ERE.net

You can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow nor the same recruiters used for active candidates.

We conducted an in-depth survey with LinkedIn last year that indicated that 82% of their fully-employed members were unlikely to even consider switching jobs unless directly contacted by a recruiter or through an employee they’ve worked with closely in the past. This increased slightly to 83% in this year’s survey. This is shown on the graph, with the dark blue line representing the satisfaction level of those surveyed (4,550 fully-employed LinkedIn members) comparing their job seeking status and job requirements over time.

From a strategy standpoint, the idea is to find candidates either the moment they actively enter the job market, or before. But to do this, you need a different process for sourcing and recruiting the 83% who are not actively looking than used for those who are. This is what is meant by an “Early-bird Sourcing Strategy.”

The surveys also highlighted the fact that most companies spend most of their recruiting resources targeting the 17% who are actively looking. Making matters more challenging, while most passive candidates are open to a discussion with a recruiter, they would only consider a significant career move to switch jobs.

Over the next several weeks I’ll be hosting a few webcasts describing how to develop this type of early-bird sourcing program. Part of this will describe some of the workflow process changes required to support the strategy, and the specific competencies a recruiter needs to possess in order to implement it. These changes are not insignificant. keep reading…

For a thought experiment (and to encourage creative conversation), I recently asked a few recruiting friends, “If you were left with only one method or tool for recruiting talent, what would you use?”

I’ve listed a few responses below and included some dialogue regarding pros and cons of each. Hopefully this discussion will help recruiters and recruiting leaders focus their energies on those tools that actually bring value to their organizations. keep reading…

Nasa photo of "crystal ball" nebula

I’m going to go out on a very firm limb here and suggest that I’ve just seen the future of passive candidate recruiting and sourcing 2012-2015, and it’s amazing. Before I uncover this tasty morsel for all to see and properly digest, let me set the stage, the lighting, and get the orchestra warmed-up.  keep reading…

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog I came across this quote attributed to Steve Jobs (this has been paraphrased for the ERE audience):

Screw the channel.

Manage the present for optimum performance.

Reinvent the future.

The equivalent for recruiting goes something like this:

Screw sourcing.

Maximize quality of hire.

Become a great recruiter.

The point: hiring great talent is not about great sourcing; it’s about great recruiting. And if you continue to chase the next sourcing silver bullet you’ll wind upexactly where you are today in 5-10 years from now. In fact, those of you who have followed the “chase-the-sourcing-silver-bullet” strategy have not improved quality of hire in the past 5-10 years. The only companies who have shattered this fundamental truth in the war for talent have been those who have a great employer brand. For everyone else, improving quality of hire requires great recruiters.

In a nutshell, here’s my secret formula for hiring great talent:

Great Hires = Good Sourcing plus Great Recruiting

If you follow this formula you’ll be seeing and hiring far better people. Here are some ideas on how to reinvent the future of recruiting: keep reading…

If you are consistently recruiting from the same competitors or for similar positions, pipelining provides you the opportunity to have a candidate list ready to discuss with a hiring manager after your first intake call.

Building a pipeline of candidates by recruiting for openings you are likely to have in the future allows you to manage your daily tasks efficiently and limits your daily sourcing needs going forward. With no urgent need to contact the pipelined candidates, you can focus on gathering data and dedicating 1-2 hours per day of pipeline-building activity.

With that, let me get you started by offering five key components to pipelining: keep reading…

In the frenzied change of today’s market many times we are faced with situations that thrust us into unfamiliar roles that are mission critical. Here’s the Survival Guide for a common sense approach to staying cool while the pressure is on to adapt, survive and ultimately thrive in your new role. Join us as Russ Moon explains how to stay afloat in a sea of change.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on sourcing be sure to check out Sourcecon!

Let’s get real here. Anyone who thinks LinkedIn is in the doghouse when it comes to recruiting the best talent isn’t a real recruiter, or they don’t know the difference between active and passive candidates, or they think sourcing is recruiting. So I’m going to use this article (and this webcast) to set the record straight.

First, let me first define a real recruiter:

1. They have excellent relations with the hiring manager and the hiring team. As part of this, 100% of their candidates they present are interviewed by the hiring manager, and none are bad.
2. They understand what it takes to maximize quality of hire, and achieve it on every assignment.
3. They thoroughly understand real job requirements and why the job is important to the company. As part of this they can convince their hiring managers that using traditional job descriptions minimizes the opportunity to hire top performers.
4. They are subject matter experts when it comes to knowing the company, the industry, the compensation ranges for the positions they handle, and the competition.
5. They prepare sourcing plans and programs based on how the best talent looks for work, especially passive candidates.
6. They are comfortable picking up the phone and talking to real people and getting outstanding referrals.
7. The best candidates consider these recruiters great career advisors and proactively refer other top people to them.
8. They can accurately assess competency and job fit on multiple measures including how the hiring manager and the person will work together.
9. They maximize their first contact to final close yield (candidate opt-out rate) by recruiting at every step in the process.
10. They can close the deal by emphasizing the career growth opportunity, not the compensation.

Being a real recruiter is less important if cost per hire is more important than quality of hire, and your management team is comfortable with hiring average people. However, if you want to implement a raising-the-talent-bar strategy, or facing a situation where the supply of talent is less than the demand, you need a real recruiter to pull it off, and in most cases they’ll need to target passive candidates. (Here’s a “real recruiter” competency model we created, if you’d like to rank yourself or your teammates. You need to score at least 35 out of 50 points to be considered a “real recruiter.”)

From a “let’s get real recruiting” standpoint, LinkedIn has a major edge over its current rivals. This is important since 82% of the professional fully employed categorize themselves as passive candidates. With real recruiting in mind, here are my top reasons why LinkedIn has a significant edge over Facebook, Google+, and those newbies who think they offer a better solution. keep reading…

Some points to make before you read this article:

1. 

   It’s somewhat controversial, but by the end you’ll agree (if you get that far).

2. If you’re a corporate recruiter or HR leader, put your confirmation bias in the parking lot before reading this article.
3. You might want to listen to this YouTube video of a webcast (Future of Recruiting Circa 2020) we recently held. It will give you a sense what’s happening now and what will happen soon.

No surprise here, but the answer to the headline’s question is an unequivocal yes. Here’s why the current version of the corporate recruiting department is heading toward extinction: keep reading…

When I first started names sourcing I used to think to myself, “I wish there was a database of names with titles.”

In fact, I used to do wistful dogpile and altavista searches that looked something like this:

“Hewlett Packard” “employee list”

or this:

“Hewlett Packard” employees

You get the idea.

That was back in 1996.

Once in a great while I’d get lucky and something would come up but not usually.

I’d search for something — anything — that could get me inside of a company and then I’d call and bounce around until I got the information I was tasked to find.

It’s pretty much what I do (still) today.

Someone called me a “dying breed” on the Recruiting Animal show the other day because I use the telephone.

I’m okay with that.

In fact, I’m glad to be recognized as such because in this dying I am experiencing a rebirth.

More of that in a bit — let’s get back to the late 90s in this industry. keep reading…

In this session, Arbita founder Don Ramer will present highlights from a process used to identify opportunities that achieve this leverage through expert benchmarking against best practices.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In this webinar panel moderated by Gerry Crispin, some of the most interesting companies on the planet and a few of their top recruiters will discuss the challenges, strategies, and tactics for the future of building diverse pipelines and slates.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

In this 60-minute webinar, you will learn the basics of Google Custom Search Engines as our panelists show examples of CSEs they’ve created as well as take you step-by-step through how to make your own.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Home Depot has quietly been expanding its use of Facebook in online games and recruitment advertising on people’s profiles, meanwhile operating with transparency and responsiveness — returning emails in 24 hours — often missing elsewhere in online recruiting.

Miko Covin, who manages the employment marketing group, is one of the key players. She and others in that group — people like Alison Foy — came up from recruitment ad agencies like Bernard Hodes, TMP, and JWT Inside.

Covin arrived in 2008 from JWT, wanting to use the basic marketing and advertising skills she’d learned at agencies and apply them to social media and recruiting. In early 2010 (late in the game, she admits) she opened up a personal Facebook page after a friend invited her to be a Facebook member. She also saw the agency world struggling, social media increasing its role in recruiting, and wanted to move Home Depot in the social media direction.

She spent 2010 on education. There were HR people in Home Depot who didn’t get social media; in fact, some even used the now-awkward word “The” preceding “Facebook.” “I don’t know about The Facebook,” one person said.

Covin kept talking up the importance of social media in recruiting. By the spring of 2010 Home Depot began testing two things on Facebook, targeting people based on the information in their profiles. First, it tried advertising store jobs to females, part of an effort to reverse the perception as a company for male jobs. It casted a “huge net first,” Covin says.

It narrowed after that, targeting people — now both male and female — whose profiles indicated they were in HR, and were based in areas where an HR district manager was needed.

It brought on JWT, the recruitment marketing agency, to help with the Facebook project.

By August, satisfied with the approximately 100 resumes it had received over the summer from these efforts, the recruitment marketing team was feeling that Facebook was a success in recruiting, and it should be expanded. keep reading…

In this last and final installment of this series we’re going to talk about how to use low and high technology appropriately to tailor your message to your audience.

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology. keep reading…

As many of you know — I announced it at the ERE Expo in San Diego — I’ve decided to bring recruiting back to recruiting. This is my new old mission. Somehow this has been lost in the past few years when overall candidate supply exceeded demand. Hiring top talent is not the same as finding top talent. While sourcing is a step in this journey, it is only a step, and one getting easier each passing day.

Consider this: at the current rate, by March 11, 2012, everyone will be connected by one degree of separation with everyone else either via LinkedIn or Facebook. (FYI: I define sourcing as the process of name generation only. If you pick up the phone and call a person who did not apply, and convince him or her to consider your position, you’re recruiting. If the person applied for a job and all you’re doing is qualifying the person, that’s screening, not recruiting.)

While sourcing is getting easier, recruiting these now-more-visible folks is getting harder. This will become even more challenging as the demand for top talent accelerates, and everyone makes a wholesale shift to contact the same passive candidates you’re contacting. In this case, good recruiting skills will make all the difference as to who attracts and hires the person. keep reading…

Our sister site, SourceCon.com, which provides news, knowledge, and information for the recruitment sourcing community, has revised its email subscription option and is pleased to let you know that it is now ready and available for registration. The new email subscription service, SourceCon Weekly, will deliver your subscription to SourceCon news via email each week on Thursdays. This new service will be replacing the old daily FeedBlitz email subscription service, and the hope is that it will provide a better user experience for you!

keep reading…

Navistar builds trucks and buses, military vehicles and engines and chassis. Its equipment is tough and rugged with names to match; Workhorse, MaxxForce, ProStar+, and, for the military, the MaxxPro, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle.

So when the company needs engineers, not just any engineer will do.

“The positions we look to fill are very specialized, niche positions within the industry pertaining predominately to engineering-level, engineering-focus, that really have (a) very small number of qualified candidates with the years of experience we’re looking for,” says Navistar recruiter officer Keith Sanderson.

That quote comes straight from an informational video about how Navistar, working with CareerBuilder, used a new service from the job board company to source, qualify, recruit, and hire engineers for a new facility it was opening.

Watch the video and you get the impression you’re hearing about a successful job fair. And you are. But listen closely as CareerBuilder’s Mary Delaney explains the success. What you’ll discover is a new tool from CareerBuilder that brings a little more science to the hunting and sourcing of candidates. keep reading…

“I don’t know who I’m calling,” Marianne said.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I answered, while thinking to myself that none of us ever really do.

She nodded unhappily.

“Did you read One Lesson Lois?” I asked.

She nodded that she had.

“Did any of that resonate with you?” I asked again.

“Well, sort of,” she said.

“But Lois was never in the recruiting business so I can kind of understand her reluctance. I know it’s my job to call people …” she trailed off.

I watched her body language as she said this.

The right hand that she had drawn back clenched to her chest moved to her leg and she started to scratch at her knee. Her left hand went to her mouth and started pushing at her lower lip.

She appeared to be thinking. keep reading…

Last week I told you we were going to continue Marianne’s story by exploring the opportunities LinkedIn did offer, and I promised that’d we build on those results and a few others using Hoover’s and brief search engine visits to create a robust search that would surprise you.

One of our readers, Ben Ness, SOSed Marianne (in Part VIII, Comments section) with the following:

I googled “pigging,” figured out it was the same as “pipeline inspection,” did a keyword search on linkedin using “pipeline inspection” and came up with 280 results who currently still work in this industry. And that is just in my network. The Internet is a beautiful thing. Marianne, if you arereading this, I hope this helps.

I asked Ben what kind of LinkedIn account he had, because when I put the words “pipeline inspection” into LinkedIn’s keyword box I got 280 results too, but guess what?

NONE of them had any names attached to them — only titles like: keep reading…

She sat quietly adjacent to me at the oblong table we used on the first day of training.

Her six coworkers all seemed to like her.

Her name was Marianne and she was a pretty 20-something and this was her second job after graduating from college.

She mostly didn’t say anything but she did answer willingly when called upon.

I sat down next to her at her desk on the second day of training.

She was scheduled after Max and she seemed organized and efficient when I sat down.

Her job was up on her screen and it was formatted exactly as I had asked the class to do it the day before.

She was quiet and attentive as she had been the day before.

I asked what we were looking for.

She answered that she wanted to work on a job that had been causing her quite a bit of stress.

She needed people involved in the pre-sales activity for a piece of pigging machinery that would be installed onto a food-manufacturing floor.

The client wanted them to live in the Midwest so they could travel around the country more easily than if they lived on one coast or the other.

Sound reasoning.

I asked her if she had found anyone. keep reading…