Productivity change in the nonfarm business sector, 1947-2009

How different is what you do today from five years ago? Are you able to find and hire top-notch people faster than before? Have you invested in systems, technology, and process improvements to lower costs and improve the speed to find and present qualified candidates? If not, you are clearly lagging behind those who have, and will have a tough time catching up. The corporate recruiting world is soon to be under full assault from the third-party and RPO world.

The evidence shows that increases in productivity significantly lag the investment in tools and process improvements. We normally first use new technologies to emulate what we already do in another way. It’s only after significant time that we begin to find new and innovative ways to use the tools and adjust our processes accordingly.

An example is the introduction of the typewriter. In the early days of the typewriter a manager would dictate to a stenographer who would take shorthand and then use the typewriter to create a document. This took two people and three steps. It took decades before we got to the point of eliminating the stenographer by having the manager learn to type and enter the document directly. But when this occurred, the profession of stenographer disappeared (as did shorthand), efficiency went up, and the number of people an office needed went down. While this is a very simple example, it illustrates what I mean: It takes a lot of time from the introduction of a new technology for people to learn how to use it and to adjust processes and structures.

From the 1970s through the mid-1990s organizations globally were investing heavily in computers and software and everyone assumed that because of those tools, productivity would soar. For anyone old enough to remember, that did not happen, and lots of economists called this the productivity paradox. It seemed that no investment in technology, computers, or software caused any major change in productivity. Then, around 1995 everything changed. Suddenly productivity began to climb. It has now settled back into a comfortable 2.4 percent per year growth which is still greater per year than before 1970. The great lesson is that investments in technology and process improvements pay off — but it takes time for that to happen.

Recruiting has seen no surge in productivity, and corporate recruiting functions may even be losing ground as the talent market becomes more complex and employer needs change. Relative to most other functions in an organization, HR and recruiting have made little investment in technology and even less in process improvements. A recruiter from 1970 would be very comfortable in most corporate recruiting departments today except for learning to use the computer.

My concern is that recruiters have been and still are too focused on the short term to see that investments they make today will eventually pay off — and pay off tremendously. If you have not made the investments, you are not only behind, but it may be impossible to catch up. Being able to use technology requires a learning curve that early adopters get from the beginning. Look at how hard it is for a middle-aged person to grasp the power of social media or to fully realize the capabilities of the iPhone compared to someone younger who has been working with these technologies from the beginning of their careers. Time is not our friend when it comes to adopting technology, so early investments pay off the most.

Here are a few ideas on what kinds of investments you should be making:

1. Invest in software that will increase your ability to interact with candidates. This includes all sorts of things from websites and highly-targeted marketing systems to candidate relationship management tools. Most of you are still focused on the zero-value-add backend systems that do nothing directly to serve your customers: the candidates. Applicant tracking systems may be convenient, but they are the equivalent of order entry systems for salespeople. They are not going to make you better at finding candidates or getting them interested in your clients. You will need to refine how you source candidates and try to reduce the number of people you need to do each step of the hiring cycle. The goal might be for a single person to attract, source, screen, and present a candidate while the administrative tools automatically track everything that is happening and generate the appropriate reports and paperwork. RPOs and agencies have been working on these things for at least a decade and are about to reap its benefits.
2. Invest time in thinking through how you recruit people today. How many steps, people, tools, and touchpoints are average? How much time does a recruiter spend per hire? What could be done to shave seconds or minutes off that? What would you have to do differently if a recruiter were to deal with twice as many requisitions as they do today? The answers to these questions can form the backbone of an improvement strategy that will pay back high dividends down the road. Several RPOs have made big strides toward integrating automated processing and tools into what they do. This has given them the ability to charge lower prices while maintaining customer loyalty. Over time, they will refine and improve the technology until it will offer them such a large time and cost-saving that very few will be able to compete with older and less technology-enabled methods.
3. Move on from legacy systems and old technologies. Even if you have not recovered your investment, hanging on to obsolete applicant tracking tools, old databases, and inefficient processes will hurt you. Anything you own or use that is more than three years old and has not been upgraded is a candidate for the dust bin. Most technology has moved into the cloud or is delivered from an ASP. No software sits on your own servers unless your organization is large enough to need its own instance of the software. Almost every kind of software is being delivered as an app that can be installed on your mobile devices as well as your computers. Social media is dominating the sourcing arena and search is becoming easier to do, is likely to be built into applications, and is more powerful than ever. Resumes are being served up along with compilations about the candidates that have been scraped together from many different sources. Candidates are delivering their own “social resumes” that expand the information on the usual resume. You need to be able to accommodate all of this easily and quickly. Recruiting productivity will go up — I think exponentially — very soon. Most of this improvement will come from third-party agencies and RPOs. Unfortunately, the corporate recruiting world is still mired in yesterday and is unable to make the investments needed to move productivity up and to ensure success.

Today is a different time and the focus for many CEOs is building a sustainable organization that can avoid the layoffs and bad branding that accompanies them. They are at least hoping for a workforce that is balanced between regular employees and those who work part-time or as contractors or consultants. Every recruiting vice-president, director, and manager should have a similar objective.

Having a lean workforce means having the right team and working seamlessly with RPOs, third-party recruiting agencies, and contract recruiters. It means redefining what an internal recruiter does and what skills they need to have. And all of this depends on the soundness of your recruiting processes and technology backbone.

In the scramble to get competitive over the past few years, many recruiting functions accumulated technology and threw together recruiting ideas and processes with little coordination or deep thought. When you are in the midst of a war for talent it becomes very difficult to approach things in an orderly or careful way. You think, someday I’ll take the time to integrate, evaluate, and eliminate. Well, the time has come.

One of the good things arising out of this recession is the time to look over everything you are doing and make changes that streamline and integrate for sustainability. Whether the next six months brings us out of this economic slowdown or not, we do know one thing: eventually the slowdown will end and we will be asked to suddenly start recruiting again with few or no addition resources.

Here are some things to consider over the next few weeks:

How is Your Recruiting Process?

The first step in getting the function organized is to outline or map out your current recruiting processes. Start with the hiring managers’ need to recruit someone and work your way through each step in the process. What does the manager have to do, when, to whom, and so on? How does a recruiter get the requisition? When? What is the first thing she does? The second and the third? How do you source candidates? Are there alternative ways that might be faster or cheaper or better? Take each step and follow the chain right through the candidates coming on board as an employee.

If not a pro at this (and few are), it would be very wise to attend a seminar on business process improvement or business process mapping, which are frequently offered at local colleges and from many independent seminar firms. As I have written before, two good books on this topic are Business Process Mapping: Improving Customer Satisfaction by J. Mike Jacka and Paulette J. Keller, and a simple one by Dianne Galloway called Mapping Work Processes. Also, if you work in a technology or an engineering-type firm, I am sure someone already now show to knows how to do this.

A small team can be assembled to map the current processes and recommend how to improve the process by eliminating redundancies, integrating steps, or simplifying the administrivia. After this first step, you can look at whether you have the right structure or the right tools, and you can base your decisions on how things really work.

Of course, to save time and gain expertise, you can also hire a consultant to help you (hint, hint!).

Look at Your Team

While you may have a very small team at this point, you still need to ask yourself if you have the right quality and mix of people. My suggestion is that you have a core of experienced recruiters who are jacks-of-all-trades. You want people who can move where they are needed, when needed. Maybe this week it’s focusing on sourcing and next week on persuading a hiring manager or a candidate to be flexible. Versatility and agility are the most prized skills of all, in my mind. You can hire specialists as contractors or consultants as needed, but you need people who can flex all the time.

Decide which functions can be given to a trusted partner outside your organization. Many activities including such things as maintaining your recruiting website, developing a branding strategy, sourcing candidates, and even initial candidate assessment can be done by contractors or an agency.

If you are doing volume recruiting for similar positions, an RPO that specializes in that might be more sensible a choice than ramping up your internal function. Most likely building and maintaining an internal team will take away resources and time from productive work.

Your ultimate goal should be to deliver a quality service at the lowest price and faster speed possible. Whatever mix makes that happen is the best one.

Look at Your Technology

Are you using the right mix of tools? An applicant tracking system is basic to success, and almost everyone is using one these days. Perhaps more important is how you are using social media and building relationships with candidates. True relationships only happen when there is an exchange of meaningful information and when a level of trust is established. While email is a part of that, providing candidates with feedback on their skills, helping steer them to the right position within the company for those skills, and being honest about opportunities (or the lack of them), is also essential. You should have access to a candidate relationship management tool like those available from Salesforce.com and Avature.net.

Social media is a critical part of an overall recruiting process these days and you need to have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But, you will also need to still use traditional Internet search as well as job boards for some positions, so having people with broad-based expertise is a plus when deciding on your team.

Putting together an integrated, but as simple as possible, technology platform will give you the capability to do more with fewer resources.

This can be a wonderful time to reassess and transform your recruiting function into a much leaner and more effective machine than it probably has been. Hiring lots of recruiters is almost for sure not the way to go and if you have immediate needs, use third parties and RPOs to fill the gap. To thrive over the next decade will require putting together a collaborative, highly versatile team that loves to find new ways to use technology effectively. Focus your time on process efficiencies and sustainable models.

Convened by President Obama, the forum is focused on the gap in technology between the private and public sectors.

Craig Newmark, founder and owner of Craigslist, Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres, and Monster chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi are sharing their suggestions for improving government efficiency, improving customer service, and maximizing the return from the government’s investment in technology.

In advance of the forum, Iannuzzi joined with three other CEOs of leading technology companies in publicly praising Obama for “consistent efforts to ensure that innovation becomes integral to how our country operates.”

Iannuzzi, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, Jeff M. Fettig, chairman and CEO of Whirlpool, and Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe Systems, in a commentary posted on Huffington Post, say, “It’s time to modernize government — streamline what works, and eliminate what doesn’t.”

The men echoed President Obama’s own lament that government has fallen woefully behind the private sector in using technology to streamline operations and speed the delivery of public service. In a White House statement, President Obama says, “I want us to ask ourselves every day, how are we using technology to make a real difference in people’s lives.”

In their commentary, the four CEOs say, “As the pace of innovation accelerates, so will the distance between the technological promise of the private sector and the practice of the public sector. Along the way, we risk losing billions of taxpayer dollars, opportunities to serve those at risk and in need, and transparent insight into the operations of our democracy.”

“Indeed, the time is ripe for a real public-private partnership initiative aimed at driving innovation and sustainable job growth.”

The company announced the Series B funding tonight. The round was led by ATA Ventures, whose co-founder and managing director, Hatch Graham, will join Jobvite’s board of directors. In December 2007 Jobvite received $7.2 million in Series A funding from a group led by CMEA Capital.

Jobvite says it grew its client count by 300 percent in the last year and now counts Accuweather, Mozilla, TiVo, Yelp, and Zappos among its customers.

One reason for Jobvite’s success is its versatility. Not only has the company built a nicely featured ATS, but it took care in the development to include the kind of networking capabilities that recruiters want. The recruiting platform allows for internal collaboration, encouraging employees to make referrals and, to the extent company culture and hiring managers allow, they can participate in the hiring process.

Making this a more active exercise is Jobvite’s behind-the-scenes job matching capability. Employees can choose to connect Jobvite to their Facebook friends,  LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers. Jobvite analyzes the profiles of those connections and suggests good matches with company openingx to the employee, who can choose to send a “jobvite” invitation to their friend, follower, or 1st degree connection.

Jobvite is an on-demand system with a yearly subscription fee priced for the SMB market and designed to be less demanding of recruiter time.

“This recession is fundamentally changing recruitment, pushing companies to become more cost-effective, innovative, and strategic. Companies are looking to the technology industry to make this possible,” says Dan Finnigan, president and CEO. “Our growth this year proves we’re serving a big need and delivering immediate ROI to our customers. With this new investment, the strong additions made to our team this year, and the on-going advancements in our technology, I’m looking forward to what Jobvite will do for our customers.”

“I never use data services,” I haughtily told the salesperson.

And then it happened. I palmed (pardon the expression) an iPhone. Sheepishly, I upgraded my plan. I am a convert — to unlimited everything! The iPhone makes handheld technology fun and accessible. (I still get a kick out of the level application. I fire it up to randomly to test the lopsidedness of tables. I also play mobile Scrabble. Hours of geeky fun!)

In addition to entertainment value, the iPhone also provides opportunities for recruiters to improve productivity. Joel Cheesman and Michael Marlatt have written extensively about the coming mobile revolution. Joel, who has launched a mobile recruiting marketing agency, outlines why recruiters should be paying attention to mobile technology in an excellent whitepaper.

Most of the recruiting/job-related iPhone applications were developed for jobseekers. Here are a few apps that will help recruiters save time, allow greater mobility, or improve communication with networks and contacts. You may very well have some favorites to add; please include them in the comments.

Tweetie ($2.99). Do you keep your network informed via Twitter? Tweetie makes communicating via Twitter easy and fast. Tweetie provides all of the functionality of the twitter.com website, such as saved searches, inline web browsing, and the ability to manage followers. In addition, Tweetie supports navigation between multiple Twitter accounts, easy retweeting, automatic URL shortening, and uploading Twitpic pictures. I find Tweetie easy to use when tweeting from conferences. There are other, free, Twitter-for-iPhone apps, such as Twitterific, but I find that the additional features of Tweetie make it worth the small investment.

SearchOnTheGo ($9.99). SOTG is the first iPhone app written especially for recruiters by recruiters! SOTG turns your keywords into a full-blown Boolean search string. SOTG automatically generates search strings for resume searches, blog searches, PDF and Excel file formats, and more. SOTG will also execute web profile searches and public LinkedIn profile searches. After executing the search on the iPhone, users can save the search, email the search, or review results real time. Pretty nifty, especially if you dislike writing Boolean strings. Currently, SOTG returns only Google results. I would love to see other search engines included in future versions.

LinkedIn (free). Can’t live without LinkedIn? Then make sure you download the iPhone companion. The mobile version provides basic LinkedIn functionality — search, status updates, invites and more — for recruiters on the go. When meeting someone in person, try linking in instantly, instead of exchanging business cards. I am especially impressed with the Address Book Integration, which uploads contact info to the iPhone in one click. Unfortunately, there is no ability to receive or manage LinkedIn Groups information.

AgileMobile ($9.99). It was not until I joined Yahoo! that I became a big fan of instant messaging. Used properly, IM can improve the speed and quality of communication. Phone calls and emails are best for initial outreach, but nothing beats IM for quick confirmations and clarifications. AgileMobile is an all-in-one instant messaging service for mobile phones. Agile allows instant chat-on-the-go with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, and GoogleTalk. This kind of agnostic service is great for recruiters, who can communicate with candidates or colleagues regardless of IM service provider. AgileMobile also enables voice chat and media sharing.

Interview Pro (1.99). Technically, Interview Pro is an application developed for jobseekers. And a pretty clever one at that. This app provides a list of “50 of the most common behavioral interview questions.” Each question is accompanied by an answer that helps candidates navigate the interviewer’s intent and expectations. The questions are divided into categories such as “Team Dynamics,” “Planning,” and “Success Factors.” The interview questions are not all “behavioral” and the app does not come with instructions for the interviewer (such as how and when to drill down to get complete answers). With a few modifications, however, an application like this could be very useful to recruiters and hiring managers. Imagine if your hiring managers were able to download a custom interview guide. Never fear: the makers of Search on the Go tell me that they are working on just such an app.

beamMe (free or $1.99 for subscription updates). Finally, I can feel comfortable leaving the house without business cards! beamMe allows users to exchange vCards by inputting an email address, mobile phone #, or @Twitter id. The recipient is directed to a secure website, where he or she can download a vCard (including a photo or logo, and links to URL or Twitter id). Genius! The only downside is the subscription scheme; so far the free version works well for me. I’m not sure I want to be billed $2/month to continue to receive product upgrades.

There you have it. The future is here!

After taking a whirlwind tour through some of the things OrcaEyes can do, I have no hesitancy in admitting that “I’m not smarter than those 4th graders.”

Of course the significance of those reports was lost on the kids. Hilbert just wanted to make sure the navigation was easy to use and the red-yellow-green alert system easy to understand. And they are.

But it’s those reports that make the $200k a 20,000-employee firm can spend on OrcaEyes seem like a bargain.

Before I get into how, here’s a bit about the what, as in just what is OrcaEyes? Hilbert describes it as HR System Management Software. You can think of it as ERP for HR. Either way, the system provides an overarching view of how human capital impacts the enterprise. It does this by connecting to a company’s existing business systems — hooking into finance, sales, operations, supply chain, or an ERP (if there is one), the HRIS, HRMS, and whatever others may be there.

OrcaEyes crunches the data it extracts from these systems and combines it — for certain uses, like recruiting and salary setting — with data Hilbert obtains from such external sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census, and private data providers. Thus, in an instant, literally, an HR recruiter and a division VP can tell the cost in lost business for staffing shortages in the North Sea unit of Exult Energy’s refining and petrochemical division.

I thought that was nice information to have, but no special feat since any CFO can do revenue averages per year-end headcount. But as every CFO and line manager knows, being down one position doesn’t translate into a direct or immediate loss of revenue. Depending on the size of the unit, other workers will pick up the load.

Here’s where the magic of OrcaEyes comes in. The system is too smart to simply say you’re in danger of losing $1 million in revenue just because that’s the average. Nope. It knows, because you’ve told it during the setup, that losing one worker for a short period will have a minimal impact. But as the number of vacancies increases and the vacancy time lengthens, the bigger the effect and more bars on the OrcaEyes report turn red.

This is also a modeling program, not just a “what is” program. So OrcaEyes knows that besides the current vacancy, the attrition rate is such that there’s a high probability of losing more employees in the unit soon. And retirements will add a few more. Now OrcaEyes can tell you what the impact of all those things occurring — or some of them — will be.

That’s but one example of what this data-based analytics program can do. Even though OrcaEyes has only just recently come out of the incubator, there are plenty of other examples of its value from the 10 Fortune list companies that have been testing it now for several months.

I asked Hilbert for a sampler and here’s what he sent:

• A global manufacturing company discovered that when overtime for operators, maintenance, and skill trade workers exceeds 12.5 hours for three weeks, accidents increase by 105 percent. When the company added staffing to reduce the OT, the savings from fewer accidents came to $370 million in just two quarters;
• A retail company discovered there is a correlation between store clerk overtime and theft and customer complaints. When OT begins to exceed an average of 11.8 hours for three consecutive  weeks, thefts increased by 41 percent and customer service complaints increased 52 percent. The retailer loses one customer for every 2.6 complaints.
• That a manager with poor ratings by their staff affects bottom line performance is not an “Aha” moment. But just how much? Hilbert tell us that a retailer found store sales revenue dropped by 1.2- 1.8 percent for each 10 points below a 75 percent manager approval rating.

OrcaEyes, says Hilbert, provides “just about every metric you can imagine.” And many you might not have thought of.  Another example: Our mythical oil company Exult Energy needs chemical engineers. Where in the U.S. are prospects the best for finding engineers who are most likely to come to work for Exult? Would you believe Bay City, Michigan?

OrcaEyes was born out of Hilbert’s years with the much lauded Valero Energy. He was Global Planning and Talent Lead for the fast-growing oil company, landing the job with almost no direct HR experience, but a broad business knowledge from having CEO’d tech firms. During his four years at Valero Hilbert won award after award for his programs, including five from ERE alone.

It was during those years he came to appreciate the integration of HR and business purpose and metrics. In the process, he turned Valero into a poster child for data-driven recruitment. Dr. John Sullivan, a recruiting thought leader, industry consultant, and proponent of scientific recruiting, wrote of Hilbert and Valero:

“its primary differentiator is that the company takes a business-like, almost scientific, approach to recruiting. Most recruiting departments treat recruiting as an art. Valero, in direct contrast, utilizes and directly borrows from other successful business systems like supply chain, IT, Six Sigma, and process reengineering to craft a function whose performance can be measured (and improved) down to the minutest degree.”

Some two years in the making and months in the testing, OrcaEyes is Hilbert’s effort to bring the same principles and discipline he used to transform Valero’s recruiting to the rest of the world.

Because of its price tag and the system’s hunger for business data, OrcaEyes is clearly not a tool every company can afford or can use. But if you get a chance to do an OrcaEyes demo, do it just for the chance to see what recruiting will be like in the future.

And to ask Hilbert how he came up with the name of the company. (Hint: He didn’t. A marketing acquaintance did. And it has something to do with the fact that orcas — killer whales, as they are often known — don’t ever completely sleep and have sonar vision, just like the program.  And it’s a name people don’t forget.)

This scene played out over and over. Sometimes the candidate would even be looking over the interviewer’s shoulder without noticing the poster proudly displayed behind the Microsoft hiring manager. Yes, after 25 years, we were still getting those questions.

That was two years ago. Since then, we have changed the perception of Microsoft Hardware. We have changed the brand Hardware@Microsoft. Hardware@Microsoft has become a profession. The average “person on the street” may not know anything about Hardware@Microsoft. But a target audience of engineers who work in hardware will know about the importance of hardware in terms of Microsoft’s business vision.

ERE acknowledged our work with a “Most Strategic Use of Technology Award” and industry thought leaders like Dr. John Sullivan called our work “pioneering.” (In fairness, this award was shared by a talented group of colleagues who created View My World and incidentally just launched a new careers site.) While being recognized by one’s industry is flattering, the real success of our work was in solving a business need in our division.

The story of making Hardware@Microsoft a profession was an answer to a critical business issue.

As our division is the manufacturing part of Microsoft, we had a billion-dollar problem with respect to the quality of one of our key products. We needed to recruit world-class hardware and “reliability engineering” talent to solve some immediate issues and make certain this did not happen in the future.

The first thing we tried to understand was our target audience and how we could identify the individuals who we needed to attract — where they were employed; the best colleges for hardware engineers; what associations they joined; what they read … you get the picture. At a high level, the graph below illustrates the complexity of identifying hardware engineers. (It is at this point that I lament that IEEE has discontinued publishing a membership directory.)

Undaunted, we segmented hardware engineers from other types of engineers. The difference in our approach is that we use 17 to 20 different sources to identify the target audience. In this initiative we used competitive intelligence and competitive org-charting along with alumni associations, and every free and paid job board available. The filter that we apply to the talent is: would we be interested in that person over the next three to five years?

It is useful to illustrate micro-segmentation with a mini case study.

As the graphic illustrates, out of the 620,000 engineers (estimates provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), we have identified 18,900 hardware engineers. And we identified a micro-segment of 2,500+ reliability engineers from the various aggregated sources.

We had eight openings in reliability engineering and needed to fill those roles with the best of the best. We employed a strategy that we call a TalentStream (a continuous flow of prospects) to make certain we met our business challenge. We targeted this group with four emails over six months. By the fourth email, nearly 40% of the target audience looked at our jobs. This rate was two and one-half times greater than the audience response to one email. By the final email we had three and one-half times more prospects than we had from the first email. The end result was we filled eight positions with candidates from eight different sources of hire. Thirty-eight percent of the hires came from referrals, so the viral aspect of the campaign was evident.

Now we have 2,500 reliability engineers and no openings. These prospects are passive and represent some of the best organizations in consumer electronics. We were faced with the challenge that every recruiter faces. How do you keep talent in orbit when there are not any positions? We choose to create community with these reliability engineers.

We created a LinkedIn Group that is for technical professionals only. Reliability Engineering on a Global Scale is a group (sans recruiters) designed to allow this premier group of professionals communicate and network with one another. Initially, 10% of the target group accepted our invitation. Since that time the membership in the group is increasing at about 5% per month. We do not brand this group with Hardware@Microsoft (although it is obvious Microsoft Hardware is involved). The two reliability engineering roles that our division had this year were filled quickly with high-quality individuals from the efforts described above.

We have just created a hardware@microsoft Facebook page and a hardwarejobs Twitter page. We will invite members of the original 2,500+ reliability engineers to become a “fan” of this Facebook community and also offer them the opportunity to “follow” us on Twitter. One of the discoveries that we learned during this talent community pilot was that we need to take a “community of communities” approach because, not all people will join the same groups. That caused us to rethink our original “uber talent community approach” as it turns out only a percentage of a targeted group will join.

The social networking laws that explain involvement (or lack thereof) by potential members of community caused us to rethink our strategy. Some important thinking on people and community was developed by Jakob Nielsen, who suggested that only 1% of a community were heavy contributors. Nielsen advocated that another 9% were intermittent contributors, while the other 90% were just lurkers. Jake McKee, a thought leader on community, build on Nielsen’s “Participation Inequality” theorem and carried it into the 21st century as the 90:9:1 as a way to describe people’s behaviors in a single online community. More recently the Groundswell folks at Forrester use Social Technographics to explain behaviors of population over multiple online communities. What Forrester Research discovered is that Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content, 21% of online U.S. consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

So what do these studies have to do with talent communities for recruiting? What it means is that if you expect to get a large group of people to join another community that we have formed, even if we are Microsoft, it is just not going to happen. We need to connect with the micro-segmented target audience on the leading communities (Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter) as well as our proprietary community that is part of our vendor partner, Jobs2Web. So, if we think about our micro-segment of reliability engineers, in order to fully engage the 2,500+ target audience, we may have to form communities on 5 to 10 different social networking and/or community sites.

Micro-segmentation and community go hand in hand. I noted in a previous article that sourcing is marketing. And if we look through our marketing lens we see in this “new world of social media, networking and Web 2.0, much of segmentation occurs naturally” as communities are formed. Micro-segmentation has been built into the DNA of our approach to developing talent communities. And it is the backbone of our Web 2.0 recruitment marketing engine provided by Jobs2Web.

A purpose of this article is a preview of a presentation for the Fall 2009 ERE Event, where our talent community pilot will be discussed in the broader context of Web 2.0 Beyond the Social Recruiting Hype: Microsoft’s Approach to Building Talent Pipelines and Communities. While the presentation will be much broader than a discussion of “micro-segmentation,” this strategy is a cornerstone of our community development workstream.

According to a blog post by TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington, the tech-focused website was emailed 310 Twitter documents “ranging from executive meeting notes, partner agreements, and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars, and phone logs of various Twitter employees.” Most of them, Arrington writes, “are somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting.”

Those, including documents showing who interviewed for senior positions at Twitter, will not be released by TechCrunch, he says. Those dealing with the company’s business plans and products, will be published, he said.

The first, released very early Wednesday morning, was a pitch for a Twitter-based reality TV show. The next was a financial projection for the company through 2013, which says Twitter expects “1 billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue, 5,200 employees, and $1.1 billion in net earnings.”

However, the first leak of the documents came on a French site (English translation), which discreetly obscured names and certain data points. Hacker Croll, as the perpetrator calls himself, previously published Twitter material obtained directly from the site. He (or she) could chose to post them all, including the interview schedules and candidate resumes. That possibility no doubt has some people squirming.

Croll got the documents by accessing a Twitter employee’s Google account, not by hacking into Twitter iteself. Like so many companies and individuals, Twitter uses Google Apps to share information with its employees and uses Google Calendar to schedule meetings and appointments. The hacker accessed these documents.

Commonly referred to as “cloud computing,” the key features are that the application and the data reside on someone else’s servers. That makes it convenient for mobile workers to access the documents anytime, anywhere. It also means they are potentially exposed to hackers anywhere in the world.

Software as a Service is a form of cloud computing that has been growing ever more popular, including among recruiters. Many companies offer an online ATS that stores applicant resumes, interview calendars, and email contacts.

Vendors make efforts to secure their systems from direct attacks, but like a chain that’s only as strong as its weakest link, there’s little protection against a hacker who gets hold of a user’s password, which is what happened in the Twitter case. It’s also what happened two years ago when phishers hacked Monster’s database and stole data on 1.7 million job seekers.

Vendors warn recruiters to use unique passwords, avoiding birthdates, children’s names, their own street address, and the like. Even so, “For every person who has a strong password, there are two or three who use the same one for everything. Anyone who has worked in IT knows of people who have their logins on notes taped to their screen,” reports a representative for a vendor who asked not to be identified.

Although Twitter co-founder Biz Stone exonerated Google for the security lapse, The New York Times quoted a network expert saying, “Using Google apps and Gmail is great for personal use, but from a corporate perspective, I just can’t see putting something out there that is so able to be compromised and has been on numerous occasions in the past.”

If you’re at all similar to the thousands of other HR leaders that have gone through the process, you probably assembled an inter-departmental group from across the company and began creating lists of all the features anybody suggested.

Like other companies, that list probably didn’t include such vendor questions as:

• What is the turnaround time on resolving system problems?
• What is the turnover in your customer support staff?
• Can we request a change in our primary customer representative?
• When do we have to pay for system upgrades? Can we refuse an update and still receive support?

An article in the September issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership addresses the issue of post-sale service and support for HR technology systems. The article (available only by subscription) talks about the advice experts like Leighanne Levensaler of Bersin and Associates and HRchitect’s Rick Fletcher and Matt Lafata have for companies planning an investment in HR technology. (Incidentally, they all agree that mere lists of features is the WRONG way to go.)

They, and, surprisingly, the vendors I spoke with for the article, all agree that the most overlooked area in systems acquisition is customer service.

After the system is up and running, the most important feature becomes service and support. That the systems have user-defined fields and configurable screens matters hardly at all if you can’t get the vendor to help you batch post job listings to multiple sites.

That’s why Andrew Curtis, director of customer support at iCIMS, suggests that once you’ve got a short list of vendors, and are making a decision, the post-sale support and service “should carry a 100 percent weight.”

OK. So that might be overkill, but SilkRoad technology’s COO, Brian Platz, says, “How much weight would I give to post-sale issues? I would give it 50 percent of my criteria.”

Now that you’ve got some sense of just how important the post-sale service is, how do you go about checking out the vendor? The Journal article offers more detail, but here are some tips from the consultants and vendors.

Who to interview when checking references

• A regular system user in HR. For talent acquisition systems, this is probably a senior recruiter, or lead.
• The primary liaison between the user and the vendor. This may be the project lead or the “go to” person, but not necessarily.
• The user’s in-house tech support system. Large companies may have an HR tech specialist. Most others will not, but they may have one person who has more specialized knowledge of the system than other techs. In the smaller companies, there may not be an IT support person. In this case, find out who gets asked the “How do I do this” questions.

What to ask

• Does the vendor have a single support contact person for the user? How often does the contact change?
• Is the vendor proactive? Is the vendor interested in how you are using the system? Do you get advice and tips on improving efficiency? How regularly do you hear from the vendor, not counting sales calls?
• How often is training offered? How effective is it? What’s the method of training?
• Is there a portal where training materials are available, information is posted, updates are announced, and especially, is there a user forum or online discussion where users regularly exchange information? (Ask the vendor for access to it and see what users say.)
• How long does it take to get through to a live person when you have a support call? What is the quality of the response? What has been your experience when the problem is more complex than the first-level support person can handle?
• How long does it take to get a call back in an emergency situation?
• What do you like most about working with this vendor?
• Would you use this vendor again?

Tips

• For the demo, ask the sales team to bring a support person or client relations manager. Sales will bring along the best person they have. That’s the person you want to insist on as your own contact.
• Specify in the Service Level Agreement that you have the right to approve and change the support contact or client rep.
• Require that the lead implementation person remain onsite (if an on-premises installation) or otherwise be available for a period of time after going live with a new system.

What prompted this question (which I encourage you to comment on at the end of this article) is Hunch. That’s right, Hunch, a dot-com that launched out of beta on Monday. It’s not exactly a search engine. Nor is it an oracle. It’s, well, here’s how co-founder Caterina Fake explained it to CNN.com: “It’s something new.”

We’ll call it a decision engine, since that’s what others are doing and it’s as good a descriptor as any. The first time you use Hunch, you’re confronted with 20 questions. More will come later, but Hunch starts easy. You can skip these profiling questions, but like talking with a shrink, any question you ask will be answered with several from Hunch.

When I asked Hunch about where to look for a job, it presented me a with a list of topics and question options including, “Should I look for a job or wait?” Not exactly what I was looking for, but interesting enough. The first question Hunch asked when I agreed to that topic was “Do you need the money?” After working my way through the decision tree, Hunch advised me to “wait a bit.” But the split between that answer and start looking was 55-45.

Besides being fun, Hunch has a serious side. Though it isn’t going to replace a search engine for sourcing candidates, it can help cut through the clutter to help you answer questions like “Do I need an in-house person for my U.S. business?” Or “Is it OK to ask my co-worker on a date?“

Ask it a more objective question and the answers are specific and immediately helpful. For instance, Hunch made four recommendations for website builders when it was asked what website builder to use. Rerunning the query, but answering the decision-tree questions a bit differently, produced two different recommendations among the four it offered.

The results would be even more customized if I had taken the time to open an account and answer a string of questions about myself.

Now, if you’re not in the mood to bump about asking questions, but you still need answers, try Microsoft’s  Bing. This is indubitably a search engine, even if Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi told TechCrunch it is “more of a decision engine.” (Watch that phrase, it could become the “in” name for 2009.)

Setting Bing apart from other search sites, besides the spectacular home page photos, is the categorization that helps narrow down results. Searching for a Toyota Prius in the Web tab yields completely different results from Shopping. Not much of a big deal until you look off to the left navigation to discover that Bing is offering to skip right to “Reviews,” or “Recalls,” or “Dealers” or any one of five more topics.

I didn’t find candidate sourcing much different on Bing, though it was easier to cut through the duff. An especially handy feature are the expanded snippets for each of the search results that you can check with a simple mouseover. Between the search results and the abstracts it’s often not necessary to leave Bing to find something worth clicking into.

Others are discovering Bing, as the Comscore traffic numbers show. Microsoft, with its tired old search engine, had about 9 percent of the search market at the end of May. That jumped up two points when Bing was introduced in the first week of June and the number continued to rise last week by almost another point.

Google is no doubt watching Bing closely. The New York Post reported the company had gone so far as to assemble a task force under the personal direction of founder Sergey Brin to decode the search engine. However, the company doesn’t have much to fear. Comscore, in another press release today, said 65 percent of all searches conducted in May were done on Google.

About that Facebook question. Hunch said don’t do it. What do you say?

• Pipes. Yahoo’s tool allows you to “filter and process feeds.” Here’s one explanation.

• ConnectTweet. Multiple employees can Tweet through one handle. Best Buy does this. “It’s really unusual to have multiple employees represent one brand,” says Kahn.

• Retargeter.com. Actually, Kahn didn’t bring this one up; an attendee did. It’s the Hotel California of online-advertising tools. Your customers can leave your site any time they want — but you’ll follow. Here’s a similar tool, by the way.

• Job searches on Facebook. Add some code here, add a search box there, and voila, you may have come to the Best Buy Mobile page looking to read about the Palm Pre, and you ended up searching for a job.

• Jobs2Web. Marvin Smith, from Microsoft, will likely mention it on September 10.

• Yelp. Kahn likes it for reviews. I like it. Angie’s List isn’t bad either, though their telemarketers won’t stop calling me, asking me to write reviews.

• SlideShare. A site for sharing your documents, such as a PowerPoint file.

We’re not talking here about the sandwich sign guys or even the athletic sign spinners you see on street corners pointing to check cashing businesses, tanning salons and new home developments. (Though you would be surprised at how much the jobs pay and just how cutthroat the business is.)

Nope. We’re talking about the president and founder of a technology sales lead company wandering around the showroom floor at SHRM’s upcoming conference in New Orleans handing out $100 bills. All you have to do is find Clay C. Scroggins, a/k/a Claydough, walk up to him and say “Hi, Clay” to get one of the five hundreds he’s going to be handing out.

There’s a hitch. (You didn’t think it was going to be that easy, did you?) You can’t be wearing the logo of any vendor, unless it happens to be CompareHRIS. You have to consent to having your picture taken with Clay, and having it posted to his blog. And you have to be among the first to greet him.

You’ll probably also have to listen to a pitch about CompareHRIS. In the long run, that could be worth more to you than the $100. CompareHRIS makes its money from selling leads to HR technology vendors, but don’t let that deter you. The site has a wealth of information about systems, features, and the buying process. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. To be fair, it’s not the only site that lets you compare and select systems, but it is one of the better ones. And Scroggin is pushing hard to promote the site and a new sister site for Europe, HRcomparison.com.

So now, how do you find Scroggin? It won’t be easy, given the thousands of people expected at the conference. He’ll be the guy wearing a logo of CompareHRIS.com on his polo shirt.

I preferred his original idea, which was to wear an LED-laced shirt flashing the logo and whatever else he thought of. But at $5k to buy it, plus however much for training and support, Scroggin figured his money would go further doing something different. “No $5,000 t-shirt for me,” he confessed today from his office in Florida. He was a little more florid on his blog, “I’m so bummed.”

So am I. Ever since seeing this (below) little confection from Wales, which made the rounds of the canine herding lists a few months ago, I’ve been hoping to see the real thing. They’re available from a few places. Scroggin got his quote from Lumalive.

I now return you to the Social Recruiting Summit.

The lucky beneficiary of the German electronics and electrical engineering giant’s decision to replace its multiple talent systems globally is SuccessFactors, which will see most of its performance and talent management modules deployed to Siemens’ 430,000 employees in 80 countries and 20 languages.

Dr. Norbert Kleinjohann, head of corporate information technology for Siemens, says in the press release announcing the deal, “The enterprise cloud computing business model is a strategic direction for us. It not only lowers IT costs, and creates faster end-to-end processes, but can also grow with our requirements both globally and locally.”

SuccessFactors says the Siemens deployment will include its compensation, goal, performance, and recruiting management, career development planning, variable pay, and succession planning tools. SuccessFactors willl replace Siemens’ existing multiple talent systems globally.

The deal — the value wasn’t released — is not only noteworthy for the size of the SaaS deployment, but also that it is one of the largest single-vendor HR selections of its kind. While Oracle/PeopleSoft and SAS have equally large employers as customers, they are sellers of enterprise, on-premises systems.  So signficant a deal is this for the still-developing cloud computing approach that tech site Zdnet says “this company wide rollout really draws attention to the maturity of cloud computing.”

Based in San Mateo, Calif. in Silicon Valley, SuccessFactors was founded in 2001 providing HR services over the web. The company today, before the Siemens deployment, serves 2,700 customers and 4.7 million users in 31 languages and 185 countries.

Before it settled on SuccessFactors, Siemens evaluated nearly 40 vendors and system providers. We conducted an in-depth market evaluation of 30 leading vendors and seven system providers Siemens already had over five months, with our end-users stress testing the software quality, global scalability, and innovation potential,” explains Marion Horstmanm, who heads corporate HR for the company. She says in a press release that, “SuccessFactors was the clear winner by a significant margin based on its usability, ease of integration, and rich functionality.”

The delight in being selected by so large an employer as Siemens, which last year did (US) $107.4 billion in business, is evident in the SuccessFactors press release and the comment by its CEO, Lars Daalgard. “For such an amazing company as Siemens to decide to eliminate so many systems and standardize on SuccessFactors in the cloud is obviously a testimony to SuccessFactors delivering more large business clients over the web than anyone else.”

Industry consultants may beat up on us for saying that, since the process of identifying company needs and finding and evaluating vendors is, or should be, far more complicated than checking off a couple dozen boxes. But, as the saying goes, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.

That’s what we like about CompareHRIS; it’s a starting place for those who don’t know where the trailhead is.

Clay Scroggin launched CompareHRIS in February 2008. At the time he owned HR Pay ‘n’ Time, Inc., an HR tech reseller, selling, supporting, and implementing software systems for a number of vendors including Sage Abra, for whom he had worked in sales. Scroggin sold off his HR Pay ‘n’ Time clients last fall to concentrate on CompareHRIS.

To be clear, it’s a lead generation service that makes its money selling leads and listing vendors. Consequently, not every system vendor is listed. Scroggin makes the point on the site that he’s tried to get them, but not all vendors participate. He also emphasizes that the system recommendations are based entirely on the choices buyers make when they use the site’s selector survey tool.

What’s especially useful about CompareHRIS is that it will get you thinking about features to address HR functions that may not be top of mind. The swarm of resumes now coming in by email, fax, by hand, and your local post office may be the impetus for going tech. Or it may be the flood of inquiries you’re getting about benefits, accrued vacation, certification upgrades, and what not.

Whatever the reason, CompareHRIS is going to ask you about a range of HR functions. Your company may not be ready to invest in a workforce management component or succession planning module, but the site will get you to make a conscious decision. And if you aren’t sure just why you might want these features, the site has a deep — and we mean deep — library of articles covering nearly aspect of system buying, including vendor directories and listings. There are even articles on how make a business case for a new system.

One more thing not to miss: The RFP template. For systems novices, the 68-page(!) document can be intimidating. Unless you are half Geek, you’ll need to get IT involved to explain if you should even care about a vendor’s answer to questions like: “Describe your multi-layered architecture for scalability and extensibility.” It’s thin in some areas, especially in the post-sale support assessment, which is an area that will be covered in a future issue of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. Still, you should make the template part of your homework.

SInce launching, CompareHRIS has had 50,000 visitors. The company crowed about that achievement in a press release today that also says the company will soon be offering a European version of the site.

To be fair, there are other software comparison sites and buying guides online, all of them making money by selling leads. Many, like Capterra or Technology Evaluation Centers are not exclusively HR focused, but provide good information.

Jobscience unveiled an iPhone app in London today that will let you source a resume database from a park bench, the airport terminal, or anywhere you have connectivity. When you find the right contact you can reach out however you think best — email, text message, social network post, or that other thing iPhones do, voice call.

The mobile application works with the ATS offerings available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Jobscience uses the Force.com platform for the applications it offers, including ATS solutions for large and small businesses, staffing agency software, and others. Because of that flexibility, users can add on other applications available through the AppExchange.

Besides searching the company database via an iPhone, recruiters and hiring managers can create and manage job reqs and postings, handle scheduling, and do virtually (no pun intended) anything they can from their desktop.

“Jobscience for iPhone is the first complete applicant tracking system that can run on a mobile device,” says Michael Vicchitto, marketing manager of Jobscience, calling it “the most scalable and flexible solution for human resources and the staffing industry available today.”

As I read their analysis, it seemed evident that the lessons learned about what makes a company innovative could be directly applied to the recruiting industry. With this perspective in mind, here’s how I’d translate business and product innovation into recruiting ideas.

Some of them are wild and crazy, but then again, they might just work.

Innovative Recruiting Lessons Loosely Interpreted from Fast Company

The order shown below is my ranking of the ideas themselves. The Fast Company ranking is also shown.

1. Amazon #9 on the Fast Company list. Innovative idea: developing the Kindle ebook based on the idea that you should focus first on your customers’ needs when delivering products and services, not some preconceived idea of the way it should be. Application to recruiting: if you want to hire top people, first figure out how they find career opportunities, why they engage with a company to evaluate a specific opportunity, and why they select one job over another. This seems so obvious, yet when I look at how most companies write ads, screen candidates, keep them interested, and make offers, it’s great advice. Maybe you should be reading this on a Kindle.
2. Intel #6. Innovative idea: created teensy chips for targeted market applications. Application to recruiting: stop posting big, boring job ads on career sites. Instead, use Twitter and micro blogs targeted to narrower audiences, or push your jobs using aggregators to specific functional sites.
3. Team Obama #1. Innovative idea: empower your customers to participate more actively using the latest online technology. Application to recruiting: create talent communities. This is a search engine optimized talent hub grouped by job class that’s easier to find than an individual posting, and certainly more inviting. This micro site funnels candidates to a prospect pool to be nurtured using some CRM tool. To capture their attention, prospects can interact with recruiters and hiring managers without applying, just to get more information. What an idea! Imagine allowing customers just to look around and easily compare products before buying one? Now that’s a recruiting idea worthy of consideration.
4. Google #2. Innovative idea: continuous innovation. Application to recruiting: always improve what you’re doing, use consumer marketing concepts to reach people before the competition to establish a competitive advantage, and try stuff out even if it doesn’t work. Application to recruiting: just about everything you do now should be reconsidered. It fact, maybe have the recruiting and sourcing department report to marketing or be run by someone who is customer-focused?
5. Hulu #4. This is the TV-on-the-Internet company. Innovative idea: make a site that’s easy to use and fun, and easy to create by getting rivals to work together. In this case, Fox and NBC Universal. Application to recruiting: make it easy as possible to have prospects find your site and get engaged. As part of this, maybe recruiting should have its own dedicated IT staff. There are just too many rivals for the corporate IT department’s attention, so this way you could try more new things faster.
6. Apple #5. Innovative idea: offer great design, charge premium prices, don’t stop innovating, and be green. Application to recruiting: Make your jobs different than the competition; offer something unique; sell on career growth, not compensation; and be green.
7. Hewlett-Packard #12. Innovative idea: partner with non-related companies in order to offer your customers a unique and custom product experience. Application for recruiting: Partner with non-traditional organizations outside your company to attract a different type of prospect. For example, you could partner with Trump Casinos and invite recent MBA grads to a poker championship (it’s been done by Harrah’s) or develop some type of online competitive interactive game for your sales reps.
8. Cisco #5. Innovative idea: continue to act like a start-up. Application to recruiting: don’t be bureaucratic. This means HR, comp, legal, and the OFCCP shouldn’t be driving the design of your hiring processes. This doesn’t mean you’ll be out of compliance, it just means you won’t be boring.
9. Pure Digital Technologies #7. This is the company that makes the Flip video recorder. Innovative idea: make the product easy to use and offer customers a chance to interact with it by customizing it. Application to recruiting: rather than have prospects find a specific job, drive them to a talent hub of all comparable jobs. At this warm-up page let them interact with recruiters, find related jobs or have them design an “ideal job” by describing the work they enjoy the most and are great at. Then let your ATS bring forth what “best fits” for them. At the extreme, maybe let candidate’s create their “ideal job” and then repackage the jobs you have open to fit this.
10. Ideo #10. This is the top design company on the planet. Innovative idea: the company has grown from just designing products to transforming systems to designing for behavioral change. This means adapting the product or service to incorporate a benefit, like saving the planet or at least getting better gas mileage. Application for recruiting: stop thinking about just hiring people to fill jobs, instead, think about offering careers. You’ll need to understand the behavior criteria your prospects use when looking and comparing positions to start this process. To implement it, you’ll need to apply every one of the ideas mentioned above.

We’ll be discussing these and other innovative recruiting ideas on my Recruiter’s Wall blog. So join and participate. There’s only one criteria — be innovative!

As I review the other innovative ideas on the Fast Company list, there seems to be a number of common themes or principles that stand out as guidance. For one thing, all of these ideas are innovative. As obvious as that sounds, being innovative is hard, because you’re fighting the status quo.

So if you want to be innovative, expect lots of naysayers, a bit of ridicule, and some grief.

Start small. Being innovative doesn’t mean copying someone, it means being first, but copying can help to prove your point and establish your bona fides. Trying out lots of different ideas until one sticks also seems to be part of being innovative.

Continuous change and constant renewal seems to be another aspect of this.

What’s also interesting is that these companies have always been innovative; it’s part of their corporate DNA. So it’s not a surprise to see any of them on the list. This becomes a chicken-or-the-egg problem for recruiting, then. Can a corporate recruiting department housed in HR ever become risk-taking and innovative?

Perhaps not, but since all of these companies are doing fairly well from a competitive standpoint, being innovative certainly has a significant ROI that can be demonstrated. Maybe it will take some gutsy person to make an innovative pitch to the CEO to get the process started. This alone is pretty innovative, so show some guts and get going.

Join LinkedIn Groups

Suppose one of your areas is, like mine, SAP Consulting. Search for groups using the word SAP in the group search box. The groups will be shown in the order of size. You will find:

SAP Community with almost 15,000 members
SAP Network Global (12,000+) … Active 12,000 members
SAP People Forum almost 8,000 members
etc.

Join these groups. The instant benefit is that all of the members are now in your network even if they are beyond the 3-level connection distance.

Search for Group Members and Send Them Messages for Free

There are two ways to search for people in a group. First, there’s a simple search box within the group members tab. You can search for members by keywords. The advantage is that you will see 500 results.

Now notice that you can “send a message” to any of these people using a link under their name in the list of results. If you go to the very last page of the search results, you will likely see people who are connected to you only through the group, yet you can send them a direct message. That is just like sending a LinkedIn “Inmail” but is free.

The second way to search is to use the new advanced people search functionality. You are able to check one or more of your groups on the advanced people search page to target your search at these groups’ members. You can now combine your search with keywords, target title, company, location, etc. If you have a free account you would only see 100 results. (It used to be 500 just recently.) I don’t see it as a big limitation; there are always ways to run a variety of searches to see more results. If you mouse over a person’s profile in the results list you will see the link “send message” for people who are either connected to you or are in your group. If you go to a profile view, you will see the same “send message” link there as well.

Important Notes on the LinkedIn search syntax:

a) LinkedIn search allows you to use Boolean syntax: as an example, in the group search members box you could look for
“SAP FI” AND Consulting NOT Recruiter.

b) However, just like Google, LinkedIn search does not recognize special characters like @. It’s no use to include @ in your search string in order to find email addresses either on Google or on LinkedIn.

c) While Google search would see the symbol * as “a word or a few words” and some databases like Monster would allow to use it as a “wildcard,” LinkedIn search doesn’t recognize the symbol * at all.

Post Discussion Items on Groups

On the majority of LinkedIn groups, the discussion boards have anything and everything. People self-advertise, announce that they are “open networkers,” etc. However, if you post a discussion item about your opportunities there’s a chance you will see some relevant responses.

Or, post an interesting industry-specific question in the hopes that you will hear from experts.

Explore the Company Pages

The company search is located at http://www.linkedin.com/companies

Search for the company you are sourcing for. LinkedIn shows a lot of information on a company page. That includes the “career path” that helps identify target companies for your sourcing.

Search within the companies is rather limited, but you could also do a Google X-ray search like this: <keywords> site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies
to investigate target companies and look for their employees.

As an example, do a Google search

SAP Consulting site:http://www.linkedin.com/companies “San Francisco”

and explore the results.

Use Contact Capture to Parse and Organize Your People Searches

Broadlook Contact Capture is a great tool with many uses, and it’s free. You can download it at http://www.broadlook.com/braingain

On the “people search” page on LinkedIn, use the “extended” view. Highlight-all on the page and use Contact Capture to capture the results. The tool was not made for pages like this, and you will get some extra “junk” — but this will capture all the first and last names. If you searched for employees of a specific company where you know the email pattern, you can now create an email list for these people.

(Another relevant tool comes from eGrabber. It is not free but is extremely useful for capturing and parsing LinkedIn profiles. Go to the site www.eGrabber.com and look for the “Excel” tool.)

Have Their Email Address? Learn More About the Person

If you have an email address that is likely to belong to someone you’d like to learn more about, there are several ways to do it using LinkedIn.

You can enter it in the “import contacts” page. If the person is on LinkedIn and is not in your network you will get a link to his/her profile. Another way is to use the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar. If you create a contact in Outlook with the email, save it and reopen, you will see a link to the profile. You can download the Outlook toolbar from http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=outlook_toolbar_download

Drive Traffic to Your Profile

It is somewhat similar to search engine optimization for websites. Make sure your profile is complete, and it’s clear what your competency is and who you are looking to connect with. Make your profile rich in content; add links and applications such as Wordpress if you have a blog. Use relevant keywords in your profile including variations (such as consultant and consulting).

To get more relevant people to find you, post interesting questions and answers in the LinkedIn Q&A section; start LinkedIn groups; use your LinkedIn profile link in your signature in emails, blog posts, Twitter posts, etc. (Here’s mine, by the way: http://www.linkedin.com/in/irinashamaeva)

Being an “open networker” or not is, of course, a personal preference. I think though that with 30+ million of people on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea not to limit yourself to networking with a just few people whom you closely know, but allow yourself to see and be seen by a larger community.

I hope you liked what you read. I’d also like to invite you all to join our “Boolean Strings” group on LinkedIn. It’s a great community of people and you will have a chance to learn a lot and to share your web sourcing knowledge.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

I) Recruiting Tools that Use “Other People’s Time”

If you’re short on recruiting funds and on hours in the day, the best approaches to consider are those classified as “OPT” approaches that use employee time and budget resources of other departments:

1. Recruiting at professional events. Ask your firm’s employees to recruit at local and national events, trade shows, awards dinners, and seminars they are planning to attend. This is a superior approach because your employees can easily approach potential candidates as “equals” and because their time and travel expenses are already being paid by their business unit or other sponsor. The key to successful event recruiting is to develop the expectation that each employee attending such events will bring back three names of individuals who would be outstanding recruits. Encourage your executives and superstars to speak at these events, because that exposure might result in some immediate candidates, as well as improvement of your overall employment brand.
2. Social networks. Having recruiters spend endless hours building profiles on social network sites can be expensive. Instead, shift some of the responsibility to your employees because there is a high probability that your employees currently utilize one or more social networks already (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) both on and off the job. Start by encouraging your employees to include in their profiles compelling facts and stories about the firm. Next, encourage them to proactively make group connections and to provide you with names of potential recruits.
3. Blogs. Recruiters can write effective blogs but it’s probably also true that many of your top employees probably already author blogs or are active participants in blogs relating to their field. If so, encourage them to talk about the positive aspects of your firm and to actively recruit on their blogs. Encourage other employees who read blogs to use them to also identify top talent.
4. Boomerangs/corporate alumni. The best way to ensure a high-quality hire who perfectly “fits” your culture is to focus on recruiting boomerangs (individuals who previously worked at your firm). During tough economic times, many of these individuals might regret their decision to leave but be hesitant to approach you about attempting to return. A simple phone call from an employee in their former department reassuring them that they would be welcomed back might be all it would take to land proven talent.
5. Videos. Videos are powerful recruiting tools because they allow you to more effectively “show the passion” at your firm. Rather than paying vendors to develop these videos, consider holding a video contest where employees throughout the firm compete to put together short, compelling videos about why your firm is a great place to work. The employees will do it on their own time and surprisingly, they may find many compelling features to display that you weren’t aware of. Post the best ones on your own corporate website or on YouTube.
6. Proactive employee referrals. Employee referrals need to be your number one focus because they shift a great deal of the recruiting “work” away from recruiters and on to your employees. Referrals produce high volume and high quality, but during tight budget times the cost of referral bonuses needs to be avoided. The best way to do that is to directly approach top performers that work in areas where you’re hiring and ask them to provide you with a handful of names of top people. Next ask them to make some contacts for you to begin the relationship recruiting process. Most employees are willing to do this work without an expectation of a referral bonus. Also consider expanding your referrals to allow referrals from customers, strategic partners, vendors, consultants, suppliers and retirees.
7. Ask past references for referrals. Individuals who served as references for previous top hires will often help out again in your search for new candidates if they were asked. Start identifying recent hires who have turned out to be exceptional. Call their references back, thank them, and then ask them who else they may know who is exceptional and could possibly be interested. Because these individuals have given good references once, it is highly likely these new names will also be of high quality. Most references are more than willing to help without an expectation of reward.
8. Traditional referral programs. During tight economic times you might need to shift away from individual referral bonuses and towards a “drawing” or lottery approach. This is where employees get a statistical opportunity to win trips, vacation time, lunch with CEO or other non-cash yet compelling prize. You can also make customers, employee’s families, suppliers and consultants that work with your firm eligible for the referral drawing program.
9. Hold a name-gathering Rolodex/PDA party. If you need help in sourcing or identifying top candidates, involve your employees who are likely to know the best and brightest in helping you put together a list of possible candidates. Rolodex parties are informal departmental or business unit meetings were top performers are brought into a conference room, given ice cream or treats and are then asked to “download” and share the names of the very best individuals that they know at other firms from their personal contacts. Those names might be stored in a Rolodex, a PDA, mobile phone, or email-based contact manager. Regardless of where the information is stored, the very best names are gathered at the party and are then targeted by recruiters to fill current and future job openings.
10. Chat rooms. Chances are that your best current employees are already active on Internet listservers, forums and chat rooms. Encourage them to talk up the firm and answer questions highlighting your best practices and technology.
11. Media coverage. Encourage managers and top employees to make themselves available to the press because the coverage can help attract candidates. Also encourage them to write articles in professional publications that highlight the firm’s best practices and technology.
12. Recruit at company events. Consider company sponsored business, PR, product and sales events to also be recruiting events, where you might be able to identify potential candidates.
13. Mentors and mentees. Mentoring relationships can be very strong. Take advantage of that by asking your employees if they are a mentor (or a mentee) of someone at another firm. If so, ask them to help you recruit the best ones.

II) Sourcing — Low-Cost Approaches for Finding the Names of Potential Candidates

If you’re looking to identify potential candidates, here are some sourcing approaches that will cost you little or nothing:

1. Ask candidates during the interview. Ask the best interviewees for the names of other good individuals they know during the interview. If you ask enough interviewees, you will get a pretty good list of top names.
2. Ask new hires during onboarding. Ask all new hires on the day they start who else is good at their former firm. Ask them to help you recruit any of the identified individuals that they know well.
3. Almost qualified – Re-look at “finalists” from previous hiring efforts for roles in a given job family to see what former candidates may now be more qualified.
4. Conduct Google searches. It’s almost impossible for anyone with any professional status to “hide” these days. Key people always have high online visibility, so identify well-known individuals by running their “Google score.” Names can be found by searching using major technical terms or job titles, along with a firm name.
5. Turned us down. Re-visit finalists who, in the past, rejected your job offers. Try a new approach and attempt to resell them. If they say no, ask them if you can contact them again later.
6. A find-you-again profile. Ask your current employees “how would I find you again?” Ask them what business and social events they attend, magazines and journals that they read, TV shows that they watch, etc. Use this information to identify the sources that are the most likely to produce results.
7. Retirees. Some retirees have second thoughts about leaving the world of work, while others are willing to work as “fill-ins,” so keep in touch with those that you might like to have return.
8. Community groups. Encourage leaders of community, service and church groups to make referrals and to let you speak at their events.
9. Contests. Technology firms like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are utilizing online technology challenges to identify the best problem solvers in the world. Finance companies are using “case contests” to identify teams of MBA graduates with the ability to rapidly apply their learning.
10. Clubs and organizations. Firms are beginning to realize that if you want risk-takers, you recruit at rock-climbing clubs. If you want people with discipline, you recruit former Marines. Several pharma organizations have begun hiring ex-cheerleaders as salespeople because of their discipline and their ability to get people’s attention. Pockets of labor usually share at least one extracurricular interest outside work. One hospital organization in Illinois found that nearly all pediatric nurses’ frequent arts and crafts supply stores regularly and began targeting crafts clubs and training classes in such venues as sources.

III) Selling Candidates — Tips on Convincing Candidates to Say Yes to an Interview or a Job Offer

1. Job descriptions. If you have a hard time getting individuals to apply, a dull job description is a common reason why. Rewrite your job descriptions to make them more like marketing pieces. Identify the WOW factors that you have and the features that excite your current employees. Put them in your job descriptions and make them compelling.
2. CEO calls. Have your firm’s CEO call top candidates directly and encourage them to sign on. CEO calls are incredibly effective.
3. Same-level calls. Many individuals make a habit of not returning recruiter calls. Instead, have someone at their professional level call them and you will get as much as a three times higher response rate. The reason for this is “professional courtesy” and the opportunity to learn.
4. Peer interviews. Many organizations have found that they get a significantly higher acceptance rate if candidates are interviewed primarily by the individuals they will work directly with. Because peers know the job, they can be more convincing and at the same time, more believable than hiring managers.
5. Side by side offer sheets. Provide your hiring managers with a single sheet that shows how your offer compares favorably with offers from competing facilities. This helps improve offer a acceptance rates.
6. Contact them on the right day. Constantly seek out information about top individuals that might “all of a sudden” be unhappy because their boss/friend just left, a merger has been announced, they didn’t get a raise, they got a bad performance appraisal or other “triggering event”. Contact them right away and close the deal.
7. Select a hiring team. Some managers just aren’t good salespeople (recruiters). Identify the employees that are good recruiters and salespeople and let them do most of the hiring. Give them recruiter training and reward them for their efforts. Because they do a lot of hiring, they will naturally be better at it than a single manager that only does hiring once or twice a year.
8. Free training. Offer top candidates you have pre-identified any vacant seats in your training classes in order to build a relationship and to assess their capabilities.
9. Involve them. Ask top individuals to help you “assess” a new idea or program, then build the relationship to the point where they know you well enough to accept an offer.
10. Sell sheet attached to your application. Attach a “sales sheet” to your hard copy application forms that highlights the best practices and features of your firm.
11. Promise them an interview. Guarantee potential recruits an interview. Consider giving them a reward (a $10 coffee card) or a free meal if they show up for an interview.

IV) College Recruiting Tips

1. Interns as on-campus reps. Ask your college interns/ part time staff to serve as recruiting representatives when they return to campus. Ask them to visit campus events and to provide you with the names of the best and what it takes to convince them.
2. Grad assistants. The grad assistants of top professors not only know the best students but they are very good at convincing them to accept your new opportunities. Officers of professional student organizations are also excellent talent scouts.
3. Use last year’s hires as sourcers/recruiters. Ask last year’s college hires to help you identify and recruit this year’s crop
4. Ask college professors. Ask college professors to be referral sources. Identify the best and begin selling them more than a year before graduation.
5. 2-years-out college hires. If you haven’t had a lot of success competing for students graduating, try re-contacting those you wanted but couldn’t get two years out of school. You might find recruiting them now is a lot easier as their preferences changed when they become more experienced.
6. CEO talks. Having senior executives speak on campus and give presentations and classes have unusually high impact on recruiting.

V) Other Miscellaneous Approaches

1. Create a hiring consortium to share costs. Consider going together with a group of similar firms to share recruiting ad and/or career-fair costs.
2. Win “best place” awards. Although it takes a major effort, winning a place on local or national “best place to work” type employer branding lists will have a dramatic impact on both the quality of your applicants and your offer acceptance rates.

Conclusion

There are literally thousands of approaches that have been used by recruiters to reach top talent. Some approaches are more mainstream and as a result have been monetized by entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to make money.

But the majority of approaches are simple, low-cost, and wildly effective when used in the right way. What works for the manager of the local tire and lube shop probably wouldn’t work for the software startup, but there are at least 100 innovative approaches that would.

The key to being a successful and innovative recruiting leader is trial and error; not random trial and error, but educated trial and error.

Look at the characteristics of the audience you are trying to recruit and identify approaches that make sense for that population. Top talent is used to being barraged by recruiters using mainstream approaches, so when you try something different you most likely will slide right past all the barriers they have erupted!

To be held outside Dallas on June 10 and 11, 2009, the show used to be sponsored by the area chapter of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management. HRchitect helped organize it in years past, but is now sponsoring the conference itself.

Matt Lafata, show chair and VP of sales and marketing at HRchitect, promises theHRshow as it’s being called, will be the “largest HRM show in the Southwest and one of the biggest tech shows besides HR Tech.” He and Rick Fletcher, HRchitect CEO, insist they aren’t trying to compete with the HR Technology Conference and Exposition put on every year by the magazine HR Executive.

“Our show is regional,” Lafata told us, estimating that about 90 percent of the attendees will come from Texas and adjacent states. Added Fletcher: “We’re not trying to take away from HR Tech or any other show.”

It’s certainly getting to be a crowded show calendar. The national IHRIM conference is in San Diego, April 19-22. The annual SHRM conference is June 28-July 1 in New Orleans. HR Tech is in Chicago Sept. 30-Oct. 2. And this is hardly a complete list. Lafata said HRchitect has a list of something like 400 HR-related conferences, shows, and events.

“Our show is not in competition with anyone,” says Fletcher observing that the HR professionals surveyed at the previous shows strongly supported having a local event. Vendors, also, endorsed a regional show, especially since the cost of exhibiting ($795 for a booth) is less than a third — even a quarter — of what it might cost them to exhibit at a national event.

On the other side of the equation, attendees will find the cost of theHRShow significantly less than other shows. Conference fees are $335 for early-bird registrations. That makes it affordable for smaller companies with technology needs, but small travel budgets.

Right now the conference schedule is barren, bereft of keynoters and presenters. But Lafata and Fletcher say that when the lineup is released next month, “It will be as strong as any show. We’re just now making our big marketing push. We’ve got some great speakers already and we expect to have a really decent size show.”

We rely more and more on pictures, graphics, and videos to display data, deliver the news, give us instructions, and keep us up-to-date with our families. The facts are amazing. Using Quantcast as my source, here is a rough idea of what’s going on. The online version of the New York Times, for example, has a monthly readership that averages about 14 million people in the United States. And that’s the largest readership of any print media I could find. The online Wall Street Journal does a paltry 4 million and even the prestigious Economist does only 3 million globally and most are seeing declining readership.

On the other hand, YouTube averages about 71 million viewers monthly — just in the U.S. And its rivals are also doing well and growing. Veoh does about 23 million, Hulu about 19 million, and Break about 15 million globally.

This indicates a decisive trend: more and more of us are getting information and education from video, rather than from words – whether in print or online.

We have already seen video slowly gaining in popularity and importance in recruiting. All top-tier career sites incorporate both pictures and video. Usually the videos are of employees talking about their jobs, but some include campus tours or chats with the CEO or a hiring manager. Many recruiters have received a video resume, and chat rooms have buzzed with concerns over the legality of such resumes and whether they should be accepted.

I don’t believe there is any serious legal issue in using video resumes, as long as your organization has a policy about how they are used. They are no more discriminatory than a face-to-face interview and may actually help to showcase communication skills and other positive traits. They can speed up the pre-screening process and may even eliminate the need for the number of interviews we subject candidates to.

Younger candidates, who are just entering the job market, may prefer to create a video resume as it reflects the media with which they are most comfortable. I can also easily imagine a time when the face-to-face interview is replaced with a live, virtual interview, perhaps with the hiring manger and several others also present virtually. The use of video lowers costs, expands the number of people who can participate in an interview, allows asynchronous viewing, and makes it more convenient for a candidate.

Here are just four of the ways organizations are using video.

1. Branding and position promotion. Many organizations are including videos that showcase the organization or promote a specific job or group of jobs to prospective candidates. For example, KPMG, Starbucks, and Nike all incorporate at least one video on their careers’ homepage. Many other organizations include clips of chats with employees or even take you on a guided tour of the company, as does Tivo. Just as the Internet allowed sites such as Amazon to provide more product information and user ratings, candidates are now starting to expect the same from career sites. The practice of incorporating videos about the organization and about available positions will expand over the next few years as candidates expect a much higher level of information and awareness than they did even two years ago. Several companies produce these types of videos. One is a Dutch company, C-Looks, which is able to provide videos for a variety of purposes, including promotion. Another is RecruiTV, which allows you to make and embed videos in your career site. Still another in this expanding arena is Vipe, an organization that serves both the corporate marketing effort as well as the candidate.
2. Screening or interviewing candidates. Another growing use of video is to screen candidates. Sites such as InterviewStudio and FaceHire allow a recruiter to set up an online interview easily. InterviewStudio was founded by Colleen Aylward who is the author of a fabulous white paper that I recommend you download a video called “Unmuddying the Waters.” Here is an example of a tool that allows a recruiter to video chat with a candidate. Candidate screening via Skype or other webcam service seems to be inevitable and a great way to expand the limited capabilities of a telephone.
3. Resumes. The practice of candidates submitting their resumes as video clips is just beginning. From as far back as the first CD/ROMS, candidates have been intrigued by the idea of submitting their resume in a video format. Video has advantages – it allows candidates to show their communication skills and it is often easier for a candidate to be expressive about past achievements when telling a story to a camera. Although these are not a substitute for an interview, they are a way to pre-screen candidates and develop a more complete picture than one gets from a written resume. If you are doing a lot of college hiring or are looking for entry-level people, the video resume may be a good way to differentiate candidates and a way to get more qualified people to apply. Many younger people who lack in-depth experience but feel they have other qualities might rather put together a short video than write a resume. The Dutch site C-Looks allows candidates to easily make their own short resume using a webcam. John Younger, President and Founder of Accolo, a San Francisco-Based RPO provider, says, “While I don’t think videos designed to replace a complete resume will ever take off, short videos where a candidate answers one or two particular questions will become very popular and useful.”
4. Outplacement. Videos are a wonderful gift to outgoing employees as part of their severance package. A creative organization could provide the tools and coaching to help each person create a video summary of their experience and capabilities that could be circulated to organizations that are hiring. A copy could be given to the employee to use on their website or as part of en email job-seeking campaign. Once again, C-Looks provides this service as well.

Over the next few years, all recruiters will come to embrace and more effectively use video to brand, inform candidates, receive resumes, provide information to candidates and hiring managers, and provide onboarding for new employees. Are you ready to join?