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Over the past six months, I’ve worked with dozens of major companies and some of the latest new recruiting and sourcing technologies. Based on this, it’s not a reach to contend that how companies will find, recruit, and hire top talent in 2010 and beyond will be far different than how it’s been done in the past few years.

I’ll also make the contention that only a few companies are ready for this shift and none of the predictions below are far-fetched.

For one thing, they’re now being successfully tried out today in some form by big-time companies. More important — they work, especially on a recruiting-ROI basis. I define this as the quality and impact a candidate makes divided by the cost and effort to find and hire the person. (Email me if you’d like to review this Recruiting ROI calculation.)

To further validate some of the more “off the wall” predictions, I’ve tied the major points to an online survey. The results are currently posted, providing an instant view of where your company stands in comparison to your competition.

With the idea of getting ahead of the recovery, here are my 2010 New Year’s predictions for sourcing and recruiting: keep reading…

LinkedIn became easier to use last week, quietly introducing a new user interface for Boolean-challenged recruiters that we suspect even top-tier sourcers will welcome.

The change is so subtle that unless you’re a regular LinkedIn searcher, you might not even notice the addition of Dynamic Refinements (the official product name) to LinkedIn Recruiter. But now that we’ve alerted you, take a look at that right-hand rail. There’s a screenshot with this story that has the names obscured, but is otherwise what the results look like.

The drilldown choices have been there since LinkedIn Recruiter was introduced a year ago. What’s new is the deeper decision tree for the top-level filters. As you refine your search, adding more and more filters, watch the numbers in the rail change. These are the number of LinkedIn profiles matching your search criteria. keep reading…

Pete Kaiser, CEO of the Kaiser Group, talks about how recruiters can benefit from dollars allocated in the recent government stimulus package.

Kaiser, a former recruiter who operates “one-stop” shops for the government; explains how employers can use the government to find everyone from military veterans to IT employees. keep reading…

Subtle as it may seem, there is Grand Canyon of difference between a database of prospective candidates and a community of talented prospective candidates.

Recruiters frequently tell me they have a talent community, when further investigation reveals that they have a huge database of people they do not know at all. These databases have been built up using impersonal methods including the career website, profiles gathered through the applicant tracking system, and perhaps referrals from other employees.

Databases suffer from two major problems when it comes to being effective recruiting tools. keep reading…

Everywhere we turn we hear about how “The Economy” is causing everyone to tighten their belts and hold off on making any decisions that may seem too risky. It has quickly become the catch-all answer for almost every difficult question that the corporate world is facing.

Q: Why are we letting so many people go?
A: The Economy

Q: Why is there a hiring freeze?
A: The Economy

Q: Why was it 60 degrees in December?
A: The Economy

Of course, not being able to afford to make a purchase is always a good reason to reduce spending, but there are always those necessities that no matter how tight our belt gets, we will find some way to get them. For the human body, food would be such a necessity. And for companies, it is good, hardworking people who keep the organization moving forward.

When times are slow, the typical company’s knee-jerk reaction is to slow down on all processes. Expenditures are categorized as either necessary or unnecessary and then prioritized. Finally, once every process seems contained and controlled, they wait to see what the rest of the world is going to do.

Now to some degree, prioritizing makes perfect sense. The challenge is to make sure you set the right priorities. But once you do, the key is not to wait and see, but to take action. keep reading…

Fast forward to January 15, 2010. What are some of the hiring challenges you’re now facing?

As you put the list together, consider these assumptions:

1. The trough of the economic downturn was reached in April 2009.
2. Job losses continued through October 2009, but at a declining rate, with job gains finally turning positive in November 2009, at around 20,000 or so.
3. The unemployment rate peaked at 9.7% in September 2009 and although still at 8.5% in January 2010, it is forecasted to drop to 7.0% by June 2010.
4. The number of searches on Google with the words “jobs” (e.g., “jobs nurses Seattle”) peaked at 7.3mm/day in April and has been declining by an average of 10%/month since then, but started inching up again in October 2009.
5. An article by Lou Adler on ERE in November 2009 suggested that this pickup was due to people who are fully employed but now getting itchy to leave. He contends that the pent-up demand for a new job is finally being seen and that this is a new group of people entering the job market. Note: this will be unexpected for unprepared companies.
6. Hiring for critical positions will begin in earnest three to four months before a general improvement in the jobless rate is seen. This will be exacerbated by an increase in voluntary turnover.

These assumptions are pretty realistic. The question is, are you ready for this scenario? If you are, here are some of the things you’ve probably been doing over the past six months:

keep reading…

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful.” ~ Alan Alda

What kinds of things can you learn in a company’s telephone directory?

If you have a company you admire (Hey! I’d hire just about anyone from there!) it might profit you immensely to spend some time (especially now — what else have you to do?) doing some voice mail mining by tediously calling through each number of a company’s internal dial system.

Recently I wrote an article here on ERE called “Direct-Dial Directories: How to Research Staff via Phone Numbers” that has become one of the most e-mailed articles on the site.

In it I describe the technique of “farming” a company’s telephone directory — an activity that can be performed on just about every major company in America from the comfort of your own desk and telephone. Toward the end of the article I mention a few things that a directory reveals, these being only a smidgen of the type of information that can be extrapolated from a company’s telephone directory. Following are some other “tidbits” of valuable information that a directory might yield. keep reading…

About 25 years ago when the self-help gurus came on the scene, I heard Jim Rohn say something that still sticks:

Things will get better for you when you get better.

Sage advice indeed, and now might be the best time to take heed. keep reading…

A valued customer asked me to ferret out 1,000 names and numbers from a satellite office of a large company (22,000 employees total). I’ve done this work for him before — I’m not sure but I suspect he uses the work for sales development, the theory being that these people all have well-paying jobs in one of the more healthy sectors of our economy.  He has ordered many of these custom-developed directories from me before, so whatever madness is behind his methodology it seems to work for him! This is how it’s done. keep reading…

Coming up on the second weekend of the NCAA tournament, I am happy to report that I’m in first place in my pool of 35 basketball fanatics. I won two years ago and I’m looking to repeat the performance. The funny thing is that I don’t even follow the sport. My personal secret is my professional weapon: pre-project research.

Research is an oft-forgotten yet essential business tool and can save money, time, and resources. While the cost of entry for my basketball pool was only $25, the stakes are significantly higher when assessing the costs to launch a new branding campaign, career site, or national recruitment program. Small mistakes can create long-term headaches like high turnover, poor performance, or dropped conversion rates.

So before the next round of hoops begins, lets take a moment to look at some of the different kinds of research there are, and when it makes the most sense to launch yours. keep reading…

The next time you get an impossible job req, think of Will Owens. He and a counterpart are looking for 1,413 people this year to become Allstate agents.

Big deal, right? Yes, it is. His agent prospects have to have $50,000 in the bank and want to be their own boss. Ideally they’ll have some insurance experience in their background or at least have held a business leadership role. All of them are expected to foot the bill for their Allstate training.

Then, when they finally start selling Allstate’s auto, home, and life insurance, they’ll be independent contractors who will have to cover their office and living expenses until the business starts making money, which can take more than a year.

Now how easy does it sound? Riiiiiiight.

Even in an economy that has seen thousands of financial professionals laid off, Allstate recruiters have to work every angle to meet their 2009 goal. He oversees recruiting efforts for part of the country. A second senior HR manager oversees another team.

keep reading…

I am always looking for trends, new ways of doing things, or emerging practices that are changing, or at least influencing, the way we attract, source, assess, and recruit talent.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging. keep reading…

Many sourcing expeditions are doomed to failure because the sourcer “assumes” they have found what the customer wants. The fact is, in these instances, the sourcer hasn’t asked enough questions of the customer on the front end of the process to know what the customer wants. This is because they do not possess the depth of experience in sourcing to know what questions to ask. keep reading…

Times are tough. Even those companies that are doing reasonably well are cutting their recruiting teams by a minimum of 30% to a maximum of 90%, and tightening up expenses to the absolute barest minimum.

Half of these cuts are probably necessary anyway, the balance most likely an overreaction to the dismal economic conditions most companies are now facing.

There is an expectation that along with the cuts these recruiting departments need to drastically improve their productivity by 30%-50%, almost overnight.

The good news is that while most corporate recruiters are working hard, the majority are not working smart.

As a result, getting 50% or 100% productivity gains isn’t that hard to do. With this in mind, here are some things recruiting leaders can do to increase overall productivity by at least 100%.

keep reading…

Are we rusty as corporate recruiters? We haven’t had the amount of positions to fill as we have in the past. Volume is lower. Search assignments are scarce. I almost believe we are sharper when the volume is high. With only a few searches to work on, we may forget some of the steps we need to cover, when we haven’t been working at the capacity we once were, like it was just last year.

Our skills need to be sharp — even sharper than ever. It’s more important now that we bring in the best candidates possible, and actually get the candidate to accept the offer. No room for errors. We need to go through our recruiting process and make it perfect.

It takes all you know now, when that important search comes up and once again, you kick into high gear, ready to fill it with the best this market has to offer. What we used to do with 60 jobs on our plate at once is all different, now with only a few key positions to fill. Being in “auto pilot” is something that went away last fall. Now it’s a new game, and we need all the expertise we have to pull it off.

keep reading…

Economic downturns, mergers, and acquisitions all place pressure on organizations to curb labor costs. No time in the last decade has that tenet been more apparent than right now.

Layoffs, large or small, force organizations to cut loose the talent in which they have invested salary and training dollars. While talent released during a layoff today may seem like little more than an expense, tomorrow it could be the difference between success and failure.

keep reading…

Lately, the word Boolean has become very popular among web sourcers and recruiters. (As you might know, I am fond of it myself!) For some, “Boolean searches” seem complicated. Others wonder what the big deal is since Boolean simply means AND, OR, and NOT applied to keywords.

Let’s try to find some clarity. I’ll write about Google here. Though other search engines are similar in many ways, each has its own syntax, somewhat different from Google’s.

Google syntax does, of course, implement Boolean logic, though in a limited fashion. It’s not what I want to talk about here; I’d like to talk about the additional, “non-Boolean” part of Google. Google syntax (shall we call it Googlean?) contains much more than an implementation of Boolean logic.

There are operators and special characters that instruct Google on how to use keywords in a search string. One doesn’t need to learn about all of the operators to become successful in one’s searches, but adding a few operators to your search will help quite a bit. Here I’ll cover some operators that I think are a must for a serious web sourcer’s toolbox.

Part 1 of 2 “Googlean” and Special Characters

keep reading…

(the chart in this story was updated February 23)

Once again referrals have turned out to be the leading source of external hires in the annual CareerXroads source of hire survey. In 2008, 27.3 percent of the external hires made by the 45 large employers who completed the survey came from referrals made primarily by employees, but also by alumni, vendors, and others.

Corporate web sites — a destination and not an actual “source,” insists the report — was second with 20.1 percent of the external hires coming from there. Rounding out the top three were job boards, which accounted for 12.3 percent of the hires.

No big news in those results. For the last several years the survey that CareerXroads principals Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler conduct every January has consistently found referrals accounting for about 3 of every 10  external hires made by the participating companies.

What is different this year is that 38.8 percent of all openings were filled by internal transfers and promotions.

“We found that very interesting, ” says Crispin. “That’s the highest number since we started this survey eight years ago.”

His explanation is that despite hiring freezes, critical openings still have to be filled. But, now that’s being done internally and the  jobs the transfers leave are simply being absorbed by the remaining staff.

keep reading…

The economy will recover some day. I’ll admit I was a bit overly optimistic in an earlier article this year. It must have been the New Year’s bubbly.

Regardless, it will probably take at least six months of planning, testing, and search engine equity before any Web 2.0 sourcing tools you implement will have an impact. So you might want to start today to figure out when you pull the six-month “before the recovery” trigger.

To get a sense of this, I developed a very crude forward-looking indicator. This has to do with the number of searches on Google including the word “jobs.” People looking for work will search on Google before going to a job board using a phrase like “Java jobs Dallas” or “nurse jobs Memphis.”

It’s a lot easier doing this rather than going directly to a career site or hunting and pecking on a job board. I’ve been tracking “jobs” on Google since September 2008 when the number of searches was 110 million. It’s climbed steadily since then, and in January 2009 reached a peak of 151 million searches.

I predict that when the daily rate per month stops increasing it will be a strong indicator of a turn-around in about six months.

This will be confirmed when the daily rate peak is reached and starts to decline. This is a sure sign of a recovery, which will be about three months ahead of a pickup in hiring.

So with this in mind, now is the time to begin the planning process.

keep reading…

To most people, the Super Bowl is a fun event to watch. However, because the game is highly competitive and because only the very best teams make it to the event, there are some critical lessons that corporate managers and recruiters can learn from competitive sports and the Super Bowl:

Lesson #1 -“Minor colleges” produce some of the best players on Super Bowl teams.

It’s clear from examining the player rosters that most Super Bowl players don’t come from powerhouse football colleges. Some examples include:

• The Star Players. The four most notable star players in the game all come from non-football powers. For Arizona, star quarterback Kurt Warner came from Northern Iowa - Burlington and star wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald came from the University of Pittsburgh. For Pittsburgh, starting quarterback Ben Rothlisberger came from Miami of Ohio and running back Willie Parker came from North Carolina. Not a single one of these players former university teams made it into the Associated Press Top 25 rankings this year.
• The Remaining Players. Of the 112 active players on the final rosters of the combined teams, only four came from this year’s top college teams that are perennial powerhouses (i.e. Florida, Oklahoma, and USC).
• The Arizona Cardinals roster successfully recruited players from non-powerhouse teams like Louisiana-Lafayette, Kansas State, Richmond, Northern Iowa, Hawaii, Brown, Delaware, Fresno State, Tennessee State, Trinity University, UC Davis, Northern Iowa, and of course, Clarion!
• The world champion Pittsburgh Steelers roster includes players from such non-powerhouse university teams like Hofstra, Clemson, Kent State, Marshall, Tulane, Southern Mississippi, TCU, Northern Colorado, Syracuse, Rutgers, Indiana (of Pa.), La.-Lafayette, and perennial powerhouse…Tiffin.

Lesson #2 –“Experience” isn’t required to become a Super Bowl head coach.

At least this year, previous experience as a successful head coach isn’t a requirement for getting your team to the Super Bowl.

The best head coaches aren’t always the most experienced. You can’t say the coaches of either team this year are experienced, veteran head coaches. Neither has been a head coach at a Super Bowl before. Both would have to be considered as “inexperienced” head coaches (both are only in their second year of being a head coach anywhere in the NFL), and both are relatively young.

Mike Tomlin of Pittsburgh, the NFL Coach of the year, is only 36 years old (the youngest Super Bowl coach ever) and Arizona’s Ken Whisenhunt is only 44.

keep reading…