

Since inception, just a year ago, the program has grown the percentage of hires attributed to employee referral from 14% to 32%. Employee awareness of the referral program has jumped from 20% to 99%, an astounding feat (do a quick survey in your organization — you might be surprised how few people know the details of your program and how to make a referral). The quality of referrals also improved significantly, reducing the number of referrals required to generate a hire from seven to five.

Consider some of their program’s highlights:

• Charity component. The critical component in any referral program is getting your employees to make high-quality referrals, not for the direct monetary benefit, but for the opportunity to provide their teammates with the very best coworkers. By allowing the employee to allocate a portion of the referral bonus to charity (i.e., KidsRights and local elementary schools), you have added another altruistic reason for making successful referrals.
• Focused referrals. Its referral application form makes it difficult for employees to make referrals of people they don’t really know. The process requires the individual to explain how they know the individual, that the individual’s skills are exceptional, and that the individual will “fit” within the organization. These types of features can help to limit the number of “casual” referrals that can clog the system.
• Exciting rewards. Employees receive a small reward for a successful referral and €500 is donated to charity. They also offer an opportunity for employees who make successful referrals to participate in a drawing for exciting world trips. In addition, employees also receive €100 whenever one of their referred candidates is invited in for an interview. Obviously, any candidate invited for an interview is of sufficient quality to merit at least some reward and recognition.
• Employee scorecard. Employees have their own individual online website that allows them to track the progress of their referred candidates throughout the hiring process (this increases employee involvement and transparency). It also covers the number of referrals and their accumulated bonuses both for themselves and for charity. The scorecard also lists the employee’s personal referral success rate. By allowing the employee to see how well they’re doing in their referrals, relative to others, you can motivate lower-performing employees to increase their referral effectiveness.
• Referrals are flagged. Employee referrals are flagged by the application process so that they can be prioritized and fast-tracked during the hiring process. Under their enhanced program, every referral is acted upon.
• Everyone is eligible. It’s fairly common for referral programs to exclude hiring managers and HR professionals, but this can be a mistake because among all employees, these are some of the most well-connected. Accenture’s program now covers all positions and its expanded eligibility now allows everyone, including managers, HR professionals, and recruiters to participate. Other firms that have adopted this practice simply encourage individuals to donate 100% of their bonus to charity when they see a potential conflict of interest.
• Referral cards. Referral cards can have a major impact on referral program success. Most referral cards are “paper” and are handed out individually. Accenture has taken the practice one step further, allowing employees to send electronic referral cards to people in their network. The e-cards contain a code that allows them to get credit if the individual submits an application.
• Courage. Even though it’s an intangible factor, it’s critical to referral program success. It’s easy for executives to discourage talk about hiring and winning awards during tough economic times, but the managers at Accenture had the courage to continue the development of this important program and to also follow through on the awards process. I salute them for their courage.

Other outstanding referral features from other companies:

• Acumen Solutions. Rather than the traditional passive approach, targeted referral percentage goals are set for each department in order to increase healthy internal competition. They provide a toolkit to educate their employees how to more effectively network. They celebrate referral successes publicly at all major company events.
• Microsoft. Microsoft raises the bar on employee referral related branding with their “Spreadthelove” website. This site allows Microsoft employees to “write up” their own individual story about their career with Microsoft (their story might include pictures, testimonials and video). Employees can then share the web link and “spread the love” with targeted friends, family and potential referrals. Microsoft has increased its process effectiveness by ensuring that every referral is contacted first by an employment specialist, which then introduces them to a recruiter that will manage their experience moving forward.
• Tata Consultancy. Adapted a marketing/CRM model for its referral program (i.e., the company offers a 24×7 referral help desk with a toll-free number). Another component allows newly hired candidates who have not yet joined the firm to refer their former colleagues (in order to capitalize on their “top of mind” knowledge of their networks in their previous organization). They also instituted a “Rapid Hire” process where resumes were collected at referral desks that provide “on the spot” screening followed by preliminary evaluation and instant feedback. They also offer early bird & spot prizes as well as contests between business units to foster a competitive mindset around referrals. The metrics demonstrated (as many other firms have) that referral turnover rates during the first year are significantly lower than traditional experienced hires (2.9% for referral hires versus 8%).
• CACI International. It sends targeted messages to employees for open “hot jobs” and has scaled its incentives and process referrals on a daily basis.

Category II: Best employer brand — Ernst & Young

Coupled with an effective employee referral program, a strong employer branding program can be the second component providing firms with a distinct competitive advantage in recruiting. An employer branding program is an image-building program that emphasizes the “viral” spreading of stories and information about the elements that make your organization a “well-managed” firm.

Some of the key components of the Ernst & Young effort include:

• A targeted branding effort. The most effective organizations try to segment the brand to meet the targeted population. Because Ernst & Young hires a large number of college grads, it has developed an effective employer branding segment that has resulted in them being listed by BusinessWeek as the number one “best place to launch a career” beating out Google and other well-known college recruiting powerhouses.
• Brand pillars. They have four key brand pillars including Learning and development, Workplace flexibility, Inclusive community, and Opportunity. Brand messaging is embedded in every candidate facing communication.
• Web 2.0 channels. Even though they operate in a conservative industry, Ernst & Young has chosen to use the latest technology to engage their primarily Gen Y audience. They use modern electronic tools like video, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They offer “live” question-and-answer exchanges via Facebook where real questions are submitted and then answered online and shared with all. In the experienced hire category, Ernst & Young has been ranked on the Fortune 100 Best Place To Work List for 10 years in a row.

Other notable features of other companies:

• Microsoft. Adopted a micro-segmenting or micro-targeting approach to employee brand messaging. They used extensive market research to identify the appropriate brand messaging by segment and then the optimal brand messaging channels. Both View and “youatMicrosoft.com” enables a targeted storytelling approach to branding that can be targeted at specific population segments, large and small.
• Johnsonville Sausage. Surveyed employees to identify weaknesses in brand messaging, then created task forces to address the gap between the targeted employee experience and the actual employee experience so employees could become true brand ambassadors.

Category III: Best Retention Program/Practices — American Cancer Society

Retention is always a hot issue, but will become “red hot” when an economic turnaround begins and employees begin to think of “getting even” as a result of their treatment during budget cutbacks and layoffs. Most companies don’t even have a director of retention, nor do they offer formal companywide retention efforts, so invariably, there is a lot that can be learned from best practice organizations.

Some of the key features of the American Cancer Society’s retention program that you should consider adopting include:

• Significant results. The most important feature of any retention program is the results that it produces. As a not-for-profit organization, the American Cancer Society is limited in its ability to offer significant pay and benefits to retain workers. However, even under those constraints, this program produced breathtaking results, namely a 2% turnover rate among program participants compared to the organization’s 37% overall turnover rate.
• Business case. Even though they are not-for-profit, they use metrics to make the “business case,” demonstrating the dramatic impact that employee turnover has on organizational objectives. In particular, they showed a direct connection between high staff turnover and the ability to recruit volunteers in local communities. In addition, they put a dollar cost on employee turnover ($11 million per year) so that managers could better see the impact of losing talent.
• Program elements. The program is called the talent opportunity program. It is a three year, three phase development plan for developing early career professionals. It offers a 5-point support system (online community, a local buddy, a local mentor, a local manager, and a career coach). The program has an electronic component that meets virtually via web 2.0 tools including Facebook and Blogger (used to facilitate a weekly book club).

Category IV: Best Diversity Program — Microsoft

Microsoft has adopted a long-term perspective for diversity recruiting. Rather than just meeting recruiting targets and offering scholarships, they have attempted to actually increase the supply of qualified diverse candidates with technical skills.

Some of the best practices include:

• A pipeline approach. The recruiting begins early (high school) and contains elements that continually identify and build relationships with potential recruits. They sponsor DigiGirlz, a technology camp for young women in high school and they hosted an annual minority student day to get students excited about careers at Microsoft.
• Targeted website. They launched an extremely powerful and targeted website, www.youatmicrosoft.com, a micro-branded website offering diverse candidates an inside look at Microsoft from a several different diversity perspectives. This site spotlights the authentic, personal stories of diverse individuals at Microsoft who have forged successful careers in technology.
• Dedicated diversity recruiting team. Their team has full life-cycle recruiting responsibilities with a special emphasis on executive recruitment.
• Identified challenges. They convened a panel of engineering and diversity experts to help identify the problems and challenges involved in building a multicultural workforce.

The award recipients highlighted here deserve to be congratulated, and I thank them for pushing the envelope in recruiting and HR.

It should be obvious from both the attendance and the tone of this year’s Expo that the “war for talent” is still going strong.

The rate of innovation in recruiting is increasing. The one overriding trend is that recruiting is becoming more “business-like.”

Stay tuned for part two of this article, which will cover the four remaining awards:

Category V: the best college recruiting program – Ernst & Young
Category VI: the best corporate “careers” website – Yahoo!
Category VII: the best strategic use of technology – Microsoft
Category VIII: the recruiting department of the year — DaVita

He heads recruiting for a large construction company where business is good and hiring strong. There are many open positions for experienced, senior-level people and there will soon be many more as a large number of boomers are approaching retirement. He is being urged by some on his team to begin using Web 2.0 techniques and to develop a more exciting and interactive Web presence in order to get ready for both current and projected needs.

So Willie is wondering….would a social network be useful for his organization? Would it give him any return on his invested time and money? Or would it just divert attention from more urgent recruiting challenges? Is it worth investing in today or should he wait for some commercial applications to arrive (if they ever do)?

What would you do if you were Willie?

Here is one of the first responses that I received from a reader:

“I would suggest Willie fishes where the fish are. Web 2.0 is fun, new, different, exciting and sexy, however the fish he is looking for are not feeding there. 45-55 year old engineers and project managers are not on social sites on the Web. . .”

There is certainly a lot of merit in this argument. While a recent Pew study suggests that a very large percentage of people over 50 are using the Internet, it is likely few of them would use the Internet to find a job.

Most people – even those much younger – are most likely to find a job through a personal referral or family member. In the construction industry, this is even more likely as teams of workers often stay together and go from job to job.

So should Willie just forget about the Internet and Web 2.0? Another thoughtful reader offered this opinion:

“However, the trend line of usage is only heading in one direction – up.  Willie should not jump in just to be there. He should develop a plan to systematically explore the sourcing effectiveness of a range of established and emerging social networks.”

One intriguing thought was put forward by this reader:

“Let the old-schoolers do an open house or attend events and let the new-schoolers do another Internet-based project. Measure both, see which one works better. Experimentation is the heart of problem solving and data doesn’t lie (if you don’t lie to the data).”

And another writer says:

“Sticking to ‘old school’ exclusively won’t work (it tends to attract old-school candidates) nor will emailing everyone and his brother via LinkedIn or Zoom. However a mixture of these approaches (along with well-thought-out and updated Employee Referral, Employee Alumni, Blogging, Industry Websites, etc) and an action plan that follows up with rigor and process to emails with calls (early in the morning or late in the evening) has worked for me.”

One reader seems to think that if we could find an incentive that attracts construction workers, then the Internet, specifically a Ning site, could be leveraged to spread the word and attract potential candidates. Many organizations have had success with methods similar to this – Cisco Systems used to give away water bottles and associated running/jogging paraphernalia to attract potential candidates with great success. He writes:

“I would get a bunch of tool makers for construction to sponsor tool giveaways on his Ning site and establish an email campaign offering multiple entries into each months drawing for the tools to members that drive new membership to the site. I would set a limit of 5 entries per person per month for folks that drive a certain number of new members. Tools talk to construction guys!”

This would be a low-cost solution as well because the tool makers would be paying for the giveaways.

As in most things in life, there is no one answer or magic bullet. Change can be evolutionary or disruptive depending partly at least on when you choose to get started on a change effort. If you start before things are in crisis, it can be an evolutionary experience.

If not, it will certainly be unpleasant and highly disruptive. This reader recognizes this and presents a reasonable approach for Willie to consider:

“Willie is in the same boat as many recruiters. They all face the same challenge; what I’m doing now is working so why should I change? What they are doing now is just fine and will work in the current hiring environment. However, what works now might not work in the future. If the team is having problems with the hard-to-fills now, I would anticipate the problem only getting worse.”

Thanks to each of you for sending in your opinions. Here are some of my thoughts, many of which are mirrored in those of the readers who responded:

• Willie needs to develop a comprehensive approach to this issue. He should continue doing what works now and even needs to do it better. This means relying on some of the older and more experienced recruiters to continue building referral networks, holding on-site events, and doing other things that will engage and attract the current experienced worker.
• On the other hand, he also needs to start building capability for tomorrow. This means perhaps letting some younger recruiters get a social network started and to begin finding ways to connect effectively with construction workers virtually. That may mean focusing on mobile technology — recruiting via mobile phone, using Twitter, or finding some other ways to engage people working outdoors without a typical office connection to the Internet.
• Extensive planning, deep research, and large teams are not the best way to approach this. He should not spend much time in deciding which way to go because there is no good data and not many people with experience.
• His solution should be one of experimentation. He could start a number of small projects that each use a different approach and monitor and measure each one for effectiveness. As soon as one approach fails, he needs to kill it and move on. Speed is important, as is effectiveness. Keep each approach simple and cheap. Use low-cost solutions such as Ning until he is certain of its potential and then invest as much as possible to make the chosen approach robust and highly engaging.

As in almost everything in life, there is value in yesterday and in tomorrow. It is finding the right balance that is the key to success.