In fact, these are the same companies that everyone else will be benchmarking in 2010 and beyond. So if you’d rather be the presenter at ERE Expo instead of sitting in the audience hearing about what you should have done, here are some things to consider as you begin implementing a JIT sourcing program.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, supply chains became very sophisticated with concepts like material requirements planning, demand-pull procurement, Kanban, and just-in-time sourcing becoming commonplace. Recruiting is now starting to apply these same supply-chain ideas to improve the quality and timing of hiring efforts. This parallels the increased application of advanced consumer marketing and advertising concepts to recruitment advertising. It is the adoption of techniques from these two fields that makes JIT sourcing possible.

The basic concept behind JIT sourcing is the development of a dynamic candidate database of resumes and prospects. On top of this is a drip marketing program nurturing and engaging with this database on an ongoing basis.

When jobs become available, appropriate candidates in the database are notified and invited to evaluate them. As long as the database is filled with enough high-quality candidates and if primed properly, enough people should raise their hands for consideration. This means that jobs could be available for interviews within hours after a req is formally opened.

Even better, a recruiter could query the database ahead of time to determine whether there are enough candidates available to meet upcoming hiring needs. If not, sourcing programs can be accelerated to meet future supply needs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judging by what’s on display and what’s being discussed at some other HR tech conferences I’ve been to, HR technology appears to be geared more to the past than the future.

To be fair, technology products tend to be lagging indicators of needs, and HR technology is no exception.

Having said that, the lack of vision for products is substantial. Most of what’s on display at conferences is reminiscent of a Sears appliance showroom — lots of similar products in a few categories, with little changing from year to year. Truly interesting products are about common as a pro-McCain story in the New York Times. We’re still seeing products that have not fundamentally changed in 10 years. That gets reflected in awards — a few deserve them, but most seem to make it just to fill out the list. One company managed to win an award for a product that was just a repackaged product from another company. This is why the Nobel committee has never shown much interest in establishing a prize in this category. But that doesn’t stop people from coming. But that doesn’t stop people from coming to look at products. I’m reminded of the story of the small town where the high school football team had never won a single game, yet the stadium was always packed. When someone asked why people went the response was “just in case they do.” That sums up the situation with HR technology — there’s the hope that we just might see something interesting.

This year there are a few products that deserve recognition. The first is Talent Drive; this product solves the extremely common problem — one faced by every recruiter — of having multiple sources to search but no easy way to do it. Talent Drive integrates all job boards a recruiter subscribes to, along with hundreds of free ones, and allows them to be searched from a single, elegantly styled interface. Results are aggregated in one location and resumes can be matched to job requirements and ranked. Best of all, the product allows a user to create a single search requirement that is adapted to all the boards. The efficiency and productivity gains are significant. There have been others that have tried to do this, but not well. This product is designed for that neglected group of people — recruiters. We hear a lot about serving the needs of candidates (the Web 2.0 experience), and hiring managers (making ATS reporting simple), but little about those that do most of the work. Talent Drive one of the few offerings that actually makes their life easier.

Prophesy from eQuest is another. The product lets a recruiter analyze the effectiveness of job boards and provides a variety of metrics related to candidate responses. Now in its third version, Prophesy can allow an employer to focus its spending where it provides the most value.

A third product that I’d like to mention is Value Networks. This product would not be generally associated with talent management, but it can make a big difference to an organization’s talent strategy. Value Networks allows an employer to visualize and understand the informal network that exists in every workplace — that is, the real organization chart. This can help an organization understand how information really flows and who contributes value, which may be completely unrelated to their title or position within the organization. It helps highlight vulnerabilities and devise strategies to optimize information flows. The implications for talent management are obvious — talent strategies should be shaped based on an understanding of the value network, creating and filling positions that help optimize information flows.

These products have two things in common. One, they deliver tangible value that goes beyond automating a process, and can be measured in dollars and cents. In that regard they are very appropriate given the current economic climate. Second, small companies developed them. Real innovation is never a hallmark of any major vendor. Admittedly innovation in technology in general, and software in particular, is difficult. The U.S. Patent Office issued more patents to products in the category of hunting, fishing, and vermin removal in the last year than to software products in the entire 20-plus years that patents have been available for software. But it’s not impossible — as these three have demonstrated.

So if you’re looking for the future of HR technology the product bazaar may not be the best source of information. Perhaps another fixture of conferences — the obligatory “expert” panel — might help. Trouble is that what gets said is mostly of middling quality, based on spin put out by vendors, and dominated by discussions of what the majors are doing. You hear statements like “Vendor X is continuing to fill in their functional gaps and looks poised to take advantage of web 2.0.” Look at the content and the same could be obtained with a few keystrokes on Google. Truly innovative products are almost never discussed because the vendors are too small to tithe, er, subscribe to analyst firms.

There’s also the simple fact that the “experts” don’t use most of the products they are discussing and in general see too many demos to get anything but the most cursory understanding of them and the value they offer. They do have some insights into the situation that specific vendors are in and their likely future, but that is not stuff for a panel discussion. Few have the courage to make predictions about the future — better to say something innocuous couched in jargon to make it seem important, and be right than to make a bold prediction and be wrong. Sitting in on one of these is not unlike being stoned to death by popcorn.

I’ve long said that conferences having to do with HR technology should be on the same schedule as the Olympics. There really isn’t that much going on in the interim that necessitates having these more frequently. Let’s face it, despite whatever we may think of ourselves — this is HR, not astronomy or bio-tech. We’re not finding new planets or sequencing genomes. Then perhaps we’d see many more interesting products that really merit an award that’s worth something. Right now it’s like getting a hole-in-one — in mini-golf.

High-Level Observations

• The rise of talent management. This seems to be the age of  “talent management” when it comes to the use of technology in HR. I saw a ton of companies offering “talent management systems.” These platforms use technology to cover a broad footprint of key HR areas/functions such as branding, recruiting, onboarding, learning, development, and communication. Talent management products are starting to provide HR practitioners with a technology based backbone that will allow them to integrate major HR functions. The integration of more functions into one platform is a trend that can have significant value given the traditional walls that tend to exist between the major areas of HR in larger organizations. There seems to be variation in the functions offered by the various talent management platforms as well as some gray area around what defines a talent management product. These gray areas are nothing new, and are indicative of the nature of an industry-wide trend that is causing vendors to jump on the bandwagon. While my overall thoughts about talent management products are definitely positive, one wonders how many vendors have just dubbed themselves as “talent management” providers to be trendy, and have not significantly changed their products.

• ATS Not Hip Anymore. Is it just me, or does there seem to be a significant decrease in companies selling products referred to by the term “ATS”? I could not help but think that much of the momentum in the use of hiring and technology seems to be in the idea of the broader, strategic, idea of talent management and less in the more tactical area of applicant tracking. The concept behind applicant tracking and its related functionalities are still of great importance; it just seems that the term itself is losing favor as traditional ATS functionalities are being baked into other products such as advanced screening/assessment management platforms and talent management systems.

• Goodbye paper resume. It seems that there is continued movement toward removing the resume from the hiring process. This is definitely true of the paper resume, but there is a broader movement afoot to deconstruct the resume and extract the types of data it usually provides (i.e., skills and experience). Key information about candidates is being collected via other opportunities in the search and application process such as the creation of detailed profiles that have fields that guide the entry of important candidate information in a standardized format. Parsing, another method of deconstructing resumes, seems to be continuing to evolve as a means of extracting important data from resumes. Resume deconstruction methods allow for much more efficient searching, and matching between candidate data and important job requirements. These methods are part of an overall trend that will see the integration of a variety of candidate information into a digital platform that will allow it to be standardized, categorized, and compared to key requirements for a job or career. While we have a long way to go toward the complete death of the resume, technology is helping us to continue the slow march towards the inevitable.

• Web 2.0 is hot. It almost goes without saying that the latest in HR technology is leveraging the benefits of easy access to information, communities, and data that are at the core of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was everywhere at this show. It seemed to me that the applications of web 2.0 seemed to be concentrated more in the space of performance management products, but there is no doubt that it is having a large impact on the thinking of those creating recruitment-oriented products as well. I saw a heavy focus on the use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook and on products that provide companies with platforms on which to build communities. The data-driven nature of web 2.0 provides a good deal of promise for the area of recruiting and hiring.

• We’ve come a long way. The products I saw at this show provide a sign of continued progress and evolution that seems significantly more advanced than the products available five years ago in many ways. While the core function of many products may remain the same, we are continuing to develop new ways to connect people and information. The products I looked at seem slicker, cleaner, and more usable than ever before. While it is often hard to cut through the smokescreens when one is looking at products on the tradeshow floor, the overall level of tech-savvy seems higher than ever. I was able to see firsthand the positive impact of technology on a variety of recruiting- and hiring-related products. Of course keeping up and separating faddish technologies from those that truly are game-changers will continue to be a challenge in years to come.

Assessment-related Trends

• Assessment is still an outsider. While there were a decent number of assessment vendors at the show, as an overall area of HR technology, assessment is still a very small piece real estate. This makes sense to me given the problems that organizations seem to have in understanding the value assessment can provide.

• Two directions of evolution for assessment. Technology is helping assessment to slowly evolve in two directions. The first of these involves assessment being integrated into the functions provided by bigger, broader systems and products such as job boards, ATS, and talent management. Embedding assessment into other products makes sense when one understands that the core value of assessment is to provide information that can be used in conjunction with other information to support informed decision-making. Pre-employment assessment actually may have the most value when it is an integrated part of a process-based approach into which its results are integrated. This trend has been very slow to develop, but we will continue to see a trend toward embedded assessments. The second direction in the evolution of assessment is toward the productization of assessments to be sold transactionally. While assessment has been sold transactionally for decades, the present state of evolution leverages millions of data points to help provide a new level of clarity about what content predicts certain traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This evolution allows for off-the-shelf products that are more accurate than ever before, while providing documentation to support the relevance of these products for specific jobs.

• Hello, talent management providers? Assessment seemed to be conspicuously absent from the slate of services provided by most talent management systems. While assessment is part of the deal for some of the big players in talent management, it does not seem to be a core part of the concept at this point. This is upsetting given the value assessment can have, not only during the hiring process, but throughout the entire employee life cycle. Anyone who considers themselves to be a player in the realm of talent management should strongly consider embedding quality assessment tools.

• Platforms evolve nicely. The software platforms that accompany pre-employment assessment products are evolving nicely. I refer to these as “candidate management systems.” Today’s candidate management systems offer many of the functionalities once seen only in ATS products. This evolution should help support the value proposition of assessment as products become easier to use and provide additional decision-making support.

• Simulations still lacking. While there has been some definite positive movement toward the creation of more advanced simulations, we still need to be pushing ahead in this area. While there are some nice simulation products currently available, the future of hiring will continue to move toward the increased use of simulations. Not enough steps are being taken toward the development of truly innovative and unique simulations. This is an artifact of a lack of buyer interest and the absence of “killer apps” that are needed to allow simulations technology to advance.

When it comes to HR technologies that support the recruiting and hiring process, we are moving in the right direction and have come a long way over the past five years. The technology level available for assessment both as a core process and as a supporting cast member is more advanced than ever. However, there is a lot more that we can be doing to integrate assessment into the products that seem to be marking the trends in HR and technology. Assessment still seems to remain the misunderstood stepchild of HR, which is a shame since there is so much evidence for the value it can have. I remain optimistic that assessment will continue to be brought more tightly into the fold in years ahead.

• Talent management technology will be to the next five years what the ATS was to the last;
• Recruiters need to engage with line supervisors on a regular basis, and not just when a req comes through, because you will be measured on how well your hires do;
• For the same reason, recruiters need to play as big a role in the selection of HRMS tools as every other HR division;
• All HR professionals must become more proactive in identifying and implementing tools to help workers better engage with each other and the company and, for that matter, with their peers in the wide world.

The need for HR to take a more aggressive role was made so very clear in a conversation I had with a bank personnel officer on the last day of the conference.

We were chatting casually after Gerry Crispin’s presentation on “The Growing Power of Private Social Networks” when our talk turned to how her various branch managers network.

Her bank, one of the biggest in her small (by population) state, didn’t offer a formal social networking tool of the kind Crispin had been demonstrating. Nor did it have so much as a discussion list, which, back in the old days, we called a Listserv.

How do branch managers share ideas, get help with sticky problems, or offer guidance to each other? The phone still seemed to be the tool of choice; emails also fit it there somewhere. But the short answer seemed to be that it was up to them and their division to figure that out.

Despite all the evangelizing for proactive HR by the thought leaders who blog and write here on ERE.net and elsewhere, despite all the conference workshops that teach how to make a business case and how HR can earn a seat at the grownups table, there’s still the need to declare “You are expected to lead,” as Crispin exhorted during his presentation.

If there was any doubt, Prof. Peter Cappelli (pictured), director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School, made a compelling case for HR professionals to take the lead in developing new approaches to talent management.

The predictability of demand is so uncertain in today’s world market that it is nearly impossible to estimate talent needs on anything approaching a long-term basis, Dr. Cappelli told the audience, surprisingly large for the final speaker of the 2 1/2 day conference. Instead of even trying, HR needs to take a different approach.

He offered a variety of suggestions, but the heart of it is that HR can lead by inventorying the skills and capabilities of existing staff, implementing development programs that have shorter payback periods — tuition assistance programs are a favorite because the employee shoulders some of the costs and they tend to attract only the most motivated and hardworking — recruiting strategically to develop talent pools that are internal, and using a mix of worker types.

If some of this sounds elementary, pat yourself on the back. But judging from the rapt attention Cappelli got, there are plenty of acolytes left for whom analyzing the economics of layoff versus the cost of future hiring is a mystery. Measuring the costs of the salaries and benefits is easy enough. That’s what HR does.  Calculating the lost opportunity from not having critical workers in place is far more challenging and not something many HR people would even attempt.

Talent management systems can help with that, which is why Cappelli’s closing keynote was entitled “What You Should Know About Talent Management Before Buying Software.” As you’ve probably figured out, his comments weren’t about features, but about what the expectations should be for talent management and the role HR can play in helping their company perform more efficiently.

Talent management, as he described it, is “Getting the right person in the right job at the right time.” If that sounds so much like recruiting, it is. Instead, though, of the outward focus most recruiters have, talent management looks inward at least as often as a recruiter looks out.

To make better use of their human capital, companies are looking at talent management and complete HR management systems. For the first time since the HR Tech conference has been asking the question, the straw poll showed a majority of those voting were not shopping for a new ATS system. What was the top priority to buy or implement?; 21 percent said it was an HRMS. That was followed by 18 percent who said a performance management system was their priority with 16 percent declaring a recruiting system to be theirs. Interestingly, for 10 percent a learning system was their priority.

While accurate forecasting of talent needs beyond the near-term may not be possible for any system, no matter how well designed, efficiently managing the human capital inventory is possible, and these systems can help do that. But in shopping for them, HR needs to take a leader’s role in pressing the business case for its involvement in managing the workforce.

Already, the more progressive companies measure recruiters on the quality of their hired candidates as well as on the traditional metrics of time and cost to hire. And every recruiter of worth should be looking at the sourcing metrics that tell them the most effective spends. Good talent management systems, those that integrate performance management, will expand the usage of the quality-of-hire yardstick. Thus recruiters have a selfish interest in the systems their companies acquire and in promoting the adoption of tools that will help the candidates that get hired perform as well as they can.

Which brings us back to the bank’s personnel officer. I don’t know her involvement in hiring branch managers, but helping them network more efficiently can improve their productivity and effectiveness. It’s worth investigating. And that’s just the kind of HR leader Gerry Crispin was talking about.

“Recruiting is not going away,” said Zach Thomas, senior analyst with Forrester Research. But it is shifting focus to retention and internal recruiting.

He joined other industry analysts at a panel at HR Tech Thursday to discuss “Today’s Technology Trends and Predictions.” None of the four went so far as to declare the war over, but each in their own way suggested that the mass exodus of Baby Boomers from the workplace may not be quite so mass as we’ve been hearing.

With 401(k)s tanking and housing prices dropping, boomers who had been counting on both for their retirement may well delay their departure. That likelihood prompted Naomi Lee Bloom, managing partner of Bloom & Wallace, to predict multi-generational workforces that will require companies to make accommodation for different work styles, habits, and especially individual interests.

Lisa Rowan, a program director at IDC, said recession or no recession, certain jobs and jobs in some industries, healthcare, and IT for instance, will continue to be difficult to fill. “In a downturn, there is always opportunity (for workers).”

Still on the subject of the economy, there will be an impact on companies, but just what it will be, no one could or would say. Instead, they counseled HR to prepare for the worst by identifying high performers a company would want to retain under any condition, focus on cost savings, and show business value.

What was curious about the financial discussion was that just before the panel got underway, a straw poll of the audience found 66 percent of the HR professionals said the economy had no effect on their buying plans, while 69 percent said it no impact on consulting and systems integration agreements or system upgrades.

In other areas, panelists said:

• Web 2.0 and social components are over-hyped (in the words of Jim Holincheck, a managing VP at Gartner);
• Buyers and vendors are moving toward suite solutions and away from component buying, though some vendors are achieving that by partnering;
• SaaS is here to stay, at least for the forseeable future, and that is true for complete systems and not just recruiting.

On The Show Floor

Seems there’s a little discrepancy over just how the financial climate affected attendance at HR Tech. Wednesday, show manager Fred Kurst estimated attendance at around 2,000, not including exhibitors. Now we hear that number may have been more of a guesstimate and that registrations fell off as rapidly as the Dow did a few weeks ago. Even so, vendors, who almost always grumble about the cost and the conference attendance, told us they were at least happy about the latter.

eQuest (profile; site) was rightly displaying its award as a top HR product for its eQuest Prophesy. The just released tool can now track source of hires with a high degree of accuracy by extracting hiring data from the ATS. eQuest, you may know, negotiates job posting contracts for its clients, distributes the listing, tracks the source of candidates, and makes recommendations for future buys based on the metrics it generates. Now, Prophesy can track those inbound applicants through to the hiring process and report back not only what job board produces the most applicants, but the most hires. It also can connect the dots back to individual recruiters.

Zapoint, making its first appearance at HR Tech, attracted a fair amount of notice and not just because of the Smart Car it had parked on the show floor. The new company is a talent platform that takes inputs from multiple sources to generate a picture of individual readiness for promotion or internal movement. It removes from the equation such things as a supervisor’s rating of a subordinate’s readiness, relying instead on objective criteria such as performance scores, experience, and resume. The starting point and key data is the resume, CEO Chris Twyman told us.

Coming from the opposite point of view is HRMC (profile; site) whose CEO and founder, Ron Selewach, said resumes are just so much marketing material. His Acclaim system analyzes and rates job applicants based on their responses by voice, Web, or a combination to competency and behavioral questions. It’s all done by computer, which can politely reject a job-seeker or rapidly elevate them to hot prospect category.

The JobApp Network does the same thing for hourly workers, except it goes a step further and can actually hire the candidate without recruiter or hiring manager intervention. It’s designed for high volume hiring, such as in fast food, where turnover is constant and the skills needed to do the job are fairly easy to quantify.

Pegged Software does something similar, but not so far as to make the hire without a human touch. It starts by measuring the attributes of your top performers, quantifies the results, then measures candidates against them. Applicants answer a series of screening questions, provide background about themselves, and get a Yes or No recommendation from the computer whether they should be interviewed. CEO Michael Rosenbaum told us it’s as simple as that and, what’s more, there’s a 91 percent certainty that the ‘Yes’ candidates will succeed.

“We’re not seeing cutbacks,” Christopher Faust, executive vice president / global strategy for Softscape, told us this morning. “But we are hearing (from prospects) ‘How can I leverage what I’ve got?’” Softscape customers have always been heavily invested in succession planning. Now, says Faust, they are also asking about performance management so they can better manage their existing workforce.

Same story at StepStone, the European talent management company that is making a push into the U.S. market. Interest in the performance management and succession modules is especially keen, we were told. Less so for the recruitment. “The companies want to inventory their assets and better plan in case there has to be layoffs,” a StepStone staffer said.

Even so, some of the smaller recruitment-focused vendors seemed to be doing well. At the Bond StarSearcher booth, business for the ATS software was steady. Interest in the smaller market product is as good as it was last year, said Tim Schram, director of marketing and sales. Actual hiring may be slowing, he speculated, “But that doesn’t stop the resumes. People still want to make good hires when they hire.”

Fred Kurst, trade show manager for HR Executive, which hosts the show, said his sense from conversations with the exhibitors is that there is greater interest in the tools that will help a company better manage its existing staff. And the economy appears not to have slowed down anyone, least of all the major exhibitors all of whom, he added, have signed up for the same amount of space at next year’s show.

By that measure, Taleo will again have the largest exhibit. The company has three huge areas, one of them dedicated to a performing troupe of aerial artists who climb fabric “ropes” that dangle from the ceiling. Not even the Workscape car giveaway garners more interest.

The car may be the biggest prize, but up and down every aisle are iPod drawings, baskets full of stress balls, pens by the crateful and a variety of the usual — and unusual — trade show tsotchkes. Among the latter was a booth where you could take your picture with either a cardboard John McCain or Barack Obama.

Yet even with all the activity on the trade show floor, the workshops still played to mostly full houses, though here, too, the recruiting track seemed to have the lightest attendance. The morning sessions focused on case studies of specific companies including Aetna, Hewlett-Packard, and Whirlpool. The afternoon sessions took a broader view, with sessions on workforce analytics and trends in HR outsourcing.

While conference keynoter Michael Beschloss, historian, author, and NBC News historian, spoke about leadership and the presidency to rousing applause, luncheon speaker Richard Pimentel talked about inspiring greatness by believing in people.

The subject of the 2007 motion picture, “Music Within,” and a national expert on employment and disabilities, Pimentel told his life story in vignettes from his time in an orphanage to his years growing up with his grandmother (the first of many to believe in him when he was diagnosed as “retarded”) to teachers who believed he could succeed to his success as a spokesman for people with disabilities. He left the applauding audience with the challenge to “believe in someone for a year… Not as a matter of evidence, but of faith.”

Thursday’s conference highlight is the first talent management Shootout. A regular conference feature, four companies — Authoria, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salary.com, and Softscape — will compete for to be declared the best of the talent management products.

Wednesday, the editors and staff of HR Executive, honored the previously announced winners of the magazine’s top HR and training products.

Twittering for Sourcing
We see it used at conferences. We read about it on our discussion boards. We might even be active “Tweeters” ourselves … but how effective is Twitter for sourcing and recruiting? Erika Hanson Brown recently joined the Twitter community and wants to know how it works in the recruiting world. John Kennedy is skeptical about Twitter. Although it can help save time when learning about a potential candidate, John relies on some advice he received years ago, “there are only three true productive tools in recruiting — the pen, the pad of paper, and the telephone.”

After reading several more responses to Erika, it is clear that John is in the minority. Twitter can be an effective tool if you follow the advice of Kelly Dingee and Mark Tortorici including search strings, and tying together SMS and social networking sites. If anyone is interested, you can check out Dennis Smith’s presentation on the Recruiting Road Show and tune in to ERE’s webinar series on November 5 for some tips and advice from Geoff Peterson.

ATS Wish List
Erica McNally wants to know what are your “must-haves” and your “nice-to-haves” when selecting your ATS. What’s on your “wish list”? Jake Stupak lists the following: scheduling for multi-users, resume parsing, email tracking, and candidate and position matching. Sylvia Dahlby astutely advises to identify your unique business requirements first. “The leading apps all have the basics” — think about what your company needs before creating your list. She recommends CareerXroads and HRchitect for additional information. (HRchitect, by the way, is doing a workshop in San Diego at ERE’s conference on “How to Save Your Current ATS and Get a Return on Your Investment.”)

I have to add The Newman Group (who will also be doing a session on HR systems at the Spring Expo) to that list since it has a wealth of knowledge in this arena. Dorothy Beach, unhappy with Vurv, has been very impressed with Avature’s Recruiting CRM tool as an ATS option. (I also sat on a demo last week with Michael Johnson and agree that it is worth checking out.) This makes me wonder…will CRM tools replace traditional ATS tools? What do you think? Would you take the leap?

Onboarding New Hires and The Buddy System
There are several programs that if implemented correctly can make onboarding strategies successful. Based on research and discussions, many companies would include the “buddy system” on that list. Laura Arnold is very interested in a program that would pair an internal employee with a new hire but wants a new name for “the buddy system.” Apparently, Laura is not alone. Several respondents use a variety of different names, including “Mentor Program.” Bryan Chaney also recommends “Internal Career Counselor” and “Coworker Coach” while Joann Robinson has used “New Hire Partner,” “Orientation Partner” and “Orientation Coach.”

I’m interested in knowing if any companies have been able to measure the success of their onboarding programs, more specifically the concept of a “mentor program.” Todd Raphael has an in-depth look at onboarding in the next Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

JobFox or Net-Temps?

Kathleen Coughlin wants to add a new job board to her list. Can anyone recommend JobFox or Net-Temps? Although Kathleen did not receive feedback on Net-Temps, JobFox (often considered the eHarmony of recruiting) has some work to do. Taryn Pfalzgraf has been satisfied with the customer service but feels that the process is too time-consuming. She recommends a “conditional trial membership” or “waiting a few months to see if they’ve ironed out their problems.” Kimberley Joyce would have to agree. As an Oracle-centric company, she was reassured that JobFox could meet her companies’ needs. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Among other complaints, they are unable to add different tools, languages, and functionality. Given this negative feedback, Eden Shaffer encourages Kathleen to consider Search Engine Marketing instead. What do you think?

Hiring a Virtual Recruiter/Sourcer and Unethical Competitors
These topics continue to dominate the discussion boards. We’d love to hear what you think about these critical and timely recruiting issues…

Most recruiters, corporate or agency, have finally developed career sites and use the Internet for attracting, sourcing, and communicating with candidates and clients. The website is the bedrock of an effective recruiting practice, and while it may still be possible in local or niche markets to avoid it, for mainstream and volume recruiting a website is essential. In this article I am assuming you already have a decent website that has interactivity, video, audio, and other graphic material and updates frequently. That is old news.

But, to get a jump on your competition and to attract the savviest candidates, it takes more than a good website and good recruiting skills. Here are four essential tools for success.

Tool #1: Facebook or MySpace

You should have a personal and a corporate presence on a social network. I have only listed Facebook and MySpace because they represent the largest share of the social networking world in the United States and a significant percentage outside the U.S. If your organization has global operations and recruiting needs, then there are networks for China, India, and many other places that you should also consider.

College students and most other young professionals turn to these networks for information about you, to ask their friends about you, or to join a community of practice that you have created.

IBM DB2 developers have a Facebook community developed and maintained by IBM. KPMG in South Africa has developed a Facebook page to attract and communicate with potential candidates.

The U.S. Army, faced with massive recruiting challenges, has numerous Facebook and MySpace pages. Some of the pages act as testimonials or provide videos of real people talking about why they joined the Army. Other pages are focused on fun experiences such as simulations of driving a tank or on gaming.

However you use these networks, you will be exposing your brand to thousands of potential candidates who, at least to some degree, will judge their potential work experience by the quality of the content. That’s why these pages have to be done thoughtfully and have to connect to the type of viewer and what they are expecting to see and hear.

Tool #2: LinkedIn

I separate LinkedIn from Facebook and MySpace because it is not really a “social” network so much as a simple way to link people who know each other together in a web of interconnections. These interconnections can be useful when they are leveraged well, and LinkedIn has developed special applications for recruiters.

You should all get a copy of Bill Vick’s excellent guide to using LinkedIn for recruiting. LinkedIn allows you to build a network of people who know you and each other. By working to populate this network with the kinds of people who you either would like to recruit or who can help you find those you can recruit, you can leverage your success many times over.

And by learning methods such as those taught by Shally Steckerl you can use LinkedIn as a structured, searchable database of potential candidates.

LinkedIn is a versatile tool and can be used for marketing, search, and connecting. This is what makes it as essential tool for your toolbox.

Tool #3: Your Personal Blog

Developing a blog puts you ahead of almost all other recruiters by building your brand and your organization’s brand. Blogs have become the most authentic course of information for candidates. They like to read the personal stories and hear about your organization from your perspective.

Most candidates are wary of official corporate career sites because they realize how controlled these sites are and they understand that a public relations expert wrote the copy. What candidates are hungry for is authenticity and personality. And this is what blogs have in abundance.

Yet, every time I tell recruiters to create a blog I hear groans and complaints. I hear things such as, “My organization won’t allow us to blog.” Or, “I don’t have time.” Or, “No one can read all the blogs that are out there.”

While I can’t do much to help you overcome internal organizational bans of recruiting blogs, I can suggest you think about creating a personal blog outside of work that can build your brand and help you source good candidates.

Blogs can be updated once a week or so and entries can be quite short. Good blogs keep each posting to a single idea and add pictures or video to maintain interest. Devoting an hour or two a week to a blog is far more useful than spending that time pouring over unsolicited resumes or cold calling.

Tool #4: Twitter

Twitter is the most recent and least understood of these tools. It is a mini-blogging tool that allows you to write 140 characters at a time and send the message to a candidate’s mobile phone or website as a message or as an SMS. Over 2 million people have Twitter accounts and the number is growing very fast. Twitter can be used in a variety of ways to improve the recruiting experience and as a sourcing tool.

Jason Whitman from IT.Toolbox has written a few blogs pointing out ways Twitter is being used as a sourcing tool. Art’s Blog from Bullhorn, a major supplier of recruiting software for the agency world, also gives some ideas of ways to use Twitter for recruiting.

Use Twitter to push out job announcements to potential candidates, stay connected to a special group of people, or keep those top candidates in the loop. It’s free and easy to use. And, because so few are actually using it, you will have a real advantage for a while over everyone who is isn’t using it.

Staying current is never easy, but at least it can be fun. Experiment, play, and see where these tools take you. I think you will like where you end up.

“We didn’t add any staff because responding to candidates didn’t add more work — we just changed our process,” says Catie Cowher, candidate experience leader for Recruiting Strategy and Initiatives at Wachovia Corporation.

Wachovia posts some 600 to 800 openings per week on its website, which includes both newly created positions and vacancies, and averages 10,000 applicants. According to Cowher, rejected candidates receive an e-mail informing them about their status and the reasons behind Wachovia’s decision. Most candidates are declined early in the recruiting process, following a resume review by a recruiter. Nearly 90% of applicants responding to job postings at Wachovia are declined. Giving candidates immediate feedback about their status was a process change that served up numerous benefits.

Cowher cites anecdotal evidence that she’s received through feedback from applicant surveys that making quick decisions and informing candidates about their status has not only improved the applicants’ experiences with Wachovia’s hiring process, but more specifically their perceptions about Wachovia recruiters. The bottom line is that candidates don’t view unresponsive recruiters as overworked — they view them as incompetent. A surprise benefit is that declined candidates often refer a qualified colleague, after gaining a better understanding of the job requirements through post-declination feedback. Wachovia recruiters spend less time fielding calls from candidates requesting a status update, and have a better handle on the inventory of viable candidates.

In addition to informing declined candidates about their status, Wachovia refers them to other employers by including a link in the e-mail to the AllianceQ website.

AllianceQ pools candidates and shares them among member employers. The company has been building inventory since the end of May. For every 1,000 rejection e-mails sent by member companies providing a link to AllianceQ, 25% of applicants have clicked on the link and 89% have then completed a profile, according to the firm’s managing director Phil Haynes.

“We don’t make any judgments about candidates, and our feeling is that we don’t own them,” says Cowher. “Timing has a lot to do with whether someone is hired — or maybe they just don’t have the skill set we’re looking for.”

Although there’s no formal referral system in place, major Seattle employers Starbucks, Washington Mutual, Weyerhaeuser, and Microsoft sometimes refer candidates to each other, according to Rhonda Stickley, director for recruiting and staffing at Weyerhaeuser, especially when candidates align with positions offered at the other firms. Stickley adds that there has been some internal discussion at Weyerhaeuser about sharing retiree pools among several area employers, which has started a discussion within her team about managing excess human capital inventory more effectively.

In some companies, qualified candidates are referred to other managers when they aren’t a fit for one position, and some recruiters stay in touch with surplus hirable candidates through newsletters, phone calls, and touch campaigns. The key is that all resumes are reviewed when submitted and candidates are sorted into categories. Then the candidates are quickly informed about their status so databases remain pure, searches result in a slate of viable contenders, and relationships are built and maintained through the recruiting process.

“Dealing with surplus candidates or even inventory management is a challenge in our industry, and the bottom line is that we’re not doing it very well,” says Denny Clark, director of the Thought Leadership Institute. “The good news is that we’re going to see much better technology coming down the pike which will help with the problem. Another solution that I believe we’ll see more of, is a restructuring of the recruiting function so that more people initially screen candidates and stay in touch with passive candidates, so their status remains current in the database.”

But smart organizations are foregoing the traditional campus activities, in favor of leveraging the Internet. In fact, if you want to attract and hire the best students, forget going to campus at all; it’s not necessary.

College students tell me they are confused by the entire recruiting process. Organizations on the leading-edge of technology are still using the most traditional of methods to recruit them.

While every student has a Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace profile, most companies do not use them in the recruiting process at all. Students are actually a bit surprised that recruiters seem to use recruiting tactics that their parents relate to better than they do. Many are involved in virtual worlds, take online webinars, download lectures as podcasts, and learn from virtual professors. Yet, they must listen to a hiring manager and watch a PowerPoint presentation about some company in a stuffy room on campus.

Unfortunately, recruiters’ belief in the efficacy of past practices is reinforced with surveys by a variety of organizations and institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. But if you take a few minutes to sit down and actually talk to students, you get a different picture of what they would like, what would impress them, and what would engage them.

As demand for college graduates continues to steadily rise, the supply and demand figures for college students should be warning that times have changed.

The number of college students is fairly flat, growing at perhaps 1% a year, and is projected to remain that way for at least another four or five years. Another little-noted fact is that more women than men are enrolled in college and, unfortunately for the high tech and engineering worlds, women don’t tend to major in engineering, mathematics, physics, or computer science. All of these fields are facing significant declines in enrollments and in graduates.

Also consider the students of all age groups graduating from virtual universities that have no campuses. These students are valuable resources for corporations that are currently almost untouched and unrecognized.

Facing these challenges, I don’t see how organizations can focus on just a few campuses or limit their reach to elite schools. Here are a half-dozen tactics to guide your virtual efforts on campus:

• Tactic #1: Become student-centered, not campus-centered. Create an employment brand specifically for students. Your goal should be to attract any student, from anywhere who has the skills and major you are looking for. Why focus on a handful of campuses when the Internet allows you to reach all of them?
• Tactic #2: Use social networks. Create a Facebook, MySpace, or other social network presence. KPMG in South Africa and IBM have created Facebook profiles that demonstrate what can be done to build interest and connect with students. And this is just the beginning of what is possible. By leveraging a customized Ning site, for example, you could create a network where students could invite other students and generate a viral marketing program for recruiting.
• Tactic #3. Create a dynamic, energetic, and exciting website geared to college students. This should be designed to inform and entertain a potential hire. It should allow you to gather enough information about the student so you can decide whether a face-to-face interview is in order. These websites should have video tours of your organizations, interviews about the positions you are hiring for, and lots of diverse information about why a student would want to work for you. These sites can also contain screening tools and allow students to build a profile or link you to their Facebook or other profile. Use the money you save by not going to campus to pay for this website. Combined with a social network presence, this can largely replace any need to go to campus.
• Tactic #4. Build a relationship virtually. Once you have connected with a student, use email, SMS, Twitter, or some combination of these to keep the student informed about your organization and also about the positions you have available and any other details about the recruiting process. Frequent Twitter updates to students who choose to follow you, or regular updates to a blog, can keep students interested for a long time. You can link to presentations about your organizations and you can email specific information to individual students as appropriate.
• Tactic #5. Build virtual job fairs. Virtual job fairs have become common and are even more useful if you have already established a talent pool of interested students with your social network profiles and website. There are a host of virtual job fairs and more organizations are discovering them.
• Tactic #6: Use every source you have vigorously. Ask every new graduate you hire to tell others on campus about your profiles and website. Get them to recommend a few friends and then pursue them with good virtual advertising and a telephone campaign. If you hire interns, use them as both in-person and online ambassadors to other students. Have them act as talent scouts. Ask employees to recommend family friends. The goal has to be to pursue every avenue to find students who meet the skill needs your organization has. Cast a very wide net and let your website and social network profiles be your filter.

There are many more ways to leverage the Internet for campus recruiting. Over the next five years, virtual recruiting will be commonplace, and organizations that still plod around campus with presentations and cheese platters will be viewed as the dinosaurs – the companies no one wants to work for.

Now what do you do?

Lucky for you, there’s no shortage of good choices. (Alas, there’s also plenty of bad ones, too, not to mention the CEO’s wedding videographer neighbor.). Large employers with big budgets that work with a full service recruitment advertising firm can simply turn the job over to the professionals there. But when that’s not an option, consider the job boards. In the last year, CareerBuilder (profile; site), Monster (profile; site) and others have joined Jobing.com (profile; site) in offering video branding services.

“Our clients told us they want video, but they needed help getting them done,” says Jason Ferrara, vice president of corporate marketing for CareerBuilder.com, explaining the company’s decision to launch a video service last year.

When it launched Video BrandBuilder in September 2006, CareerBuilder became the first major national job board to offer employers a complete video production service. But it certainly wasn’t the first job board to offer the service. To whom that distinction belongs is not clear; however, Jobing.com certainly has a strong claim to the distinction. The fast-growing regional job site began creating employer videos back in 2001 when they were produced by whoever on the (then) 10-person staff could work the handheld camera, including CEO and founder Aaron Matos.

Today, Jobing has what may be the largest library of employment videos of any job board in the world. Joe Cockrell, director of public relations, told us Jobing has 10,000 employer videos online plus another 15,000 community videos covering topics from “How To Tie A Necktie” to a feature on the Denver Urban League that was a finalist for a Webby in the online video category.

The employer videos are just what they sound like — employer branding videos that are part of Jobing’s subscription package. The community videos are produced by staff videographers in every one of Jobing’s 18 offices.

“Video,” says Cockrell, “is a very powerful tool.”

You can’t go to a recruitment conference these days or read a recruitment site without hearing about the importance of employer branding videos. Monster’s Eva Bitteker, video product manager, said there are four main reasons for having an employer video: to attract quality candidates; to surmount or promote geography and facilities; to convey a company’s value and culture; and to reduce turnover by offering a preview of the job.

“Some companies,” she explained, “do videos to get fewer applicants. They are looking for fewer, but higher quality candidates. By giving them a realistic feel for the job they can eliminate (the unqualified and the less than committed) jobseekers.”

Monster’s service is the newest and priciest of the three job boards, starting around $20,000. Jobing’s service is the least expensive: About $1,000 for an employer not on a subscription plan. CareerBuilder, starting at $5,000, falls in the middle.

Here’s a look at the service offered by the three job boards:

CareerBuilder

CareerBuilder’s pricing starts at $5,000, but that’s a rock bottom cost and it’s easy to spend more. Larger employers may want two or more videos to use for different purposes.

For your money you get a production team that will meet with key stakeholders to gather information, write a script, scout the locations, shoot the video, and edit it to 60 or 90 seconds. The turn around time ranges upwards of two weeks. For companies with multilingual needs, videos can be produced in almost any language.

Jason Ferrara, corporate marketing VP, called the production “a real collaboration.” Involve the C-level people, Ferrara says (as if you could keep them away!). “We counsel them to be successful,” he tactfully explained, answering a question about those awful situations when the boss wants to do all the talking. “We try to educate the employer on what makes a good branding video,” Ferrara says. “Reflect on what the company’s goals are; what impression they want to make on jobseekers and to look at things from that perspective.”

But if the CEO decides wisely or not to be in the video, Ferrara adds, “it’s not up to us to be the police.”

The completed video is owned by the company, which can use it however it sees fit, including embedding it on the corporate career site and linking it to CareerBuilder job postings. CareerBuilder hosts the video and handles the technical details.

Jobing

The first of the job boards to offer a turnkey video branding solution, Jobing is the only one to have videographers and editors on staff. The company prefers photographers with TV news experience, because they are accustomed to sizing up a situation and working under deadline. That’s why, says Jobing’s PR director Joe Cockrell, an employer can have a video produced in under 48 hours. (He told us of an auto dealer who ordered a video in the morning and it was up and online, fully edited and approved, by the end of the day.)

The Jobing process begins with an outside sales rep who gathers all the basic employer information, including the goals and those ’special’ requirements, like who gets to go on camera and who doesn’t. The sales rep briefs the videographer who formulates a plan, then goes on site. By then, a story line is developed, the video shot, and the edited work submitted for approval.

“As an employer, you’re giving jobseekers a look inside your doors,” Cockrell says. “That’s what our production teams work with an employer to accomplish.”

For employers with regular hiring needs who have or become Jobing subscribers, the video is included in the price of the subscription, which is as low as $500 a month. Employers with casual hiring needs can buy a video at the $200 hourly rate. Cockrell says that even with a team on site and the post-production work, the cost can come in under $1,000 for a 60-90 second video. At that price, even small employers can afford to have a video made and many do. One look at a Jobing site and you’ll see veterinary hospitals, trucking firms, municipalities, and security firms among such national firms as Wells Fargo and Citibank.

Employers own the video and can embed it on their career site and link to it from job postings, regardless of where they may run. Cockrell told us that some employers burn CDs of their video to use at job fairs and other events.

Monster

With a price tag of $20,000 or more, Monster’s video service is for the bigger employer with competitive or special needs. Monster partners with MadDash E-Media (profile; site) for video production and hosting services. Its teams are trained not only in videography, but are also knowledgeable about privacy and, of special concern to hospitals, patient confidentiality.

The MadDash teams can spend up to a couple of days at an employer site on a shoot, getting footage that can be edited to create multiple videos or to freshen an aging one. A producer meets with the client and stakeholders to scope out the location, participants, and the story the video will tell. The video team, which can number two, three, or more depending on the situation, put together the final edit.

Unlike the CareerBuilder and Jobing videos, those produced by MadDash are not completely owned by the employer. The employer has unlimited use of the video for two years, after which it’s taken down from the MadDash servers where the video is hosted.

Perhaps because of the cost and the time limit, videos on Monster tend to be more limited in number and dominated by the largest companies like AstraZeneca, Home Depot, and UPS. Of course a company doesn’t have to use Monster’s production service; independently produced videos can be used.

Bitteker, Monster’s video product manager, suggested that HR departments seek to have other departments share the cost of video production. “Videos can be used in a bigger campaign by the company. It’s not just an HR function, but a marketing function for the whole company,” she says.

However, there is only one tool that provides a “single point of contact” allowing the use of every form of messaging in use today at any time during the day and from any location. This tool, of course, is the immensely versatile smart phone.

Today’s modern smart phones pack more computing power than most computers did just a few short years ago. They can not only handle your basic person-to-person and conference voice calls, they can also interact with websites, publish blog posts, aggregate RSS feeds, send text messages, send multimedia messages, record/transmit video, record/transmit audio, send email from multiple accounts, take/send pictures, send and receive faxes, edit office documents, and interact with social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

While many organizations empower their recruiters with smart phones, few build a corporate-wide recruiting strategy that leverages the phone as the hub of recruiter activity. Aggressively using smart phones requires forward thinking, something many recruiting managers who came up through the ranks as a transactional recruiter dedicate little time to. In organizations where technology isn’t pervasive and doesn’t permeate every process, the smart phone is seen as just a phone that happens to be mobile, despite its potential to be so much more.

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

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

Additional Advantages of the Smart Phone as a Recruiting Platform

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

Potential Uses in Recruiting

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

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

Best Practice Firms

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

Without sounding like an Apple sales representative, I discovered that the iPhone opens up a huge playing field specifically for recruiters and sourcers who frequently travel, work in the field, or who work virtually.

The iPhone acts like a mini-computer, where users can access work email, use the Internet, read and produce documents, take notes, and stay organized all while on the run away from an office setting. The iPhone offers a view of the Internet that is exactly the same one would see through a web browser on a desktop computer. With new 3G wireless speeds and advanced security features, the iPhone is now also a very safe product to allow mobile access to systems, programs, sensitive files, key company information, and important documents.

With this in mind, the iPhone can significantly boost recruiter productivity and help to shorten the time-to-fill cycle for open positions. When a recruiter is moving between appointments offsite, the iPhone can access an ATS to update candidate information, grab key files on a shared drive online, or produce a report and email in a timely fashion to various managers and team members.

Major companies, in addition to popular social and business networks, have taken notice of the power and usability of the iPhone by offering “mobile” and iPhone versions of their websites, as well as downloadable software applications. These include LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, Google, Yahoo, FriendFeed, Pownce, Salesforce, Oracle, and Digg, which all have various uses and functionality for recruiters and sourcers.

CareerBuilder has jumped on board as well, and offers an “iPhone” friendly application, although the early version is more geared toward job seekers. There are even applications which help iPhone users “record” their voice and take recorded notes to access at a later time.

The iPhone is the only product for recruiters and sourcers that offers such a unique and wide-ranging combination of tools in a small handheld device. Think about it. A recruiter can sit in the back of a taxi cab, flip through profiles on LinkedIn, check those potential candidates against an ATS, double-check these names in recruiting reports, call and screen the candidates, type, voice record, and update notes, and finally email resumes and a candidate presentation to a hiring manager. All this from one device.

Each month, fewer and fewer people read newspapers and books, and more of us get our information from moving media, including online videos, film, and TV. Why? Because videos require little effort to watch but still provide a powerful message. Written “words” are weak tools for quickly transmitting the energy and the passion that your employees have for their work. A better alternative is pictures, but they too can be limiting.

If a picture is worth a thousand words…then a video must be priceless. Recruiting videos can excite by allowing potential recruits to better “see, feel, and hear” the passion and the excitement at your organization. Videos allow an outsider to “meet” your employees, to see your technology, and even to tour your facilities.

However, for some reason, despite their incredible power, videos are the most underutilized powerful electronic recruiting tool.

Let’s face it, most traditional recruiting tools are waning in power. Brochures are time-consuming to develop, hard to distribute, expensive, and seldom read. Still pictures and narratives posted on corporate websites have value but they seldom stimulate or excite the visitor.

Videos on the Internet are one of the hottest trends in society and especially among the younger generations. With the growth of the Internet and mobile phone technology, videos can be viewed almost anywhere by almost everyone. In fact, 56% of Americans with Internet access have viewed a video or listened to audio online, so it’s important for organizations to get their recruiting message out via recruiting videos.

Benchmark firms like Google have learned how to exploit recruiting videos. For example, Google’s powerful seven minute “an inside look at Google” has been viewed by well over half a million people.

Microsoft has also demonstrated its leadership in leveraging video on its “viewmyworld” site, which portrays the company in a way that many feel is more “honest” than ever before. The U.S. Army has utilized videos in a broader range of applications than any other organization in order to demonstrate that their jobs can be exciting.

Online video has become so pervasive that not to consider it while developing your recruiting strategy would be a serious mistake. Even IBM, long considered a conservative organization, was an early adopter of online video for mobile devices.

Today, more than 200,000 people download IBM podcasts monthly. Octagon Global recruiting showed that videos have a place on TV by placing its recruiting video as an ad in the season finale of the popular TV show Lost.

What is a Recruiting Video?

A recruiting video is a relatively short video that is available for viewing on the Internet. Its primary goal is to excite potential candidates by showing them the compelling features of your firm and jobs.

Recruiting videos can be placed on your corporate careers website, on popular video sites like YouTube, or can be packaged as downloadable podcasts for mobile media devices.

Types of Recruiting and Branding Videos

Most recruiting videos can be categorized into nine basic coverage areas:

• The traditional overview of the company and its products
• A “day in the life” of an employee
• Profiles of individual employees
• “Why I work here” videos covering critical recruiting factors
• Facility tours
• Humorous videos demonstrating that your firm is a “fun place”
• Videos and highlights of company perks and benefits
• Videos of company events
• Videos that demonstrate the firm’s excellent management practices

Ways to Create Recruiting Videos

Hold a contest or competition among employees to create a range of videos. Both Deloitte and Hyatt have utilized contests to encourage their employees to create creative videos. Deloitte called it a “film festival” to give it a little more panache.

The concept is simple. Hold a friendly competition among your employees and between departments on who can produce the most powerful video that depicts the excitement of working at your firm. Having a contest creates a buzz within the firm about your employment brand image, which is exciting by itself. Using employee videos combined with the employee referral program provides every employee with a chance to be involved in recruiting, and because almost every employee has access to an inexpensive video camera, you will likely get high participation rates.

Contests are an effective tool because they allow employees to use their creativity in order to identify and cover exciting factors that those in corporate might never have thought of. In addition, the high number of videos generated gives you more choices of videos and more different approaches to choose from.

Content to Include

When creating recruiting and branding videos, here are some tips on how to make the content of the videos more impactful:

• Focus on well-managed practices. Many videos focus on benefits, but it’s important to realize that top performers care less about benefits than they do about working at a “well-managed” firm. Although demonstrating excellent management practices can be dry, it’s critical that you highlight them if you want to attract innovators and top performers. Management practices to profile include rapid decision-making, two-way communications, challenging opportunities, and great managers.
• Show off your technology. Right after being “well-managed,” top performers and innovators expect to be able to use the latest technology. Show what technology you use; make sure the script describes how your technology is superior to competitor firms.
• Use employee-generated videos. There’s just something about employee-created videos that make the viewer “believe” that the message is coming directly from employees.
• Show unique perks. Google became famous by highlighting its unique perks like free food and in-house washing machines. Be sure and highlight them by having employees utilize them.
• Have a tour. A virtual tour of the facility can show not just the building but the level of excitement that you feel when you visit. Make sure that the “sounds” depict the excitement at your firm.
• Have employee profiles. Everyone wants to work at a place that has “people like me,” so profile a cross-section of your employees. If you’re highly competitive, consider including comments from employees who used to work at competitors highlighting how much better this firm is. Be sure and include their first and last name to show that you’re not afraid of “losing them” to recruiters from other firms that view the video.
• Think global. Demonstrate that your firm is a global player by including videos created by your teams around the world. They should also consider making your videos available in several languages.
• Think diversity. Make sure that your video shows a broad range of diversity including race, gender, age, disability, and nationality (other potentially controversial possibilities include sexual orientation and religion).
• Use college videos. College students are the most frequent viewers of videos, so it’s important that you develop targeted videos for university students.
• Feature events. Include coverage of company events that might interest an outsider. Avoid the corporate annual meeting, but consider including short coverage of celebrations, parties, and awards ceremonies where the company is recognized as being a top place to work.
• Show “real” exe