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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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Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve been involved in thousands of searches, worked with hundreds of hiring managers, trained 3,000 to 4,000 recruiters, and worked closely with dozens of major companies. Following are some of the common threads among the best techniques, processes, and tools that I have seen and used.

Collectively they add up to a business process for hiring top people. While Performance-based Hiring provides a simplified high-level summary of these, it’s in the details and execution that will ultimately determine your personal success.

Following are the six core aspects of hiring top talent. A couple of key themes stand out. First, offer and recruit the best people based on career growth if you want to attract the best on a consistent basis. Second, allow people to just look and explore, rather than require them to apply for a job. This prevents them from opting out before you even see them.

If you can address these two issues, you are well on your way to hiring top people every time.

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“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

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Corporate recruiting is an interesting field. There are no books entitled The Theory of Recruiting or Principles of Strategic Recruiting. As a result, most individuals in recruiting tend to make it up as they go rather than follow a more defined set of rules or principles.

There is no formal body in recruiting that “codifies” the established practices. In this article, I am attempting to help resolve that problem by compiling a list (from my 35-plus years of experience in the field) that can serve as a foundation for your actions.

Of course, principles are guidelines to point you in the right direction. Remember to vary your direction depending on your business situation and global location.

20 Principles of Recruiting and Talent Management

The following is a list of 20 principles, laws, or guidelines to help you design and implement effective recruiting strategies and approaches:

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Summize is a free conversation search engine that allows you to scan content posted on Twitter.com.

While many of the “twits” or posts on Twitter offer little clues or meaningful context, it’s possible to extrapolate a few juicy tidbits of information.

One such example is when people use the phrase “I work for” followed by the name of a company. This is a great technique on any search engine, but it’s particularly useful on blog search engines because people love to talk about themselves. With Twitter being a microblog (only 140 characters allowed in a post) the brief comments offer little other information. But this is one of those short phrases where the context tells us much more than the text itself.

For example, a search for “I work for Microsoft” reveals a few people like:

• ThatGuyNamedKen
• Tafelzoetstof
• Rickster_CDN
• rtvenge
• Lindsi
• Vriyait
• ClarkeZone

Among others, of course. Now, that in and of itself is not very revealing. Other than knowing where they work, you can’t really tell what they do…unless, of course, you see their other posts. For example, in one of ThatGuyNamedKen’s posts you find out on April 18 he got a job offer from Microsoft to be a “Support Operations Analyst.”

“Great, Shally, but now where does he live and how do I contact him?”

Well, that’s a bit harder. If you look at his profile, you can tell he lives in Winnipeg (Canada, of course). As for contacting him, though, unless you want to commit to some CyberSleuthing, it’s probably easiest to just “follow” him on Twitter. Then you can send him a private twit by texting 40404 with a message that starts with @thatguynamedken: followed with a short (140 characters or less) message.

A recent ERE survey conducted with Knowledge Infusion indicated that the greatest individual challenge companies are facing in recruiting is identifying enough quality candidates (71% of respondents). Yet, 95% of companies believe that their sourcing efforts are average or above average.

Hmmm…this left me wondering if we needed to revisit e-sourcing and find someone with expertise in this area. We often find information on what methods and tools we should be using to identify and attract candidates. We often hear what benefits we would achieve if we did. What I wanted to know was how to see results in e-sourcing methods. And I knew just who to ask…Glenn Gutmacher, one of America’s top sourcers/trainers.

Glenn shared his knowledge with us on June 5 during ERE’s most popular webinar.

“The Sourcer’s Daily Dozen - A Top Recruiting Research Guru’s 12 Favorite Free E-Sourcing Methods to Fill Your Pipelines”.

View video on WebEx

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As the adage goes, “to catch a thief you must think like a thief.” The same applies to finding resumes in databases.

While thinking about your needs is definitely the right place to begin a resume sourcing campaign, you should translate those needs into “resume speak” to achieve optimal results. Effective resume research in a database requires you to use your command of the English language, your empathetic abilities, your comprehension of industries and professions, and your understanding of the psychology of your target candidate. In short, you need to use every ounce of your experience as a recruiter.

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In lieu of doing a complete recap today, I wanted to share some great information about a brand new way Yahoo! has come up with to use its search engine, called SearchMonkey. Yahoo! had talked about this new way to show search results a couple months ago, but it was showcasing it today at the exhibition hall at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Basically, it takes Yahoo’s search engine and allows you to see into the data on the results link without having to click on the link:

Yahoo has combined “a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web.” SearchMonkey “gives all Web site owners an opportunity to present more useful information on the Yahoo! Search page as compared to what is presented on other search engines. Site owners will be able to provide all types of additional information about their site directly to Yahoo! Search. So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in websites — ratings and reviews, images, deep links, and all kinds of other useful data — directly on the Yahoo! Search results page.”

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Catch and release is a practice within recreational fishing intended as a technique of conservation. After capture, the fish are unhooked and returned to the water before experiencing serious exhaustion or injury. According to the Wikipedia definition, using barbless hooks makes it possible to release the fish without removing it from the water (a slack line is frequently sufficient).

Catch and release has been practiced by some countries for centuries as a management tool to reduce the cost of stocking hatchery-raised trout, and as conservation to prevent target species from disappearing in heavily fished waters or “prized” circumstances.

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How many people do you know that are three feet six inches tall and don’t have an allergy to rubber? Casting director Miranda Rivers hired 5,000 people for 20,000 roles for the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and most of them had to have round eyes and round cheeks. And if that wasn’t tough enough, she had to find all of these folks in the small country of New Zealand. It’s a real challenge to hire massive numbers of elves and hobbits

She defines her team’s challenges in three parts:

• Attraction: Getting people interested in the project wasn’t a problem; there were potential elves hanging from the trees and people submitted their resumes from all over the world. The acquisition team also got out the word by speaking over the radio about the opportunity and placing classified ads.

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O?ver sourc?ing syn?drome: the need to find more candidates than needed caused by inappropriately eliminating the good candidates you already have.

This article expands upon one I wrote recently on the serious topic of over-sourcing. If you’ve ever lost a good candidate because someone conducted an inaccurate interview, someone on the hiring team didn’t like the person’s personality, or a top candidate decided not to pursue your opportunity, you’ve experienced over-sourcing syndrome.

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I’d forgotten the fun of Internet search.

I had a job come in during January. The position was for a senior-level manager in the R&D software group of a major storage business. The customer told me in the specifications that the person we were looking for was “an uber-geek who has the capacity and the desire to talk business to customers.” Further clarification pointed out that most qualified candidates “have blogs, or they’re named on the Web because they are conference speakers, award winners, or as with ____, have a brief profile of their background.” They were also likely to have been awarded patents.

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Let’s fantasize about what it would be like to take maybe a month off (or, since we are dreaming, maybe even two) just to do succession planning. It would be a time frame when no jobs are assigned, and you have a complete focus on finding candidates for jobs that are not yet open.

At Brown Shoe Company, we have established a program to do this. We call it the “Strategic Month.” Each corporate recruiter doing full-cycle sourcing and candidate-relationship building is able to have two months without any job assignments. The overflow of additional positions that this creates is covered by the other team members and by a relied upon third party named Grapevine Group. In our structure, human resources and recruiting are separate functions that partner together, working with the hiring manager.

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Howard Adamsky penned an interesting article the other day that struck a raw nerve with me. So much so that not only did I take the time to respond (which I do not do a lot of these days), but it actually lured me out of the darkness to jump on my soapbox with an article.

For those of you with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), I will give you the abridged version so you can all get back to busily juggling your day. Further on, I will give you the larger, contextual version from a recruiting leader who has learned some hard lessons over the last five years.

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