ERE.net

Recruiters who don’t communicate with recruiting source representatives are passing up opportunities to drive efficiencies up, and cost of hire down. That’s because many sources will organize recruiting events, publicize them, and connect recruiters with candidates free of charge.

Yet recruiting source representatives say they rarely hear from corporate recruiters, only receiving infrequent calls when a recruiter needs to fill an immediate opening.

Says Bev Principal, assistant director of student employment services at the Stanford University Career Development Center: “If I meet with a company representative during the summer, and receive information about its entire breadth of career opportunities, not just the immediate openings, I can pass that information along to students during career counseling sessions or I’ll remember to invite that company to participate in specific career events here on campus.”

Principal says she regularly e-mails students about recruiting events, and sends a monthly newsletter to engineering students. If she has information to share about an employer or its job opportunities, she passes it along.

John Weitzel, internship coordinator at El Camino College, says that employers are often disappointed in student turnout when they schedule a last-minute campus recruiting event. He starts promoting the retail holiday job fair, for example, when students first return to school in mid-August, and companies like FedEx and Disney set up campus recruiting visits a year in advance. FedEx is on the students’ radar screens because it recruits on campus every Monday.

“Not every student knows what they want to do when they finish school,” says Weitzel. “If I know Northrop Grumman has jobs other than engineering, like grant-writing and marketing, I can talk about those opportunities with students who seem suited for those careers.”

Even sources that provide experienced candidates can be better used through proactive planning. Olin King, site manager for the West Covina office of the California Employment Development Department, says that employees who lose their jobs due to offshoring receive special benefits and retraining, and he can sway them toward specific courses — if he knows local employers have hiring needs.

“We can set-up recruitment sessions, where we’ll line up the candidates and employers can come to our office to interview,” says King. “There are opportunities for employers to provide career advice to 300 experienced workers at our older and wiser seminars, which cater to job seekers 40 and older. We also bring education and employers together to fulfill specific needs in the community, but the only way to do that is through collaboration, and I just don’t hear from corporate recruiters.”

As America honors its military veterans, there’s news about the difficulties some vets have finding a job. A CareerBuilder (profile; site) survey says 1-in-6 vets report spending six months job hunting after leaving the service. About 1-in-10 say it took them a year to land a job.

Of the 750 vets surveyed for the report, about 20 percent said the biggest challenge to getting hired is the difficulty employers have in understanding just how transferable military skills are. Some of the vets also said they were at a disadvantage because they lacked a college degree, good interviewing skills, or there was just a lack of appropriate jobs in their area.

However, the news isn’t as bleak as the survey might imply. Bill Scott, with military recruitment specialist Bradley-Morris (profile; site), told us, “In our view, we still see this market as strong for veterans.” The U.S. economy has slowed hiring generally, acknowledges Scott, the firm’s VP of marketing and business development. But there are ”many opportunities (for veterans). There are employers who want to hire veterans.”

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Progressive companies are now implementing Just-in-Time (JIT) sourcing programs to ensure they have a ready pipeline of top talent once the economy recovers. This will provide early adopters a significant competitive advantage and an increased share of the best talent.

In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

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Your company may be sending a brand-destroying message that hiring next year’s summer intern is more important than hiring your next director, vice president, or other C-level executive.

Many firms are hiring college graduates and interns for next summer. In many of those cases, relocation is paid to the college graduate or summer housing is arranged for the intern. A look at the experienced hiring market illustrates an entirely different story. A search in Google for “local candidates only” delivers more than 250,000 results. Sure, several of these openings are for retail or hourly employees where considerable education credentials aren’t required.

But you get:
50,000+ results for “local candidates only” vp
5,000+ results for “local candidates only” mba

If you sift through there a bit, you’ll find some senior openings like Chief Financial Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. Would it not be wise to mix in talent from other regions, if not solely to have different vantage points and a more diverse perspective? The best companies I’ve ever worked for had these qualities and created true diversity in skills and life perspectives. Ideally, you should be recruiting the best people who are passionate lifelong learners with cutting-edge skills capable of a building a collaborative, high-performing culture regardless of their location.

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Recently I posted a piece about namby-pamby sourcing, part of which was about being afraid of your own shadow in these troubled times. In it I stated that one way to improve upon scaredy-cat sourcing processes was to keep a journal about your daily sourcing routine. That way you could “see” and “hear” the mistakes you made along your sourcing way. I confessed I had been doing just that for several years when one day I realized I had a body of work with which I started a fledgling phone-sourcing training business. I didn’t have this intent when I started sourcing — the training business just flowed out of my actions. You never know where you’re going in this life ‘til you get there. And then you never know where you’re going next!

Someone suggested that it might be interesting to read a scenario out of my journal and the specifics of keeping such a journal, and what goes in it. At first surprised, I soon grasped the interest potential in reading a behind-the-scenes synopsis of a phone sourcer’s day. So, to wit:

Writing about your sourcing experiences in a journal gives you the opportunity to read back over your process releasing new ideas along the way. This is how I started communicating my processes — for years and years, when I had a particularly good day (or a particularly bad one!) I’d sit down and write out what happened. I’d do it in a script format. This is where many of the scripts I use as examples in my training came from.

One such day’s entry turned into a script that I used to demonstrate the effectiveness of acquiescence when sourcing. I advise that it’s usually best, when you’re in the early stages of contact with a Gatekeeper, to follow her suggestions until the two of you have established some minor rapport that allows you to “take over” at some point in the exchange and begin to direct her actions to achieve what you want. The following entry is from 2005.

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Decision-making can be a daunting challenge, especially when faced with pressure to cut costs and reorganize in a challenging economy. As recruiters, you are presented with a myriad of tools, services, and processes to choose from and the list keeps growing and growing! I just wanted to say thanks for sharing your toughest decisions with us every day on the ERE discussion boards. I learn such valuable information from you!

Twittering for Sourcing
We see it used at conferences. We read about it on our discussion boards. We might even be active “Tweeters” ourselves … but how effective is Twitter for sourcing and recruiting? Erika Hanson Brown recently joined the Twitter community and wants to know how it works in the recruiting world. John Kennedy is skeptical about Twitter. Although it can help save time when learning about a potential candidate, John relies on some advice he received years ago, “there are only three true productive tools in recruiting — the pen, the pad of paper, and the telephone.”

After reading several more responses to Erika, it is clear that John is in the minority. Twitter can be an effective tool if you follow the advice of Kelly Dingee and Mark Tortorici including search strings, and tying together SMS and social networking sites. If anyone is interested, you can check out Dennis Smith’s presentation on the Recruiting Road Show and tune in to ERE’s webinar series on November 5 for some tips and advice from Geoff Peterson.

ATS Wish List
Erica McNally wants to know what are your “must-haves” and your “nice-to-haves” when selecting your ATS. What’s on your “wish list”? Jake Stupak lists the following: scheduling for multi-users, resume parsing, email tracking, and candidate and position matching. Sylvia Dahlby astutely advises to identify your unique business requirements first. “The leading apps all have the basics” — think about what your company needs before creating your list. She recommends CareerXroads and HRchitect for additional information. (HRchitect, by the way, is doing a workshop in San Diego at ERE’s conference on “How to Save Your Current ATS and Get a Return on Your Investment.”)

I have to add The Newman Group (who will also be doing a session on HR systems at the Spring Expo) to that list since it has a wealth of knowledge in this arena. Dorothy Beach, unhappy with Vurv, has been very impressed with Avature’s Recruiting CRM tool as an ATS option. (I also sat on a demo last week with Michael Johnson and agree that it is worth checking out.) This makes me wonder…will CRM tools replace traditional ATS tools? What do you think? Would you take the leap?

Onboarding New Hires and The Buddy System
There are several programs that if implemented correctly can make onboarding strategies successful. Based on research and discussions, many companies would include the “buddy system” on that list. Laura Arnold is very interested in a program that would pair an internal employee with a new hire but wants a new name for “the buddy system.” Apparently, Laura is not alone. Several respondents use a variety of different names, including “Mentor Program.” Bryan Chaney also recommends “Internal Career Counselor” and “Coworker Coach” while Joann Robinson has used “New Hire Partner,” “Orientation Partner” and “Orientation Coach.”

I’m interested in knowing if any companies have been able to measure the success of their onboarding programs, more specifically the concept of a “mentor program.” Todd Raphael has an in-depth look at onboarding in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

JobFox or Net-Temps?

Kathleen Coughlin wants to add a new job board to her list. Can anyone recommend JobFox or Net-Temps? Although Kathleen did not receive feedback on Net-Temps, JobFox (often considered the eHarmony of recruiting) has some work to do. Taryn Pfalzgraf has been satisfied with the customer service but feels that the process is too time-consuming. She recommends a “conditional trial membership” or “waiting a few months to see if they’ve ironed out their problems.” Kimberley Joyce would have to agree. As an Oracle-centric company, she was reassured that JobFox could meet her companies’ needs. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Among other complaints, they are unable to add different tools, languages, and functionality. Given this negative feedback, Eden Shaffer encourages Kathleen to consider Search Engine Marketing instead. What do you think?

Hiring a Virtual Recruiter/Sourcer and Unethical Competitors
These topics continue to dominate the discussion boards. We’d love to hear what you think about these critical and timely recruiting issues…

What’s a marketing manager?

Ask five people, and you’ll get five definitions. Look for resumes, and you’ll get hundreds of people doing vastly different things.

Mark Bielecki is trying to clean it all up with a new site, Joblish. (And you thought startups had used up every possible fanciful variation of the word “job”!)

It sounds more complicated than it is. Employers can fill out some drop-down menus as to what they’re looking for — let’s say, for example, that the employer wants these four things in a candidate:

• a functional area of engineering;
• the R&D department
• division head reporting to chief executive
• supervising 10 or more people directly.

The employer picks those four attributes from the drop-downs, and generates a code that looks something like this:

joblishDENERBE

Job candidates who fit that criteria will, in theory, have added the code joblishDENERBE to their resumes or LinkedIn pages or elsewhere, and employers searching for joblishDENERBE can find them.

Like so many new ideas, the success of this one will depend on getting a critical mass of both job candidates and employers to use the codes.

Are you perpetually recruiting? Then you should be perpetually sourcing. And, no surprise, there’s a sourcer’s tool for the recruiter who wants to find, build and maintain a relationship with future potential hires.

Version two of the popular Perpetual Sourcing web-based sourcing and CRM system was released last month. That might not ordinarily be news, but the enhancements and improvements are the result of a collaboration of Todd Davis, who developed the program, sourcing guru Shally Steckerl, and vendor Intelestream.

“This product is especially unique due to the level of industry expertise found at its core. As a senior recruiter with companies such as Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, and Yahoo, Todd Davis offered his knowledge to help us create his ‘dream solution.’ Shally Steckerl, founder of JobMachine consulting has also played an intricate role in collaborating on this project,” reports Intelestream’s Director of Marketing Stafford McKay. “It’s great to be right in line with the best practices taught by the experts.”

Davis has described Perpetual Sourcing as a pre-ATS applicant tracking system. An apt description for a system designed for the passive candidates found through LinkedIn, Spoke, Hoovers, Jigsaw, and ZoomInfo, all of which the system can automatically assess. It also can help source candidates via the search engines, managing your search strings for you. It also helps with OFCCP and EEOC compliance, by saving search histories, including locations searched, search strings used, and candidates sourced .

Because it is a CRM tool, it also manages contacts with the candidates. It synchronizes with Outlook and has direct email campaign capabilities.

Perpetual Staffing is based on SugarCRM, the commercial open source customer relationship management software that is in use worldwide by customers as varied as GoDaddy and North Carolina State University.

Davis developed Perpetual Sourcing in 2007 and offered it through PerpetualSourcing.com before transitioning the operations earlier this year to Chicago-based CRM consultant Intelestream.

I was surfing the Internet this week and came across a fabulous story that is a perfect metaphor for how much things have changed in the world of recruitment since the rise of the Internet coincided with the global shortage of skills. Unusually, it’s a recruitment story from the work of rock music.

The story revolves around rock band Journey, which has existed in various guises since 1973. I suspect anyone younger than an ‘old Gen X’ (like me) won’t have heard of them unless they regularly listen to classic rock radio.

Journey were huge during the early to mid 1980’s with American Top 10 hits such as “Who’s Crying Now,” “Open Arms,” and “Don’t Stop Believing,” (probably better known to pop culture aficionados as the song Tony Soprano selects from the jukebox in the closing scene of The Sopranos’ final episode).

Journey’s lead vocalist at the time, Steve Perry, scored a 1984 hit with the single, Oh Sherrie (confession: I have the vinyl single somewhere in storage).

Last year Journey founder and lead guitarist, Neal Schon, was attempting to recruit a new lead vocalist to replace the departed Perry. Frustrated with the options he had auditioned live, Schon turned to the Internet and spent hours surfing scores of YouTube videos, looking at bands and singers to see whether he might discover what he was looking for online.

Amongst the many wannabes and try-hards, he stumbled upon a video by a popular Filipino cover band, The Zoo.

Schon listened in amazement as 40-year-old lead singer, Arnel Pineda, belted out a stunning and note-perfect version of one of Journey’s biggest 1980’s hits, Faithfully (amongst many other cover versions The Zoo had posted on YouTube).

Schon messaged The Zoo via YouTube, and although Pineda initially thought it was a hoax, Schon eventually convinced Pineda he was for real, and asked Pineda whether he was interested in auditioning for the vacant lead singer’s role.

Six weeks later, a still shell-shocked Pineda was winging his way to San Francisco for a two-day audition with Journey.

In December 2007, Pineda was announced as Journey’s new lead singer, followed three months later by his debut, fronting the band live at a Chilean music festival to an ecstatic fan reaction, glowing reviews, and a television audience of 25 million.

Revitalized by its new lead singer, Journey quickly recorded a new album which it released in June and is currently in the middle of summer/autumn tour of the USA with fellow 1980’s classic rockers, Heart and Cheap Trick.

What a fantastic story for the new world of recruitment: a story covering globalization, Web 2.0, and non-traditional sourcing strategies.

What I most love about this tale is that a U.S. rock band, whose fan base is solidly in the Midwest, resisted the temptation to go for a singer who “looked right” and instead recruited the best-performed, most-competent singer, even though he was from Manila, speaks heavily accented English, and doesn’t look like Steve Perry (save the long dark hair) or the band’s fan demographic.

It would be easy to dismiss this story as unique to music and not relevant to recruiters.

I believe that would be a mistake.

Consider that in this Journey-finds-new-lead-singer story, the following occurred via the World Wide Web:

• The employer sourced a potential employee, living in another country, online.
• The employer contacted the potential employee.
• The competence of the potential employee was able to be assessed sufficiently well to arrange a live interview (audition) in another country without any need for a resume.

No recruiter was involved in the process.

When you consider the growth of career portals and the rise of online testing of skills, competencies, and motivations, recruitment in the 21st century has only just begun.

As we rapidly head towards the 21st century’s second decade, are you ready for what’s ahead?

It was the beginning of autumn in New England, and the leaves were turning orange, yellow, and red. It was a glorious afternoon, but Paul scarcely noticed. He was stuck.

His company, ABC, needed some very specialized people and he couldn’t find them. For over two years, Paul had tried to fill some very specialized and always open positions by using Internet search and revamping the career site. He had even put his reputation on the line a few months back when he insisted that a central sourcing team would solve the perpetual lack of qualified candidates.

He had just finished a tough meeting with his sourcing team trying to figure out why there were no candidates in their talent pool. He had been certain that there would be several potential people from that pool; when the hiring managers had told him about their openings, he had assured them it wouldn’t take very long.

After all, the team had known about the competencies these positions required for months. Now it looked bleak.

What had gone wrong?

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Yahoo asks itself four questions when sourcing candidates of different generations.

• Where are they?
• How do they want to receive information?
• What makes them respond and engage?
• What’s the same and what’s different about the generations?

Carol Mahoney, Yahoo’s VP of talent acquisition, talked about the questions today at an HCI event. For Gen-Xers, Yahoo is focusing more on career sites as well as recruiting events. For younger applicants, the emphasis is on social networking (Twitter is big among Yahoo hiring managers) and a long courting process. “They do not want to just drop in and get their info and go,” she says, of millennials. They want to be courted. It’s more than information. It’s a relationship.”

This courting includes friends and family. In India, Yahoo laid off what Mahoney says was a very small number of people, and many were placed in other roles. But it was “such a huge deal” in India that Yahoo had to explain the layoff to families of wary job candidates.

With generational differences in mind, Yahoo has redone its career site. On the upper left, for example, the quick job search is aimed at Gen X-ers who don’t want to beat around the social-networking bush. In contrast with most career sites, which could put a wild boar to sleep — Yahoo has done it right, actually using the career home page to excite people about working at the company. (Its older versions, Mahoney, who arrived at Yahoo five years ago says, were “appalling.”) You leave the site with the impression that a Yahoo job involves doing something important, something that has an effect on people.

There’s more on generational recruiting from this webinar:

Last month, DoubleStar conducted a survey to determine the current state of recruiting practices in a cross-section of organizations. The survey was sent to recruiting leaders and decision makers in mid- to large-sized organizations across all industries. The results are not a summary of best practices but a snapshot of current actual practices as they exist today.

The findings (full report available) are interesting. For example:

• 95% of organizations are operating without a dedicated sourcing function. Further, 28% of organizations reported that their recruiters are performing all of the sourcing.
• 44% of organizations are engaged in some level of recruitment outsourcing. However, 82% of these organizations outsource less than 25% of their total positions.
• The biggest impediments to recruitment success are the ability to find quality candidates and process delays caused by hiring managers.
• Only 21% of organizations are using Web 2.0 tools for recruiting, with only 1% considering themselves experts. LinkedIn and industry-specific sites were reported as being the most effective.
• The most commonly tracked recruiting metrics are time-to-fill, time-to-start, first-year turnover, manager satisfaction, and cost-per-hire. Few organizations reported tracking more sophisticated measures.

The survey’s overall results show that recruiting is a function in transition from older practices to more modern ones.

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A young recruiter form the UK ventured into a networking group (RBC) I belong to and asked where he could find technicians who work at BMW or Mercedes franchise dealers. He said the manager or the service receptionist names were easy to find, but he needed to find the guys working on the cars. I gave him some quick and easy advice.

“Call and ask for the breakroom or — is there a cafeteria? Ask for that. Many times there’s a black wall phone hanging over a grimy desk with lots of post-it notes and writing on the wall. If anyone is in there, they might answer! These sites usually have a car wash section too — they wash the cars for these high-end customers here in the states before returning them after service. Ask for the ‘car-wash person.’ When you get him or her on the phone, tell him you’re in the wrong place — you know that — can s/he tell you who one of the technicians is, so you might ask for him by name? Chances are he will tell you. And then when he tells you one, ask for another, and then another. Be gentle with him. Don’t scare him,” I add last, chuckling knowingly to myself.

And then I surprised myself when I told him, “Walk the grid in your mind — think about who works where and what they know — then go directly at them…”

“Walk the grid.” I suppose this is another way of saying, “Become one with your target and imagine yourself inside your target, walking around the place, looking here and snooping there, all the while minding your own very real business.”

And then, as a further surprise in my day, I’m lying in bed that night surfing the channels and what comes up but the movie “Bone Collector.”

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The basic foundation for all recruiting is the ability to communicate and share information with potential candidates directly. In our modern, high-tech world, corporate recruiters have numerous channels they can use to communicate directly with candidates ranging from face-to-face visits to video chat.

However, there is only one tool that provides a “single point of contact” allowing the use of every form of messaging in use today at any time during the day and from any location. This tool, of course, is the immensely versatile smart phone.

Today’s modern smart phones pack more computing power than most computers did just a few short years ago. They can not only handle your basic person-to-person and conference voice calls, they can also interact with websites, publish blog posts, aggregate RSS feeds, send text messages, send multimedia messages, record/transmit video, record/transmit audio, send email from multiple accounts, take/send pictures, send and receive faxes, edit office documents, and interact with social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

While many organizations empower their recruiters with smart phones, few build a corporate-wide recruiting strategy that leverages the phone as the hub of recruiter activity. Aggressively using smart phones requires forward thinking, something many recruiting managers who came up through the ranks as a transactional recruiter dedicate little time to. In organizations where technology isn’t pervasive and doesn’t permeate every process, the smart phone is seen as just a phone that happens to be mobile, despite its potential to be so much more.

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I’ve been around a lot of years, and I can’t remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives, and company leaders didn’t complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along, we were promised the solution was at hand.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

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Cost has always been central to recruiting. One of the most popular (though not the most useful) metrics is cost-per-hire.

But demonstrating the value of recruiting is difficult. The reasons are simple enough — recruiting costs are tangible; the benefits less so. It takes time for new hires to become productive, and their contributions are difficult to measure with any precision. Furthermore, it is impossible to attribute an employee’s performance to the recruiter’s skill at getting the right fit, in the right place and time. Consequently, tying recruiting results to cost is nearly impossible. Few even try. So recruiting managers usually find themselves under pressure to “manage” costs better — which usually means do more with less. Some companies have just given up trying and handed over their recruiting to an RPO vendor.

RPO has its own issues, but one benefit of RPO may just be that recruiting managers begin to understand costs, and how to manage them to their advantage. I don’t mean “manage” as in “limit” (although that’s a very fine thing), I mean structuring costs to maximize flexibility, leverage in-house expertise, and limit cutbacks during down cycles. This is the “manage” they teach in B-school.

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I have a 10-month-old granddaughter. She just started crawling. What happened in the beginning was interesting to watch. The task at hand was to get her knees up under her and her backside lifted. Watching this was a comedy of errors and a lot of fun. A week or so of this and she gathered enough strength in her hip area to assume the takeoff position.

Sure, at first she’d rock backwards and plump back down on the floor, ever determined to get back up. When she finally was at the point where she was steady on her hands and knees, the first thing that happened was that she went backwards! Like a train that has to roll a little backwards before it can go forward, she’d push back a couple knee-steps and then she’d lurch forward, falling awkwardly flat sometimes with the momentum. Up though she’d get, rock unsteadily, trace a knee-step or two back, and then off she went like a whirling dervish!

There’s a sourcing reason in this grandparent reporting. Sometimes on a sourcing job we have to trace backwards a few steps before we can move forward. And this is never as true as on a job that is giving us a lot of difficulty. The fact of the matter is, a job that is presenting a lot of difficulty may have been set up wrong. What do I mean?

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Borrowing from comedian Monty Walker of Beatle Bailey fame, the title reflects a bit of light humor in what is often a spirited debate surrounding the question of “How much is enough sourcing?”

This is perhaps the most commonly asked question I get when presenting workshops, seminars, and keynote addresses. Allow, via this humble blog post, my attempt to answer this question for recruiters by and large. Please note that I am writing this not with full-time, dedicated sourcers in mind, but for you, the full-desk recruiters who struggle to create time enough for completing your required tasks, much less for filling a pipeline with so-called passive candidates.

As my full-time sourcing brethren well know, there can never be enough research conducted as there will always be more we can do to find the right people for the right jobs, so please excuse me, but this is not written for you. For all the rest of you who carry large loads of requisitions, I hope this gives you peace of mind.

Not All Reqs Are Created Equal

Though it may feel like they are, not all of your requisitions are of the absolute “highest priority.” In fact, most of them don’t require much sourcing at all. Before you guffaw, let me define what I mean by sourcing — I mean research and identification of leads for hard-to-fill positions. Or another way to put it would be name generation for positions which cannot possibly be filled using traditional talent sources. Most reqs could benefit from some downloaded resumes, but that is a task simple to automate and one that creates little heartburn for experienced recruiters.

About 10% to 15% of open requisitions on a typical recruiter’s desk can only be filled by some kind of direct sourcing activity. To avoid a debate about this point, let me explain that of course that percentage is going to vary by industry, by function, and even by organization, but 10% is a good starting point for this example. Say that you work 35 simultaneous requisitions. Then by this calculation roughly four of those may require serious research. The rest will have an influx of candidates from one to a myriad source, with varying quantities and assorted quality.

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Consider this as a basic truth: in tough economic times every job looks better, especially the one you already have.

This would imply that during recessions there are fewer good people actively looking and it’s tougher to get the best passive consider to even discuss your career opportunity. If this is the case, one could conclude that the bulk of the people who are looking during economic downturns tend to be those who are unemployed or marginally employed.

Since this group does not represent the best-of-the-best, you’ll need to rethink your entire sourcing strategy to make sure it’s targeting the people you want to hire. Here’s a short video describing how good people enter the job market. Now here’s a quick test to determine how well you’re doing: if you’re seeing less good people than last year using the same sourcing techniques, stop using them!

However, if you do find a few good people, regardless of how you’re finding them, expect these candidates to have more objections and concerns than usual. And the better the candidate, the more objections the person has. So, if you can’t smoothly and professionally handle objections, you won’t be placing many top performers.

Here are some ideas on how to deal with some common objections. They’re more prevalent with the economy on shaky ground. The theme behind them all is to reveal very little information about your assignment until you have a complete understanding of the candidate’s background. By withholding information, you’ll gain candidate interest. This is the key to applicant control.

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Last week I posted a summary of the most relevant, thought-provoking discussions of the week, and after hearing from several of you, I thought I would make this a weekly tradition. I picked out six of the top discussions and wanted to ask what you think #7 should be. What discussion should I add to the list? Let me know what you think by posting a comment below.

Preventing Applicants from Bypassing HR. The shaky relationship between the recruiter and hiring manager has always been an interesting topic of debate on ERE discussion boards.

Coral Blankenship wants to know if there is a “diplomatic way to inform candidates in a posting not to contact the hiring manager or any other person other than the representative listed in the posting.”

Amanda Blazo and Rob Levin were realistic, saying that unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to prevent someone from contacting a hiring manager, especially with the amount of information available through the Internet.

Amanda advises corporate recruiters and TPRs to respond to every applicant “qualified or not” and Rob added that many people pass over HR because “they know it will get them nowhere.” Mike Johnson included some helpful language to include in job postings while Jeff Altman wrote about the benefits an applicant might see in going directly to HR and included an example. He also sympathized with Coral’s situation since he agreed that most applicants can’t do an “adequate job of presenting themselves on a call.”

Monday’s Question of the Day. Work/life balance has become part of our everyday vernacular. We hear about it on the news, read about it in studies, and discuss it during interviews, but I couldn’t help wondering: Do most companies really want their employees to balance both and possibly leave work early for dinner plans and yoga classes? Elizabeth DeLouise feels that “It still seems the person who is willing to put in the longer hours are the people who get ahead.” David Rees questions the phrase “work/life balance” and asks, “does that mean that work is not part of life?” He also believes that work-life balance does not affect TPRs as much, since they are “evaluated on effectiveness not hours worked”? Anyone disagree? I wonder if work-life balance is truly a question about generational differences. Is this workplace philosophy accepted for younger generations and not Boomers? Maureen Sharib included some interesting data from a Monster survey conducted in 2007 that you might want to check out.

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