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.”

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.”

Bradley-Morris is a placement and staffing firm in Georgia, which itself is 60 percent staffed by former military. It also conducts job fairs, operates a veteran-focused job board and publishes a careers newspaper that is distributed on bases throughout the U.S. and elsewhere.

Veterans make great hires, says Scott, because the military emphasizes leadership training, instills a strong work ethic, places a value on teamwork and accomplishment and skills training is about as up-to-date as it gets. Plus, he adds, with passive candidates increasingly reluctant to leave secure jobs or unable to relocate because of the housing market, “This is an excellent opportunity to pursue military.”

The hottest job opportunities for veterans, says Scott, are in manufacturing and energy.

The CareerBuilder survey found employers agreeing with Scott’s list of qualities. Almost three-quarters of the employers surveyed said veterans brought a strong sense of teamwork and a disciplined approach to the workplace.

So why is it that some veterans are reporting difficulty in finding work? BMI executives believe there is a communications gap, Scott says, explaining that there are all sorts of training, placement and other free services specifically for ex-military. But, he says, “There is no one place for a vet to go to find out about all the free services.”

SimplyHired (profile; site), the vertical search job board, has added a tool specifically to make it easier for veterans to find employers looking to hire ex-military. Announcing the search tool, SimplyHired described it as a way of filtering the “results from DirectEmployers Association’s list of over 400 federal contractors and “vet-friendly” employers, who take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment veterans in accordance with Affirmative Action Programs, the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), and the Jobs for Veterans Act.”

The U.S. Department of Labor has also organized 120 veterans job fairs to be held in 31 states this month as part of the HireVetsFirst initiative. Find the list here.

CareerBuilder HR vice president Rosemary Haefner, commenting on the findings of the survey, said, “20 percent of employers said that they will be actively recruiting veterans over the next 12 months.

“Employers value the diverse skill set that veterans can bring to their workforce and how these workers can have a positive impact on their bottom lines.”

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.

Obviously, this state of bliss doesn’t come about without some important processes in place. Here are the big ones:

1. Getting enough high-quality prospects into the database. This is where aggressive consumer marketing concepts need to be implemented. Much of this involves Web 2.0; targeting behavioral marketing; proactive employee referral programs; highly networked recruiters; pushed advertising to blogs, social networks and niche sites; and the development of candidate personas. (Check out our free resource library if you’d like to understand these concepts in more detail.) If you don’t have good people to start with, JIT sourcing will just enable you to hire average people very quickly.
2. A CRM technology that automates the nurturing process. Most CRM (candidate or client relationship management) systems require heavy involvement by the recruiter to send out a series of compelling sourcing messages on a regular basis. Making matters more difficult is the need to send out targeted messages rather than all-purpose generic messages. So without the right nurturing technology the drip marketing program becomes difficult to manage. We’re now exploring automated CRM system that eliminate this burden. Email me (lou@adlerconcepts.com) if you’d like to participate in some beta evaluations of these systems and find out what types of compelling messages you need to use to maintain and attract your prospects’ attention.
3. A short- and long-term forecast of hiring needs. The idea of workforce planning still seems to be anathema to most recruiting departments, yet this is what drives the CRM/db engine. Knowing who you’re going to be hiring 6-12 months out allows you to implement the recruitment advertising programs necessary to fill the database. While rough estimates allow the process to work at a fundamental level, knowing who, when, and where provides the raw material to keep the process running smoothly on an ongoing basis.
4. Targeted and sophisticated messaging. If you want to fill your prospect database with top performers, don’t use traditional skills and experience-based job descriptions as the basis for your ads or drip marketing emails. Traditional job descriptions filled with generic boilerplate will preclude the best from even considering being a prospect. As important, the nurturing messages need to consider your target demographic. This requires some market research up-front to get the complete series of messages done right. For example, a job appealing to a college grad would not highlight the same things as a working parent, a committed up-and-comer, or a baby-boomer looking for a healthcare plan. For an example, here’s our outrageous ad contest winner for last year, which emphasizes the culture and type of work, rather than the skills required to do the work. (Make sure you enter this year’s contest for most effective ad to get some practice with this new form of advertising.)
5. Strong metrics and reporting. Just like any business process, JIT sourcing requires constant monitoring and updating. Ongoing monitoring of factors like quantity and quality by class of candidate, the effectiveness of different sourcing programs, the productivity of each recruiter, and candidate response rates to different messages, among others, are the drivers for ensuring the program quickly delivers the best candidates when needed.
6. Implement a “just looking” mentality and eliminate the idea of “buy now.” Forcing people to apply to even talk to someone requires too big a commitment for those on the margin or just starting their job-hunting process. This blockade-mentality precludes the best from even becoming a prospect. For example, most company career sites make it difficult to find a job, or chat with a recruiter to get more information. Worse, most hiring managers are equally unwilling to just talk with a prospect on an exploratory basis. They typically want the candidate highly committed and interested before the first interview. The problem here is that the best people are generally open to talk even if they’re not looking, and many are willing to become prospects if it doesn’t require too much of a commitment. To build a big hot prospect database of high performers, companies need to eliminate every possible barrier to entry.

Even if you don’t achieve a complete JIT demand-pull sourcing program right away, proactive recruitment advertising designed to fill your prospect database will provide a significant competitive advantage. Getting prospects into the database is a science in-and-of-itself, and a good place to start.

The best way to do this for high-volume jobs (developers, sales reps, customer service, engineers, etc.) is to develop a series of talent hubs by job class. These 2-3 page microsites offer prospects an introduction to the job class (e.g., power engineers) providing information about the company, the types of jobs available, typical projects, learning opportunities, and a means to connect with the company, all without applying for a specific job.

You can add Web 2.0 interactive features to this microsite, including chat, RSS feeds, video podcasts, and a means to be first to learn about upcoming opportunities. As part of the talent hub design, make sure it can be found first by those Googling for jobs or pushing the link to appropriate blogs, networks, and social sites.

This is where search engine marketing becomes critical. Jobs2Web and Shaker Recruitment Advertising are leading the effort on creating these prospect portals.

It’s difficult to imagine the idea of advanced consumer marketing combined with state-of-the-art supply chain management as being the foundation for the future of recruiting.

Despite the non-HR emphasis, the most progressive companies are already moving in this direction with great success. Who knows? We may be able to win the war for talent after all with some true cross-functional thinking.

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.

It’s similar to what I see when analyzing strategic Internet marketing programs. It comes down to one simple thing: legacy, incumbent budgets that prevent you from achieving the desired outcome. Long-standing, legacy budgets fund college graduate and intern relocation programs and are regularly renewed while mid-level, experienced-hire budget resources are highly irregular and often insufficient to acquire the best talent.

The expenses for experienced hire candidates, such as airfare and hotels during interviewing, and relocation costs of an experienced hire, often come directly out of the P&L of the business unit doing the hiring. As you enter budget cycles in the years ahead, you should consider creating a flexible budget pool for experienced hires that is independent of the business unit. This not only will help your recruiting programs hire the top talent you need today, but will position your firm strategically to have a nimble experienced hiring process in the upcoming years as the baby boomers begin to retire and you look to hire replacement leaders from Generation X.

In the short term, you need to get a bit more creative to give offers to the best and brightest talent. Here are a few ideas for obtaining the best, most geographically diverse talent:

Actively Seek Out Renters as Candidates. It’s understandable that you don’t want to take on real estate risk unless absolutely necessary, especially in the current marketplace. Additionally, you want to be hiring candidates who demonstrate responsible financial behavior — they might have the same positive tendencies when making decisions for your business! Renters with no outstanding debt or without hard-to-divest real estate should be therefore highly sought-after assets! An added benefit of this is that there is a correlation with having fewer personal belongings when renting and that would lead to a higher likelihood of a lower-cost move overall.

Target Veterans Terminating Active Duty Military. Lisa Rosser is a book author and founder of The Value of a Veteran, a firm that advises and trains organizations on the value and hidden benefits of hiring veterans. According to Lisa, “Over 100,000 service members separate from active military duty (i.e., not National Guard or Reserve duty) each year and it’s a little known fact that each and every one of them is entitled to one free move anywhere in the United States.” The veteran can request that benefit any time within one year after the date of separation. Many military members begin their job search eight or more months in advance of their last day of contracted service. That is the optimal window to begin marketing your company and its typical hiring needs to the military audience, and wrangle that free move on Uncle Sam’s dime. She also encourages people to look at the skills and competencies fully, not just their job titles and/or organization. These aren’t just infantry folks — among them are computer programmers, highly skilled engineers, nurses, and healthcare professionals.

Seek Out Spouses of Recently Relocated Workers. You might find some candidate gems here. Larger companies in your region who frequently relocate people might have lists of such people or access to organizations that provide support to these people. Look at their skill sets completely — not just their last job title and company brand. If you find a way to quickly show these people that you see value in them when they first move to an unfamiliar place, you are very likely to make an extremely positive impression. The result will be acquiring an appreciative, loyal, and content worker who has a higher likelihood of remembering your gesture.

Target Individuals Who Have Shown Interest in Your Geographic Region. You can seek bloggers and social media participants via search engines such as Google who mention the position’s location favorably in their writings about a vacation, a relative, or close friend that lives in the region, a business trip they particularly enjoyed, or otherwise. Then again, a candidate might present you with an old-fashioned letter to someone at the company stating a desire to move the area. Due to the affinity that they have for the area, they might be highly motivated to move to the region and happily share or absorb the costs upon receiving an offer. Just like with the relocated spouse, this individual will be highly appreciative of the opportunity. As an added bonus since you found them via their blog or social media tools they are likely to tell the story over and over, creating positive word of mouth about your employment brand.

Focus On Sourcing Candidates Who Once Lived In Your Region. If the role is New York City, knowing that they can handle living there can be an important factor in selecting a candidate. Potential candidates will likely fall into one of two buckets: A) they loved it and can’t wait for the opportunity to return; or B) they never wish to return. The latter might have ideas about candidates who might be appropriate due to their prior experience in the location, so even that outcome is not a waste of your time and effort.

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.

August 6, 2005
Received job for Market Research Director in a.m. Good customer. Wants persons involved in market research at a target list of pharma/biotech companies. Looks like the old eye-dropper with an initial lavish budget of 35 names — told him for this position he’s going to need a lot more. He knows that but said his client is new to the names-sourcing concept and wants to see what it gets him and may come back to us for a second phase of work if he likes what he sees initially. <sigh> Time is of the essence (as it always is). He’s sent a couple dozen companies with the remark:

“It might make some sense to start with some of the smallest companies on the target list, and leave the real biggies for a later phase. They have a LOT of market research people, whereas some of the less-huge companies might have a group small enough to be manageable for us … “

He wants me to start first on the U.S. headquarters as that is where market research people are most likely to be concentrated and then next go out to the divisions. I don’t think time will permit much if any of that, certainly not in this first phase of work. He further instructs:

“He’s trying to fill a position as a Senior Director of Market Research, so his best prospects, and our highest priorities, will be SR. DIRECTORS, DIRECTORS, and ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS … as opportunity permits, he would also like us to flesh out levels below that (MANAGERS, and ANALYSTS).”

If I got all that we’re talking a couple hundred names — easy — out of the majority of these companies. In particular he wants people from any therapeutic area/business group, but has particular interest in people working exclusively, or partially, in the following three therapeutic areas: Oncology, CNS (Central Nervous System? — I hate it when they use abbreviations) and Addiction-Dependent Drugs.

Addiction-Dependent Drugs? That’s new. Ask for better definition …

Client would like e-mail addresses — not gonna happen. He has sent along a packet of names that includes market research people from the target companies with the remark that many are old — this means many will be gone or have moved to other functions higher up on the title level or maybe even now working in other areas. In addition there appears to be some marketing/product management people that either now work or have worked in Oncology or CNS. These people, or their administrative assistants, would know who the market research people are assigned to those therapeutic areas of interest.

Customer has tagged some of the target companies with an asterisk (*) to denote priority companies — many of them are large companies — start with the “smaller” of the “large” companies.

***
Those were my notes before starting the job and the following is the lesson formed from these notes.

A recent search for “Market Research Directors” in pharmaceutical companies demonstrates the power of acquiescence. Pharmaceutical companies have become increasingly difficult to navigate — but there are ways.

In I go, starting with my older research, LinkedIn, Spoke and other Internet results. I found as much (if not more!) elsewhere on the Internet as I did on LinkedIn, and much of my old research (and the customer’s) was outdated. But the Internet and LinkedIn stuff was especially valuable on this search. (By the way, I no longer use Spoke — I find Spoke these days to be nothing more than a repetition of LinkedIn residents.)

I Googled in different variations on the company name, along with the words director, manager, VP, “market research,” oncology, CNS, central nervous system, and addiction, and I looked up the drugs the companies produced in these verticals and Googled their names as well. In addition I added “area code/prefix” of locations I knew to be appropriate for the different locations within each company. I gathered above and below the title strike because some managers will have moved into director positions — after all, Internet research can be notoriously dated.

(Title strike refers to the level you want to “strike in” upon for your open position; in other words if you have a director position open, you’ll probably want to source managers for an upward move. Titles vary depending on the size of the company, but in general, the bigger the company, the lower your title-strike should be, and the smaller the company, the higher the title-strike can be. In other words, a manager-level in a $10-billion-sale company could be at the same experience level as a director in a $900-million-sale company or a VP in a $100-million-sale company.)

VPs will many times have administrative assistants or, better yet, executive assistants supporting them who may be willing to tell you who reports to their boss just to get you out of their hair and into someone else’s!

I generated a broad field of names (probably 300 or so) across 20 companies. Then I began the “drill in” process. One of the big hurdles was wading through all the answering machine nonsense nowadays when you call these companies. Usually I hit zero immediately when I hear that hated, “Stop and listen to this message. .. ” I don’t have time to “stop” for anything. “Zero” usually takes you to a live operator.

The following are a couple exchanges I had within the companies with the receptionists. One demonstrates the technique of acquiesce I have referred to above.

At this first company, I had no relevant names to “get me in.” I called — these pharma companies take a long time to answer nowadays!

“ABC Pharmaceutical Company, Missy speaking.”

“Hi Missy, this is Maureen Sharib, can you please transfer me to your market research department?”

“Which one, we have many?!” she gleefully announces.

“What different ones do you have, Missy?”

“Oh there are so many! I don’t have time to tell you — I’m on the switchboard — what is it you’re trying to accomplish, maybe I can help you that way?”

“I’m trying to reach someone in market research regarding oncology … ” I trail off, hoping she’ll pick up on my need. Notice I just give her one area of interest. To give her any/all of the vertical requests would probably ring her suspicion bell. At this point she does interrupt me:

“Just a moment, please” and before I can object she ejects me into their telephone transfer system, at the end of which I hit someone’s voice mail. Not knowing who it was or what it was, I write down the name of the person (Jeanette Owens) from the message; I also put the questioning remark “Market Research/Oncology?” after the name because you just never know. The line disconnected, not allowing me to “zero out” to the receptionist. Wasting no time, I call back in immediately. Missy answers again.

“Yes Missy, this is Maureen again. Well, that didn’t help, I hit someone’s voice mail — was that oncology market research?”

“Yes, it was — did you leave a message?”

“No, I didn’t leave a message with Jeanette, I didn’t know who she was — is she the Administrative Assistant for the department?” I casually ask. Notice I am repeating names (first) back to her. This is usually one of the first steps in establishing the “rapport” I mentioned earlier.

“Yes she is,” Missy affirms.

I silently replace the “?” with “AA/oncology market research” in my notes while simultaneously taking this bull by the horns.

“Missy, is there anyone else in the department we could try; is there maybe a manager, or even a director, you know, someone who heads the department, you could transfer me to?”

Missy hesitates. I wait, not too expectantly, because many times at this point (in pharma especially) I’m turned away with something to the effect, “If you leave a message with the AA she’ll return your call; that’s all I have,” at which point I usually acquiesce, agreeing to be transferred to the AA again, knowing that my response to her voice mail will be to “zero out” and hopefully get transferred to someone else in the same department or to a different receptionist who might be more helpful. In sourcing, hope springs eternal.

Sometimes it works that way, but again, sometimes it doesn’t. After which, I move onto the next company, vowing to come back to this one using my newfound knowledge about its oncology market research department to my advantage, which usually helps me get in — the different day/different dollar theory. Missy did just as I thought she might when I ended up back at her desk. “You’ll have to leave a message with her,” she informed me in a clipped tone. “All-righty-then,” I think to myself as I move onto the next target.

This job’s first phase concluded with 35 names out of a dozen of the original target companies, many of which were on the “priority” list. I put a note in the job that we had only “scratched the surface.” The end client was well pleased and ordered a second phase of work. I ended up delivering about 100 names out of 17 of the original target companies.
******
This actually happened as I have recounted it above. By the way, anything you see me write about sourcing is taken from my actual experiences, and much of this is material recorded in my journals. As you can see, this particular exercise was time-consuming on the front end but very effective. As you get further into the job, and work with and off your gathered information, it gets smoother and faster. The names become more prolific as the job advances; this rarely happens at the beginning of a job. You need to be organized and tenacious. You have to be gutsy and pick up that telephone and ask for information! There’s no other way — at least I haven’t found it yet. If you have, let me know!

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…

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.

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.

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?

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?

When he took his current position, he was aware that finding the highly specialized robotic engineers and technicians the firm needed was his number-one challenge.

Even though the organization was located in the heart of the academic world, with major research schools and labs everywhere, these robotics people remained a scare commodity and the few that he did find were happier remaining in academia.

He had worked with compensation to sweeten the incentives and he had spent time with a big-name advertising agency honing the recruiting messages and redoing the career site. They had won awards and been written about in ERE and in recruiting blogs. Paul had been given several awards. But he was failing.

The company was quite unique. It developed robots that mimicked the human hand. These mechanical hands were incredible. They could pick up an egg without breaking it and yet they could slice through a piece of steel like scissors through paper. They could manipulate, sew, pick up tiny parts, and insert them into circuit boards and they could perform some types of surgery, with assistance from a human doctor.

The demand was growing rapidly, yet the supply of people to design, improve, and manufacture them remained small. Not many schools turned out robotics engineers and not many students choose that as a career.

The engineering team had also placed tight competency requirements on candidates. Every candidate had to have degrees in at least two related disciplines, such as mechanical and electrical engineering, or computer science and mechanical engineering. Or, they had to have 5 or more years of experience and a single degree.

Hiring managers wanted prior experience in robotics, if possible, or experience in manufacturing or designing miniature components or nanotechnology. They wanted engineers capable of demonstrating these products to a global customer base. And each robot had to be installed and “tuned” for each customer, which frequently required foreign travel for a long period of time.

Even though Paul had pushed back on these tough requirements, he had not been able to change their opinions. And his sourcing team couldn’t find the right people.

So here he sat on a lovely afternoon, befuddled and at a loss. Should he quit? Did he admit defeat? Was there a way out? What strategies or tactics could he apply to this situation that might rescue him, and the organization?

I am hoping you can help Paul. What are your ideas and suggestions? I will summarize them and add my thoughts in a future column.

• 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:

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.

First, with 44% of companies engaged in some degree of outsourced partnerships for recruitment services, RPO is gaining increasing traction as a viable option for solving recruitment challenges. In most (82%) cases, companies are outsourcing less than 25% of their openings, showing a trend to move slowly into outsourcing partnerships. With 62% of companies reporting that they intend to maintain that level of outsourcing within the next 12 months, it seems likely that companies will continue to adopt RPO solutions in select areas but on a somewhat limited basis.

This data also points out just how much room there is in the marketplace for the RPO industry to expand.

With 47% of companies reporting all of their recruiting work is still executed by direct employees, it will be telling to watch over the next two years how much of that work moves to outsourced partners, and how fast.

Secondly, it is clear that talent management is in its formative years as a function, with implementations ranging from fully formed, to partially formed, to unformed. Interestingly, there is little integration (only 13%) of the external recruiting function within talent management. It seems to us that knowing the external talent landscape is a critical data input for making informed, accurate internal talent management decisions, and we are surprised that many firms are making critical internal decisions with seemingly little or no regard to the external talent market.

We expect that as talent management matures and grows more robust, we will see companies move to models that fully integrate internal talent movement, talent management, and external recruitment, and that data from all sources will be considered fundamental to forming effective and accurate workforce planning strategies.

There are interesting paradoxes in some of the recruiting staff deployment data. For example, the No. 1 challenge that inhibits recruitment success is the inability to source and find qualified candidates for critical, hard-to-fill positions. These positions, in most cases, account for 25-50% of a recruiter’s workload.
Yet, nearly all companies have recruiters working on positions that are filled with internal and external candidates. On the face, time spent handling internal movement takes away valuable time for external sourcing and relationship development that is critical for finding high-demand talent. So, in a very real sense, recruiting functions are architecting their way into delivery problems.

Another paradoxical finding was that although sourcing was cited as the No. 1 issue, only 5% of companies have dedicated sourcing functions. It seems obvious that if sourcing is the number one issue, but no staff is dedicated to sourcing, then the problem will persist, and perhaps worsen. This is especially true when recruiters are unable to focus 100% on the external market.

The data also revealed a relatively slow adaptation of Web 2.0 tools and methods, with less than a quarter of companies regularly using any Web 2.0 or social networking tool in their recruiting solution. Additionally, most companies report that they are measuring only the most fundamental of staffing metrics. This could be due in large part to the fact that most of recruiting’s key systems come with difficult-to-use or very limited reporting capabilities. The effective adaptation of Web 2.0 technologies and better analytics tools into daily recruiting delivery practice looks like the next significant technology challenge for recruiting functions.

Overall, the data seems to reflect that recruiting is experiencing an unsettled period. With RPO and Talent Management in their infancy, increasing competition for top talent creating sourcing issues, a lack of clarity around the best resourcing approaches to address the sourcing challenges, and the continuing need to adapt new technologies, leaders of recruiting functions are juggling a host of moving parts.

The companies that most accurately tie their recruiting functions to their business goals and build the solution set that enables efficient and effective recruitment delivery will fair well in this changing environment.

“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.”

Still not putting two and two together, I click on it (it was an entertaining movie!) and the movie is at the scene where Denzel Washington (Rhyme, a crippled cop/teacher ) is telling Angelina Jolie (Amanda Donaghy, rookie cop) to “walk the grid” in order to collect evidence at a grisly crime scene. Rhyme recognizes a natural talent in Donaghy for the work and assumes a mentor position with her. Donaghy (Jolie), struggling with past trauma and an innate calling to obey Rhyme’s instructions, walks her first grid, collecting evidence that helps to ultimately catch the killer.

I’m reminded of the words that popped out of my mouth without thinking earlier in the day and sigh, knowing that on the morrow I will be compelled to obey what I think of as the calling in the cosmos, walking my own kind of grid in the composition of this missive.

‘Walking the grid” is a forensics term; one meaning is to scour a crime scene — to scrutinize it. The terminology is also used in computer and positioning terminology, but before anyone leaps to the conclusion that I will be talking about actual crime scenes — I will not be. I am using fanciful imagery for the purpose of explaining one of my sourcing processes from an observer’s perspective. This is an attempt to wash the reader’s mind of any value and/or value judgment and to recast it with the practice of probing and questioning; in other words, a “learning how to learn” technique.

Donaghy: “I can’t do this.”
Rhyme: “You can do it. Yes you can. Yesterday you stopped a train. You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.”
Donaghy: “Don’t work me, Ryan. Just tell me what to do next.”
Rhyme: “Very slowly, walk the grid. One foot in front of the other. I want you to look around you now. Remember, crime scenes are three-dimensional: floors, walls and ceilings.”
Donaghy: “There’s a small piece of wood and what looks like some hair.”
Rhyme: “Alright, I’m going to walk you through collecting the evidence. You do everything exactly as I say.”

“Walking the grid” inside a target company means to “walk” through the front door of a company and freely investigate the environs in your mind. I always see the puzzled looks on the faces of my students when I say this in class. Not many people think to venture inside a company like this. Crime scenes are three-dimensional: floors, walls and ceilings. So are sourcing jobs.

The idea is that each “target” has similar characteristics. Depending on what’s going on at the site (headquarters will usually be larger and far busier than branch sites) each location will have pretty much the same activities going on. There will be, at headquarter sites for example, many times, marketing (including business development, alliances and corporate marketing), finance (including investor relations), some sales, many times R&D, most of the C-level executives and administrative staffs that it takes to support the various departments, sometimes support, operations (including maintenance), security, and last, but not least in our book, HR!

The one thing that 99% of them have is a receptionist(s) — also known as “gatekeepers” — on staff who meets the public onslaught at the front door. You and I are generally included in that warring horde, and you have seen me many times discuss how to deal with the gatekeeper, including envisioning what she looks like, what her environs look like, and what’s going on around her in the moments you are attempting to get and hold her attention. But what happens when you can’t deal with the gatekeeper? What happens when she won’t let you through?

In addition to the departments listed out above, company locations are also likely to/might have the following physical characteristics:

• brick and mortar exteriors
• doors
• individual offices of all sizes and character
• floors, walls, and ceilings
• levels
• elevators
• stairwells
• bathrooms
• breakrooms
• mailrooms
• conference rooms, large and small
• media rooms
• reception areas
• maintenance facilities
• security gates and guardstons and tons of office equipment
• cafeterias
• gyms
• childcare facilities
• dry cleaners and other services
• vending machines
• hallways
• whole campuses with several buildings
• parking lots
• sidewalks
• landscaping/lakes with ducks on them

Many, many other physical attributes but I think you’re getting the picture with what I’ve listed out above.

The idea here is to encapsulate in your mind what the joint looks like. Did you know you can go to Google Earth and “Explore, Search, and Discover”? That Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3-D buildings for location-specific information? This function was formerly known as “Keyhole” and many a time I use it to get a bird’s eye view of a company location. With a glimpse I can see how many buildings a company has on its campus, where the parking lots are located, if they have a security detail cars must pass through, if the location appears isolated or not, and lots and lots of extraneous information I know you are having a hard time comprehending what this has to do with sourcing.

This visual information, coupled with the statistical information I get from Hoover’s and the location information I get from the company website, allows me to begin the “grid walks” in my searches at my individual targets. If I see that a company has 14,000 total employees (at Hoover’s) and 2,750 of them are at headquarters (yes, Hoovers tells you this!) and I see at Google Earth that the company’s headquarters has six buildings, I can pretty much infer that each building might contain separate (and whole) functions. When I call the front desk this information has many times afforded me just the familiar “ring” I needed in my pursuit.

Let’s say I called my first target company in the first morning of my search. Shirley answered and she wouldn’t let me pass with my normal approach. I note her name in my research document because I know I’m going to be calling back. I call her back the second morning. I do a change-up in my approach. I know that Shirley has answered literally hundreds of calls since last we spoke. She is not likely to remember me.

Hi Shirley. This is Maureen Sharib. I’m trying to reach Operations — they’re not in your building are they?

Oh, no Maureen — they’re in Building 5 — you need that number?

Yes, I could sure use it!

Here you go — Maria should answer — she’s the receptionist in that building.

In case Maria doesn’t answer, Shirley, can you tell me who heads up Operations over there?”

Sure! That’s Bob Jones…

And so it goes more often than not. This is part of what is called “competitive intelligence” and it’s not as hard as it sounds. Sure, it involves a good amount of legwork on the front end. This is the beginning of the work, and things evolve from this point. But, as you can see, it’s a methodical tracing on each and every search and if you do this, if you “walk the grid” at each of your target companies, I promise you results!

Here’s another scenario.

Hi Maria, Shirley gave me your number. I was trying to reach Bob Jones - is he in?

I haven’t seen him come in yet this morning. You want his voice mail?

Well, no, not really — maybe you can tell me — who supports him?

That would be Arleen — she’s not in yet either — it’s early!

I know. Has anyone in Operations come in yet?

Oh, sure, Pete Miller always gets here first — he went up just a few minutes ago — you want him?

That would be great, Maria, — before you transfer me, so I don’t sound so stupid when I get him on the phone, WHAT IS HIS TITLE?

More times than not she’ll fluidly answer after just such an exchange. But look what I gathered in two calls!

• The receptionist’s name at the main number (Shirley)
• Where Operations is located (Building 5)
• The receptionist’s name at Building 5 (Maria)
• The name of the Head of Operations (Bob Jones)
• His Administrative Assistant (Arleen)
• The fact that most people in Operations don’t arrive “early”
• The fact that Operations is probably located on an upper floor
• One Ops report and his title — and one guy who does arrive early (Pete Miller)

Before you think, “Well, that’s not so much” — let me beg your pardon. I didn’t go on in the exchange where I press Maria for more information about the inhabitants of the Operations department and if you’d seen me do it you’d more than probably be amazed. It still amazes me today when these exchanges deliver so much information.

The sourcing “trick” here is really no trick at all — it’s the willingness on the part of the sourcer to set each job up methodically and to “walk the grid” on each and every target in a search. It’s time-consuming and this is the real fly-in-the-ointment for many. It’s another reason why sourcing is a separate and entirely different function from recruiting. I see sourcing as creating a bridge between recruiting and marketing in the sense that so much competitive intelligence is uncovered in any one search that this information deserves its own unique conduit for utilization. Walk that grid when you’re thinking about setting up your own sourcing departments!

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.

With technology advancing at its current pace, there truly are few limits as to how the smart phone can be used to power a modern strategic recruiting function. Advantages as the primary recruiting platform include:

• The single source communications platform. Obviously, any tool that increases your opportunities to communicate with candidates via a channel they will actually pay attention to and respond to must be considered a valuable recruiting tool. However, so many tools exist that the average recruiter can easily become overwhelmed. Nearly all tools require consistent utilization to be effective; unfortunately, staying on top of blogs, email, voicemail, social network profiles, and the like can consume more time than most recruiters have. Because nearly all of the tools have their own interface, the recruiter’s time can become so fractured that it seems like headway never gets made. However, the smart phone can alleviate many of those frustrations by providing a unified interface to nearly every form of candidate communication. Rather than having to get multiple phone numbers, multiple email addresses, fax numbers, etc. from each candidate, the recruiter can send all forms of your messages to the candidate’s mobile phone. On the flip side, the candidate would also be able to use a single number to communicate with the recruiter.
• Access during idle times. Traditional messaging platforms like paper letters, phone calls to the office phone, and even emails have a low direct-response rate because they can only be received and read when someone is sitting at their desk or when they are on their computer. When you are in a meeting, you can’t answer the phone, check the mail, etc., despite the fact that the meeting maybe boring as hell and have nothing to do with you! Smart phones, on the other hand, enable you to receive and respond to messages pretty much anytime, anywhere. While I don’t advocate text messaging candidates about interviews while driving down the interstate, you could certainly do so if needed. In high-tech organizations, it is not uncommon to see BlackBerry’s messaging away during meetings and conference calls.
• Opportunity to communicate while the iron is hot. Many times your mind will process things while you are doing something else. You could be on a hike when you recall meeting the perfect candidate for a hot requisition several weeks back. Historically you would have to have waited till you finished your hike and made it into the office, but today you can whip out your smart phone, look him/her up on Facebook or in your CRM powered applicant database, and fire off a message in seconds. Not only does it make you more productive, it makes you more genuine. Potential candidates often put off visiting the corporate website because it’s simply not a viable thing to do when the mood hits. However, smart phones are accessible most of the time, in part because few would even consider venturing out to the grocery store, the gym, or to lunch without their mobile phone. A Web link or a message sent to a mobile phone has a much higher likelihood of being read and responded to because potential candidates can read and answer them when they are away from her desk and during “idle” times. Mobile phone users (as many spouses will attest) will respond to messages at night, on weekends, and during vacations. If you add up the number of hours where we can answer our mobile phone versus the number of hours when we can access our computer, the mobile phone wins by a 2 to 5 margin.
• A remarkably fast response rate. For some reason, mobile phone owners respond almost instantly to messages they receive. If you have been out to the movies lately on a Friday or Saturday night, it’s hard to miss the bright phone screen flips every few seconds when the theater is dark, regardless whether the movie is entertaining. It seems those from younger generations can’t even finish reading a message before they start responding. This lack of a “delay” in responding to messages is critical, because any time a candidate postpones responding directly, it lowers the probability that they will ever get back to you. As the pace of messaging accelerates both inside and outside the work environment, expectations for a quick response increases. Failure to keep pace with expectations will influence a candidate’s perception of your organization as a modern organization.
• Accommodating personal communication preferences. The next advantage of using smart phones as the primary communication platform for recruiting is its broad capability. It is no secret that some people prefer short text messages, others encyclopedia-length emails. Increasingly, video seems to be the communication method of choice for millions around the globe. Smart phones provide recruiters with a means to communicate with candidates via a channel the candidate most prefers. The fact is, if you want a message to be received “live” and responded to immediately, it helps to send it in a format that resonates with the recipient.

Additional Advantages of the Smart Phone as a Recruiting Platform

• The cool factor. Sending text messages, videos, etc., is viewed by many as “cool,” as opposed to traditional emails and voicemails. Utilizing texting jargon like LOL (laughing out loud) can also send a message that you “get it.”
• Global capability. modern 3G phones allow you to communicate wherever you are in the world. Candidates in Asia and Europe are extremely text-savvy, and using text messaging saves them money.
• The generation factor. Some generations, including my current crop of college students, refuse to use email and in many cases, even voicemail, but they love texting.
• Not blocked by corporate. The ability to use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn is critical for successful recruiting. However, many corporate CIOs foolishly block recruiter access to some Web and social network sites on their computer systems. Fortunately, they seldom block access through mobile phones, so access away!
• Brevity. The fact that mobile phones are utilized “on the run” forces everyone to be brief in their messages. This brevity makes both reading messages and responding to them easier and quicker. It also forces recruiters to be more concise in their messages.
• Lower cost. As mobile phone services get cheaper, there is less resistance to using “my minutes” on a job search than there was in the past. In addition, you save money because you can send the same text message to a large number of people at essentially no cost. In contrast, making the same number of individual phone calls would cost a great deal because of the staff time involved in making the calls.
• Differentiation. Because few firms currently use text messages and take advantage of the entire smart phone platform, it provides you with an opportunity to differentiate your firm from others.
• Less spam. At least at the present time, the volume of spam that drives users away from email has not inundated smart phone applications. As a result, they are more willing to open and read your messages.

Potential Uses in Recruiting

As you have probably already discerned, the smart phone has a broad range of potential uses in recruiting. Some of the uses you should consider include:

• Text messaging (SMS or simple message service). Sending simple text messages for a variety of purposes is a great way to communicate and service candidates. Many leading-edge organizations are using text messaging to introduce recruiters to candidates, set up interview times, answer simple questions, and direct new hires through orientation activities.
• Job opening alerts. You can proactively “push” targeted job openings to candidates.
• Event alerts. You can notify potential candidates about opportunities to meet with your recruiters at trade shows, seminars, and career fairs. Calendar requests are a great way to make sure the event is added to their calendars.
• Social networking. Nearly all of the major social networks have applications available for smart phones that let users send messages or check out what people are up to. As many social network users periodically micro-blog, using such applications to track candidates could be a great way of refining when and how you approach candidates.
• Text and reply information requests. You have probably seen advertisements on TV that allow you to text a single word to a five digit number to get more information about a product or service sent to you. Such systems can also be used to support applicants, candidates, new hires, and employees. For example, college students could text “internships” to 7XXXX to receive more information from your organization on current internship opportunities and instructions for applying. One popular provider of text and reply services is qtag.
• Physical world hyperlinks. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard about these yet, you will in coming months! Physical world hyperlinks are 2-D barcodes (similar to those printed on a self-service check-in boarding pass) that can be added to nearly anything in the physical world. What is different about these barcodes is that smart phone users can snap a picture of the barcode and an application on the phone will decode the barcode and take the user to the website encoded in the image using the browser on the phone. College students attending a career fair could snap a pic to be transported to a special page on your website to download free toys. Because each barcode can be encoded to pass on specific data, physical world hyperlinks can be used to more accurately track source of hire for candidates met in the field.
• Blog feeds. Keeping up with the vast array of content being added to the Internet daily is nearly impossible. Luckily, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and have the new posts retrieved for you on your smart phone!
• Video messaging (MMS or multimedia message service). You can send short recruiting videos to excite and to show the “passion” at your firm.
• Podcasts. You can make recruiting podcasts available for download.
• Web links. You can send potential candidates recruiting links or Web links relevant to their profession.
• Temporary jobs. Filling temporary and contract jobs where you have a “sudden” need is easy when you can instantly send out messages to pre-identified individuals.
• Friends e-newsletter. Companies can put together a “friends” newsletter at virtually no cost. This newsletter can be used to build relationships with potential candidates by providing them with information about happenings at the company, its new products, and any best practices and innovations.
• Text message options on the website. Your corporate website should provide candidates with the option to receive text messages and all other communications on their mobile phone.
• CRM touch points. Mobile phones are an ideal way to keep in touch with candidates over time. Potential uses include sending birthday greetings, congratulations on an accomplishment, wishing students luck on their exams, or just sending periodic “hellos” to build relationships.
• Surveys/polling. You can send short surveys that cover a candidate’s interests or their job acceptance decision criteria. Mobile phones can also be used to vote (i.e., American Idol) or to get opinions from candidates or even from your recruiters. This polling process can also be used to update your database by periodically asking candidates if they’re still “in the job market?”
• Mini interviews. The mobile phone can, of course, be used for short telephone interviews and even short text interview questionnaires.
• GPS. Creative recruiters could even develop mechanisms to alert individuals when they are within close proximity of a recruiter, a job event, or even the location of a facility with a current job opening.
• Miscellaneous. Mobile phones can be used as platforms for recruiting video games, music, recruitment ads, trivia games, or best-practice sharing.

Best Practice Firms

Using smart phones and text messaging is quite common in marketing. It has widespread use in college sports recruiting and on large job boards, but in the corporate world, most firms have failed to develop a comprehensive smart phone recruiting strategy.

There are a handful of firms that have taken the lead, including Verizon, Fidelity, HCA, the U.S. Army, and Microsoft. Other users include Toyota, Shell, American Express, Accenture, Dell, NYPD, Wyndham Hotels, and RehabCare.

There are also several recruitment advertising agencies, text messaging services, RMS providers, and product marketing vendors which provide services and advice in this area, including but certainly not limited to NAS, qtags.com, Blast Companies, and CollegeRecruiter.com.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to deny the fact that almost every individual you may want to recruit constantly carries a mobile phone. It’s also true that the capabilities of these phones have grown to the point where they can be used as a platform to send nearly every recruiting message, no matter what form it’s in.

What is needed now is for the directors of corporate recruiting to take a step back and develop a comprehensive strategy that takes advantage of the mobile phone’s capability as the prime recruiting communications tool. In my opinion, everyone will eventually reach that point, but the smart ones will do it sooner and with a more comprehensive and planned approach.

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.

To make matters worse, when finalists are selected and offers are about to be made, recruiters and managers stumble through some clumsy closing process either paying too much or losing the candidate to a more professional and astute buyer. When viewed in this light, the idea of buying more raw materials or looking for more candidates makes no sense until the rest of the processes are fixed.

Here are 20 common non-sourcing problems (if you have more than 10, fix your sourcing scrap rate before you look for more raw materials):

• Job descriptions are boring.

• Managers over-specify skills, experience, academics and industry background.

• Application process is too long and top candidates opt-out.

• Managers don’t spend enough time clarifying real job needs.

• Managers refuse to see good candidates, because they don’t have exactly the right background.

• Managers exclude good candidates due to incorrect assessments.

• Managers don’t respond quickly enough when resumes are sent to them.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with our interviewing process.

• Good candidates are unimpressed with the hiring manager.

• Good candidates want to know the comp before talking.

• Passive candidates want to know the details of the job before even talking.

• Recruiters over-rely on skills and experience to screen candidates.

• ATS system is cumbersome to use.

• Candidates increasingly are rejecting offers or accepting other offers or better offers.

• We can’t attract the best people with our comp packages.

• Recruiters can’t smoothly handle most candidate concerns.

• Relocation is a problem.

• We can’t move fast enough to decide & make offers.

• Managers aren’t responsive or involved enough.

• We never have enough time to do it right.

Avoid Preventable Issues

How many unnecessary extra candidates do you need to find to overcome all of the good candidates who were lost for the above preventable reasons? Many of these non-sourcing problems are attributed to weak planning, lack of training, dumb policies, bad processes, and inadequate technology.

When viewed from this perspective, it’s apparent that there is a lot of non-sourcing stuff that can be done to help reduce the need to see more candidates.

But this is still only half of the problem. If you have more than 10 of the following sourcing-related problems, improving your scrap rate will help, but not enough to solve the problem completely.

Sourcing-Related Problems

• The quality and quantity of candidates from job boards is declining.

• We use the same sourcing methods every year.

• Our advertising is boring and out-dated.

• Our job ads are just cut-and-paste versions of our boring job descriptions.

• Ads are hard to find by top people who are casually looking.

• Ads are found, but top candidates don’t apply.

• Our ads don’t describe a compelling value proposition.

• Our ads are filled with disqualifiers and little about what’s in it for the candidate.

• Our ads are written to exclude bad people not attract good people.

• Our career website is difficult to navigate and search for jobs.

• We don’t use web analytics to track response by ad.

• We have not search engine optimized our site or our ads.

• Our ads don’t always come up first on the job boards we use.

• Good candidates say they’re “not interested” early in the process.

• We don’t get enough high-quality referrals.

• Too many voice-mails are needed to get callbacks.

• We make too many cold calls to passive candidates.

• High-potential candidates with slightly different skills would not naturally apply to our ads.

• Our CRM system and resume database is difficult to use and not very effective.

• Our employees don’t proactively seek out great people to refer.

Too many companies try to solve their hiring problems with a new sourcing-idea-of-the-month program. This is like applying a Band-Aid when major surgery is required.

Instead, think big and fix your scrap rate problems first and then start posting compelling ads in exactly the same places. Before you know it, your talent factory will be humming along.

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.

Fixed and Variable Costs

The key to managing cost structure begins by distinguishing between fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs are infrastructure costs that are necessary to participate in a business. Once incurred, they are fairly stable. They include things like office rents, recruiter salaries, hardware, and software costs. They are part of the price of entry. Management and organizational theorists have an old saying: structure follows strategy, and strategy is constrained by structure. In English, this means that organizations acquire resources to support their strategy and goals. But once acquired, be it people, buildings, or equipment, it’s hard to change. Your organization’s infrastructure is a fixed cost. It can’t be reduced easily.

Variable costs on the other hand, fluctuate with activity. As activity rises, so do variable costs — things like advertisements, commissions, and travel costs tend to be variable.

CFOs hate fixed costs, and hate increases in fixed costs even more. Most of us can deal with high costs during peak production. But, when activity is low, reducing costs is a struggle. This is because so many of them are fixed, and cutting fixed costs is painful — as anyone who has laid off staff can attest. Unfortunately, layoffs are the fastest way to cut fixed costs. Variable costs, on the other hand, lower themselves during slowdowns, and are infinitely preferable on accounting reports. Not only are layoffs painful, but after laying off core talent, it can be hard to replace them when demand picks up later. Many organizations are slow to ramp up recruiting staff, having been burned earlier. It is much easier if you can keep your core expertise intact. The way to achieve this is to increase variable costs relative to fixed costs. This is done through something called Selective RPO.

Now You See It…Now You Don’t

How does one convert fixed costs to variable costs? The answer comes to us as a variation of Recruitment Process Outsourcing. The initial reviews of RPO indicate that wholesale RPO is risky. Client companies aren’t happy and vendors aren’t profitable. It seems that keeping some expertise in-house (read: recruiters who understand the company) has real value. Didn’t we already know that? Apparently, the market did not. The key is to retain aspects that add higher value, and outsource the simpler, repetitive work. In other words, recognize what you do well and keep those activities in-house, then selectively outsource the other processes.

This Selective RPO allows you to affix costs where you add the highest value, leaving costs for all outsourced processes variable.

As importantly, you leverage valuable recruiting expertise, supporting your talented people with outside vendors to handle repetitive and menial tasks. You’re less likely to cut headcount during a downturn. This combination of managing costs, leveraging expertise, and reducing layoffs is a management trifecta. It is a direct result of carefully structuring fixed and variable costs.

Getting it Right and Wrong

I’ve recently dealt with a company that is making the effort to structure its recruiting costs to maximum advantage. The recruiting organization is small relative to the organizations’ needs. But their processes are well defined and managed. Fed by an external sourcing team, it has reliable and repeatable processes. Because the sourcing team is external, its processes are also modular. This modular structure ensures their recruiters can handle a higher number of requisitions when needed, by outsourcing the (repetitive) sourcing component. And because the relationship with sourcers is ongoing, not transactional, constant feedback flows through the process, allowing a small number of well-qualified candidates to reach hiring managers.

By monitoring individual recruiter workload, the sourcing is turned on or off, ensuring no bottlenecks develop. The organization also requires hiring managers to provide feedback very quickly, and holds them accountable for delays in the interview process. Despite the external nature of the sourcing team, measurement and feedback processes are shared the length of the process in a partnership, rather than in a typical vendor, or transactional relationship. By virtue of strong execution, this recruiting team has managed to convert previously fixed sourcing costs into variable costs.

By contrast, another organization I’ve worked with adopted a similar approach, but without sufficient attention to process. In this case, its brand is very well known — so much so that they rely on it almost exclusively. In an effort to convert fixed costs to variable costs, they too have contracted with outside vendors for sourcing. But they have paid little attention to process.

After months of frustration it became clear that the strength of its brand has enabled it to hire at volume without establishing any regularity in sourcing processes. Feedback is irregular (I’m being kind), and the external sourcers are treated as vendors (read: poorly). Everyone is scrambling to put bodies forth and hoping to get lucky. The outside vendors are servants, not partners, with the expectation that vendors should be grateful for the association. This arrogance has destroyed any likelihood of a partnership, and without decent processes, there are no reliable, repeatable results. The external sourcers, given little feedback, continue to generate large volumes of candidates, clogging the system. Worse yet, they have become fixed costs.

In response, the leadership is trying to bring in a “headhunting mentality,” hiring more outside vendors, throwing more money at the problem. While it is unfortunate, those in charge (at least for now) are so taken with their brand, they are currently incapable of learning. Here, despite an incredibly strong brand, virtually unlimited resources, and one of the best compensation packages in history, costs are rising while results decline. So, even a smart plan to convert fixed costs into variable will fail without attention to execution.

The Take-Away

Managing the ratio between fixed and variable costs is one of the few opportunities a recruiting manager has to demonstrate business acumen. This cost structure lends a number of advantages and becomes even more important when demand cycles are unpredictable. Any process not requiring essential company knowledge that can be removed from fixed costs and converted to a variable cost is a winner.

To ensure success beyond accounting reports, the relationship with outsourced partners needs to be a partnership, not transactional in nature. Feedback must flow freely in order to create reliable, repeatable processes. HR leaders who combine strong processes with this type of fiscal discipline tend to be treated as line managers, with all the right and obligations that go with executive offices.