This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work.

Note: I frequently call these agreements “secret” because that is a goal. But with the growth of social media, they are becoming a poorly kept secret.

Ways That These Agreements Can Hurt Your Firm

• A loss of trust among employees — because of the potential legal issues, almost every firm keeps these agreements secret. However, if your firm has corporate values that include honesty and transparency, when the fact that the company is keeping secrets from employees gets out, any built-up trust will be damaged or lost. Restricting an employee’s freedom without telling them can have many ugly repercussions.
• Poorer treatment of employees may lead to productivity/recruiting problems — if the goal of the pact is reached (dramatically reducing turnover), managers and HR professionals will not have to work as hard to keep the best. This may lead to degradation in the treatment of employees and the benefits offered to them. An unintended consequence of this poorer treatment may be a measurable decrease in employee productivity, engagement, and innovation. The resulting weakened and slower improving HR practices and benefits may also harm your employer brand image and whatever recruiting you do outside of the agreement.
• Limiting new ideas and best practices — “no-recruit” pacts restrict or prevent the hiring of new employees directly from your competitors. This can severely limit the infusion of new ideas and the best practices from your competitor’s employees. And if your firm is not  No. 1 in your industry, your chances of moving up may also be restricted.
• It may restrict rapid company growth — in order for a firm to grow rapidly, it may rapidly need a large amount of already trained talent to support new products or initiatives. Unfortunately, no-recruit agreements make it almost impossible to rapidly get large amounts of ready-to-go talent from the most logical sources: your competitors.
• You are forced to hire those who are less prepared — because most of the well-trained and experienced talent will be at large firms in your industry, the agreement may force your firm to hire employees from smaller firms, where the employees are likely to be less trained and prepared. Many firms are then forced to increase their percentage of college hires because most experienced talent is restricted.
• Fewer promotional opportunities may restrict leader development – if the goal of reduced turnover is reached, there will be fewer openings for your best employees to get promoted into. This stagnation will frustrate your best and brightest, and more importantly, it will slow their development. And because you can’t recruit fully developed leaders from your competitors, you may eventually face a leadership shortage. If you want to maintain an effective rate of employee and leadership development, you will have to devote extra resources to develop a powerful development function.
• Your bad employees will stay much longer — the agreement is designed to prevent the loss of your best employees but it will restrict your weak employees from leaving also. Instead of leaving, your weak employees will continue to generate lower productivity and frustrate your top performers. Unless you develop a “no-recruit-except-weak-performers” agreement, you may have inadvertently damaged your firm for years.
• Knowledge of your customers may also be reduced — one variation of these agreements narrows the recruiting restriction to a firm’s major industrial customers. Obviously regularly recruiting away a customer’s top employees won’t win you a popularity contest. Occasionally hiring a customer’s employees may strengthen bonds, communications, and it may help you better understand the customer’s needs.
• The realization among employees that they don’t come first — once the word gets out, employees will instantly realize that all the speeches about providing employees with freedom get neutralized, because in this case, clearly the company is consciously putting itself ahead of the needs of its employees.
• Employees feeling owned — preventing other firms from poaching “its” employees sends a clear message that the company feels that it “owns” its employees. No one likes feeling “owned” and diverse employees may have an even greater negative reaction.
• Damage to your external employer brand damage – once the word gets out to potential applicants and the public, the firm’s external brand image will tank. You may also permanently anger top applicants from restricted firms when they are rejected outright for no logical reason.
• Internal employer brand damage – once the word gets out among your own employees about this repugnant practice, your internal brand will be damaged, and that may negatively affect the way that your employees respond to your customers.
• Damage to employee referral programs — if you succeed in keeping the agreement secret, your employees will not know that they shouldn’t make referrals from competitor firms. Once high-quality employee referrals go nowhere, without explanation, employees will naturally slow down their referrals from all sources.
• The best recruiters won’t want to work for you – the very best recruiters know about these agreements and most of the best dislike the thought of recruiting with their “hands tied.” And with fewer top firms to target, you will likely need superior recruiters in order to bring in the best.
• Not being able to poach locally may increase relocation costs – another variation of these agreements restricts recruiting from major firms in the same community, even if they are in different industries. Obviously when “local poaching” is restricted, more often than not you will need to hire from outside the area. Requiring more candidates to relocate will make recruiting much more difficult and costly.
• Small firms may become more competitive in recruiting — employees may become frustrated when they find that they “can’t leave.” As result, they may jump at the first chance and go to a small or less desirable firm (that is not covered by an agreement). A firm that they normally would not have considered. And if they choose, they can later move directly to a formally restricted competitor of their former firm.
• It may negatively impact government contracts – should you be found to be breaking the law, it may impact your ability to get future government contracts.
• Enforcement can be time-consuming and expensive — some of the recruiters under the agreement may not “get the message” (which occurred in the Google-recruiting-from-Apple case). As a result, executives will be forced to spend the time and the expense of “lawyer letters” to fix the mistakes. And because the agreement itself is probably illegal, you likely can’t go to court to enforce it.
• It’s a contradiction — and finally, if you happen to be an advocate of free trade and open market capitalism, you will likely have difficulty explaining to your Republican friends the hypocrisy of your actions.

Reasons Why the Agreement May Not Even Work

• A cold-calling ban may be insufficient — some of the agreements only restrict “cold calling” or making the first contact (as opposed to an absolute no-hiring ban). And as a result, smart recruiters often find a way to ruse or convince employees at the target firm to make the first contact.
• Third-party recruiters can be used to go around it — most external third-party recruiters are not included in these corporate agreements, so competitors can still hire your employees; they just have to do it indirectly through a third-party. Some executive search firms have don’t-recruit agreements with customers, so finding a top firm to manage your go-around can be problematic.
• Employees will still find a way to work for your competitors, indirectly — rather than going directly to a competitor, your clever employees will find a way to get there indirectly. All they have to do is to make a short stop working at a consulting firm or they can simply take a long break and apply. Ex-employees are not normally covered by these agreements.
• Limited poaching will occur anyway — even though the agreement says no recruiting, in practice you can get away with hiring one to three people a year from a firm without getting a stop call or a “lawyer letter.” Recruiters love to stretch limits, and many managers will go along up until the point where someone complains.
• Even keeping the agreement secret is difficult – with the growth of social media, you can almost guarantee that your recruiters (especially contract recruiters) will informally spread the word about the restriction.
• Some competitor firms simply won’t go along – these agreements can only have their maximum impact if all of the major players in an industry or geographic region participate. With the recent U.S. Department of Justice and civil lawsuits and the publicity that surrounds them, fewer executives will even be willing to discuss these agreements. Already, most global firms simply refuse to participate.

Final Thoughts

I have written about this questionable practice on numerous occasions including my recent article called Recruiting’s Dirty Little Secrets. Although secret, this practice is quite common not just in high-tech but it is also not hard to find in healthcare, major accounting firms, and among consulting firms. There are arguably some potential benefits related to this practice. They include: it pleases your major customers; it may reduce salaries by restricting bidding on candidates; and you may have less turnover because fewer recruiters are targeting your very best. However, after extensive research on the potential problems, I have concluded that the ROI of these agreements is weak and it is getting lower by the day.

Within each of us, in the collective unconscious, there lies a hero — an archetype that Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed lies dormant until called to action. Studying world mythology, Joseph Campbell built upon Jung’s work, discovering that no matter what the myth, a hero’s journey remains the same. All heroes must leave what is familiar, venture forth, do battle, and then return, forever changed, with new talents and gifts to share. For those of us in talent acquisition, that means we deal with something far more important than recruiting metrics and candidate tracking systems: with each and every recruiting engagement, we bear witness to the hero’s journey.

Each senior executive, each technologist, each professional in some way is forever changed by his or her search for a new opportunity. If that involves unemployment, and even homelessness, the bravery and determination required of our hero is the stuff of which legends (and movies) are made.

The film The Pursuit of Happiness captures that heroism. Will Smith and his son Jaden star in the true story of Chris Gardner, a San Francisco salesman who rises above homelessness and poverty to become a Wall Street legend. The movie reminds me that we need to remember we are not always aware of the random acts of courage required of the candidates with whom we interact every day.

The Hero’s Journey is a story lives in the subconscious — one that speaks to us, that moves us, and inspires us as human beings. As recruiters, we would do well to reexamine the recruiting lifecycle to discover the archetypal phases of the Hero’s Journey contained within. A candidate’s subconscious may influence his actions and decision-making as much as conscious reason. To start, we need to learn to recognize the classic markers of the epic tale. The story always begins in the ordinary world, until something triggers the first phase: departure.

Departure

The Call to Adventure: For executive search and recruiting, the call to adventure comes when a candidate first discovers that the ordinary world at work is going to change. It may be that an executive has learned that his company has been acquired or is going through a massive reorganization. It may be that the boss who hired him has left, or that there are rumors of impending layoffs. It may be increasing unemployment or outsourcing of his work. Whatever the call, the effect is the same; the landscape has changed. The Hero’s Journey has begun.

Refusal of the Quest: The next step is often refusal to heed the call. Candidates may not be ready to leave their current roles out of a sense of duty or obligation. They may fear leaving what has been so familiar. They may worry that they simply won’t measure up in their next place of employment. And so the candidate stays, as other workers depart.

Supernatural Aid. Once the hero has committed to the quest, a magical guide or helper appears — cue the recruiter. The most gifted search consultants naturally assume a Sherpa-like role, reassuring candidates as they make the decision to begin the journey. In recruiting, it may simply mean that we convince a passive candidate to consider the extraordinary opportunity that lies beyond the four walls of their current employer and to agree to exploratory conversations.

The Crossing of the First Threshold. As supernatural guides, recruiters help usher candidates across the threshold to enter the world of the unknown. The candidate submits his resume, reviews a job description, and journeys into the field of adventure for rounds of interviews with your team. In doing so, he leaves behind the employer that is familiar, and ventures into a strange and dangerous place — your company — because the rules of your corporate culture are not yet known.

The Belly of the Whale. This is the final separation from the hero’s known world and former self. Often it is a dark, unknown, or frightening experience to triggers a metamorphosis. They may enter the belly of the beast when they are handed a pink slip or are fired. It may be simply painful recognition that there is no future where they currently work and that they are undervalued. There is no going back.

The second phase of the hero’s journey is that of initiation. Our hero has left what was familiar and finds himself a stranger in a strange land. He has things to learn about himself and about his new world.

Initiation

The Road of Trials. Candidates, particularly those who are actively looking, experience a series of tests and ordeals that force them to undergo a transformation. Whether it is failing to obtain interviews or failing to obtain an offer after being interviewed. In The Pursuit of Happiness the test is being unable to show up for an interview properly dressed. Still he shows up.

The Meeting with the Goddess. The meeting with the goddess represents a time when the candidate experiences unconditional love. That would be the moment we introduce the perfect candidate to the perfect opportunity — the moment the hiring manager and applicant each recognize they have found “the one.” The opportunity is not “just a job,” but rather a calling that embraces all that we are meant to be.

Woman as Temptress. Inevitably, a counteroffer is made by the candidate’s employer or another company vies for your perfect candidate, tempting him or her to stray from the quest. But while the compensation package is impressive, it is more a material temptation. It lacks a spiritual connection with the work. Why did it take the current employer so long to realize the candidate was worth keeping?

Atonement with the Father. The candidate seeks the blessing of his boss or someone with incredible power. It doesn’t have to be male. In fact, in recruiting, candidates often seek the atonement of their spouses who must sign off on the decision. These are delicate conversations for families as they consider whether they wish to be uprooted yet again, only to leave friends and their community behind.

Apotheosis. An offer is being readied and the candidate is deified, entering a state of divine knowledge and bliss. This is also a period or rest and fulfillment in preparation for the return home to a new workplace.

The Ultimate Boon. The candidate receives an offer and achieves what he set out to accomplish on his quest. All of the steps up until now have prepared the executive for this transcendent moment. In other words, jackpot!

The third and final phase of the journey is the return. It represents a coming home when there is no coming home. It will never be the same because the hero is not the same. He has been transformed.

The Return

Refusal of the Return. The candidate refuses the offer, at least initially. Either it is a negotiating tactic or it is a reluctance to return to office life and all the stresses that come with it. It is intoxicating to be courted. It is quite another thing to commit to one’s next employer and the challenges the new role brings.

The Magic Flight. Sometimes it is difficult and even dangerous for candidates to escape with offer in hand. Current employers may threaten legal action, reminding candidates of non-compete obligations and other contractual ties that bind. Often, they must struggle to break free.

Rescue from Without. Sometimes the candidate needs guides and assistants to help them return home to their new place of work. In addition to the executive search consultant or recruiter, the dream team may also include an employment lawyer, a CPA, as well as a realtor and relocation expert. For proper onboarding, the worker may be assigned a mentor and executive coach.

The Crossing of the Return Threshold. The day the candidate becomes an employee, the start date — that is moment the Hero crosses the threshold. To complete this step successfully, the Hero must remember all that he or she has learned on the journey. The Hero must harness that wisdom on the job and then to share those insights with the rest of the world – not an easy thing to do.

Freedom to Live. It is now a year or two later, and the candidate has achieved mastery on the job. He no longer fears death by downsizing, so he is free to live. The hero’s journey is complete, at least until the next recruiter calls.

I remain humbled by the power those of us in executive search and recruiting hold to transform the lives of the candidates we touch and of their families for generations. We are the door through which an executive or professional must pass for a working wage or wealth creation. In large part, we determine who gets in and who does not, decisions that shape the futures of those with whom we interact virtually every day. It is so easy to take that for granted, but I try never to take it for granted because our smallest actions have the most profound effects on people who just as easily could be you or me.

So often, in so many ways, our candidates are legendary. A hero is defined is someone who is admired and idealized for courage, outstanding achievements and noble qualities. Each and every day, let us remember the hero … and then, let’s recruit him.

This diverse and highly experienced virtual panel will debate the causes and solutions, the trends and gaps while opening the phone lines to the audience members. Register and join in the conversation.

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

Be different. I harked on this point a couple of months ago, but I challenge any staffing agency that wants to be great to clearly communicate their compelling business case. Talk about your recruiting process, client relations, local market connections, and client successes.

Don’t be a cheesy sales guy and don’t treat your own recruiters poorly. I know a lot of staffing agency recruiters, and I shy away from vendors that treat their recruiters like dirt (this also drives high turnover and lowers the professionalism bar for all recruiters). Some vendors may say how they run their businesses is none of my business and I should judge them simply on candidates hired. And in response, I will say that how you treat your people speaks volumes about how you are different/better.

Understand your competition and how they do business. As an extension to my previous point, I think staffing firms are so entrenched in the daily operation of their own business that they don’t take the time to understand the competitive landscape. Are your competitors dropping the ball with other clients? What are they doing to build business and break into new accounts you’d like to be in? I think that the typical staffing agency only has a superficial understanding of their competitors and then tries to sell against these perceived weaknesses (for example, I hear “we don’t just send you a bunch of resumes like everyone else” a lot).

For the savvy staffing agency, this in-depth knowledge of the competitive landscape should provide you with worlds of opportunity. The truly great vendors know their competition, know their recruiters, and know their challenges and strengths. This knowledge should provide an agency information on where business development opportunities lie in the market. As a corporate recruiter this information can provide me with much-needed insight into the current talent pool and where my recruiting headaches may soon lie ahead.

Too much business development is done with the “give-us-a-shot” approach. When I wrote my previous article several agency recruiters reached out to me and said, “How will you know that I’m different without giving me a shot at a tough requisition?” While I appreciate their effort, I can’t simultaneously engage a lot of vendors with this request. My world would be consumed with just managing vendors and their candidates.

Here’s a business development suggestion: Go to a client where you’ve had solid success and ask them to either A: Make a call on your behalf (I know that’s a huge stretch but I’ve done it before), OR B: Ask if you can use their name and success story when calling into another company. Strong relationships with clients allow this level of imposition. Lastly, don’t be everything to everybody. One issue I’ve seen with vendors is that they contract with every company in town. In the staffing business I know that means more sales, but it also limits your ability to recruit talent away from my competition.

Maybe there is a need for this many vendors. Ultimately I know the answer to this question is dictated by the market. If there were truly too many staffing agencies, natural selection would weed out those that are less successful. This is an effect we saw during the Great Recession. Some staffing agencies closed up shop while others were able to stay in business and make it through a couple of tumultuous years. However, the handful of excellent staffing firms drown in a sea of mediocrity.

The few solid staffing firms have a reputation built on years of experience, consistency of internal staff, and relationships built with hiring managers and human resources. As a result, a lot of their business development comes when a trusted hiring manager moves to a new company. This person becomes a strong internal champion helping introduce the agency to a new client.

Maybe they are all the same. In consideration of this article’s content, maybe we need to consider this reality — the vast majority of staffing firms are the same. Their sales pitches sound the same and their recruiting approaches are pretty similar, so maybe the best staffing firms simply have the best salespeople.

Perhaps it’s time for staffing firms to admit this reality of sameness and let hiring mangers work with the salespeople they like the most (or take them to coffee the most or get them football tickets, etc). What if success is truly predicated by luck and “dialing for dollars”? If this were the case, then treating vendors as a commodity is the only reasonable course of action (And further reason for the proliferation of vendor management systems).

In closing, I will be the first to state that I don’t know if there are too many staffing firms. At first pass, my opinion seems to be yes. I get way too many solicitation calls for the same service to think otherwise; however, the reality of the market will really bear out whether your local market can absorb new players and will weed out others.

In the space of 60 minutes (commercials included), Wendy Doulton dispenses such bits of advice to her six-figure job candidates as “You need to lose the cleavage,” and “You make me feel like taking a nap.”

Born in the U.S., educated in London, Doulton’s blunt, unvarnished advice is delivered, in a clipped British accent. “A résumé should be like a skirt,” she declares. “Long enough to cover the basics, short enough to keep them interested.”

Doulton’s delivery may be all Cowell, and her bedside manner runs more to Gregory House than Marcus Welby, but she gets results. She manages the boutique headhunting firm she founded in Hollywood Katalyst Career Group, after stints as head of talent acquisition at Yahoo Media Group, and at DreamWorksSKG.

Her client list includes all the big names; Fox, Google, Amazon, Discovery, VEOH Networks, and Grey Advertising, are just a sample.

The aptly named show, “The Headhuntress,” includes what amounts to a makeover of two job seekers. One prattles on about astrology. The other admits to having appeared in porn films. Doulton turns them into candidates you would be proud to present.

Whether the show will become a Bravo series isn’t clear. Maybe it depends on how well the “interview” goes, something we could find out by monitoring #headhuntress on Twitter. Doulton will be taking questions and feedback during the broadcast tonight at that hashtag. Follow the show at theheadhuntress.

She’ll also join Jessica Miller-Merrell of “Blogging4Jobs” at #JobHuntChat at 10 p.m. ET tonight to answer job-seeker questions.

On its face, this would seem to make sense. But it rarely works. After a while, it becomes clear that things aren’t working out as planned. The new hire either does what the other staff are doing (abandoning their agency skill set), or they quietly leave.

It’s an old story: the agency recruiter comes into an established department overseen by HR, replete with processes, advertising budgets, and clear lines of authority. Internal company recruiters, especially those working for larger employers, are adept at marketing jobs designed around the company’s brand and managed through an ATS. There are teams, matrixed relationships, and lots of processes governing recruiters. The goal here is to create reliable, repeatable service levels.

Square Pegs in Round Holes

Agency recruiters find themselves wedged into an environment which is the exact opposite of the agency model — it relies on advertising, has much higher req loads, and is a place where process trumps results. They quickly realize they have to get with the program to fill so many requisitions. This is a situation where the agency skills are not much use. The agency recruiter who wants to stay in a corporate role learns they cannot afford to use agency skills unless they have a shorter requisition list, so they can work them intensely.

Recruiters who learned their trade at a company with a strong brand never really learned to recruit. The brand does the heavy lifting. The corporate recruiter runs a different game, emphasizing ads, job distribution, and SEO, instead of digging for candidates, because its the most efficient way to meet their needs. Anyone wanting to stay will do the same. So the agency skill set falls by the wayside.

Others take a different path.

Many agency recruiters hired into corporate roles know they are talented, and that their agency skills are valuable. For them, it’s not about fitting in, but using these talents. These people are often more innovative, and more resourceful. They are results-oriented, and approach recruiting as a business function (instead of an HR function). Those invited to join a corporate recruiting team may see a great opportunity to make a difference by adding their skills to the mix.

When their approach to recruiting butts up against layers of bureaucracy, they realize they’re in a land where process and predictability are prized over results. It’s more important to ensure that the process shows that every candidate was treated equally than to get a hire. Mediocrity is acceptable, and they are handcuffed with no way to use their skills. In short, their creative, aggressive strengths are at odds with an HR culture. The bottom line realization is that if you’re really talented, you’ll leave.

Corporate recruiting runs on programs and processes. Agencies succeed because they put on a pirate hat and exploit opportunities. Pirates aren’t in for the 9-5 grind, an annual performance review, and 3% pay increase. They want to make something happen. They are resourcefulness and occasionally bold. This isn’t very HR.

We owe much credit to “skills-based” hiring, where the personality and cultural characteristics are secondary to a skill set. Most companies say they look at skills first, then fit. But if true, they probably wouldn’t hire an agency recruiter into a corporate role. The talents that drive success in an agency clash with most corporate cultures. Agency work is best done by putting on a pirate hat and making something happen. Too many rules stifle creativity, and the orderliness of corporate recruiting programs are not conducive to such behavior. Indeed, companies hire executive search firms for this very reason: they need a pirate but can’t afford to have one associated with their brand. So they contract an outside vendor and gain the skills while sparing the brand.

… the last two candidates you have sent me are terrible! The agreement you sent me prior to engaging in this search requires me to pay you 25% of the individual’s first-year salary if I hire one of your presented candidates. In my case, that would be in the neighborhood of $17,000, which is a good sum of money.

I am feeling a little confused at the moment, as I was under the impression that you are to provide me the top 1% of talent available in the field of which I am seeking talent. Or, at least that is what you told me in your initial presentation of why we should use you.

Instead I opened both of the resumes you have sent me this morning, only to find the first individual, who has already applied to this position no less than eight times and we have already rejected, and the second individual has changed jobs more times in the past fiv years than runway models change outfits; am I to think this individual will stay with us any amount of time to learn our business and be a strong contributor?

When I signed up for this “executive search/recruiting” service, I was under the impression that you were going to bring me the best of the best, a game changer or an “A” player who can bring significant value and contributions to my business unit. But all I see here are average professionals and not the caliber that warrants me paying you $17,000.

I know it’s your business on how you operate, but I feel as if I need to share some suggestions for you and for what I really need in a search partner…

• Executive search is a science that requires patience. You don’t have to fire me every resume in the city on day one of the position being open. Take your time and bring me your top 3-4 high quality individuals from which I can make a selection.
• How do you know what I really need? All you asked for was a job description. You never once asked me what was/is important, what the key functions to be performed are, the type of individual that will fit in our group, why someone should take a job here, etc.
• Quality means quality. If you are asking me to pay you 25% of one’s first-year salary, this person better be worth my investment.
• Please follow up with me — after you sent me 20+ non-qualified resumes on day one, it was almost two weeks since I heard from you. I wasn’t sure if you were still engaged on my search or if I was to even expect another resume.
• Don’t circumvent the process. We started working together on Day 1 and next thing I know you are pinging my boss with other candidates and topics. This makes me look bad.

Hope these few pointers help you in the future, but at this time we are going to take this search in house and handle it ourselves.

Good luck,

Mr. Hiring Manager

Professional recruiters are citing an increasing number of independent studies claiming there is no difference in employee quality between internal and external recruiters; so, they argue, why should organizations hire full-time internal recruiters when external ones deliver the same results … cheaper? If I were an executive looking for ways to reduce costs, that argument would resonate with me. So, if you have anything to do with recruiting in your organization, how you react to this crisis could make a big difference to your career.

Same Old Same Old

Recruiters (both inside and outside) are like frogs swimming in a pot of cold water. Experiencing slowly rising temperatures, they are totally unaware they are about to be cooked. (Actually, I never boiled a frog, so I’m taking this story at face value). In fact, the last recruiting conference I attended was utterly packed with sourcing candidates and noticeably shy on evaluating them. When I buttonholed both recruiters and sourcers about the importance of qualifying candidates, their eyes would literally glaze over. They either knew it all … or cared less. I emphasize this story because I have not yet met a line manager who thinks recruiting is doing a good job qualifying candidates. And, guess who controls the money?

Aside from sourcing, the traditional method of hiring is to screen a pile of resumes, run applicants through interviews, and do background checks. We all know it’s easy to fake interviews, and results are mostly personal opinion. Furthermore, you don’t need research to know about half of new hires fail to meet expectations. Just look around. Is it any wonder HR outsourcing is a growing industry?

Nuts and Bolts

I did not invent best-practice hiring tools. They evolved from many years of research that, in my experience at least, most recruiters blow off as being too much work. Best practice starts with knowing critical skills associated with each job, then measuring them with hard-to-fake behavioral interviews, tests, simulations, and exercises. Does this process ensure 100% perfect hires? That would be nice, but no. There are simply too many factors that affect the future. Best practices significantly reduce the number of hiring mistakes. However, one fewer hiring mistake means one additional highly productive employee. Put another way, we know in a typical organization that 20% of the people produce 80% of the results. So, imagine what it would be like if that number was reversed to where 80% of the people were top-notch.

The reasons for poor performance are seldom the employee’s problem. He or she was coached to say anything to get a job; job competencies were unclear; and interviews were easy to fake. Imagine that!

Best practice hiring tools are different: they are considerably more accurate than traditional interviews, highly focused, and hard to fake. If you want management to consider recruiting or HR an invaluable department, I suggest ignoring job titles, organizing jobs into families (i.e., jobs with similar competencies), studying each family to identify job-critical competencies (i.e., ones that can be measured), developing reliable and trustworthy measurement tools, setting professional cut-points, and training your people how to use them.

Still need to use a professional recruiter from time to time? Professional recruiters usually have access to impressive networks or are able to screen high volumes of candidates. Let them know, however, that you will require each submitted candidate to successfully pass your best-practice screen. Don’t be surprised of instead of the usual 2-3 candidates, you have to test about seven to find the right-skilled person. Will the recruiters complain? Probably. But they don’t have to live with the consequences of a bad hiring decision.

Piece of Cake…Not!

You might not have the expertise in-house to set up a best-practice system. In that case, consider hiring a psychometric expert to get you started. I’m not referring to freelance salespeople who market out-of-the-box tests. They are probably well-intentioned, but limited in their range of tools, and totally unaware of limitations (e.g., if the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail). Professionals can be identified by career and academic credentials, professional memberships, time spent interviewing people doing the job, use of different tools, professional validation processes, documentation, knowledge of the DOL Uniform Guidelines, and use of tests specifically developed for predicting job performance.

The entire investment of a best-practice hiring system is often recovered in 60-90 days. Isn’t it worth it to cut-through the sales-pitch and get the employee you actually thought you were getting?

Dead or Alive?

Is HR dead? That depends. Keep up the same-old practices, and the answer is probably, “Yes.” Move into the 21st century and master best practices, and I predict you will become managements’ new BFF.

Combined with new recruiting agreement language and proposals, the strategy presents a fresh approach will help participants differentiate themselves from run-of-the-mill contingency recruiters, while generating immediate ‘up-front’ cash flow in the form of non-refundable deposits.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on third party recruiting be sure to check out The Fordyce Letter!

“We’re Different.” Almost every agency says they have a special/unique process for reviewing resumes, sourcing candidates, and access to candidates that sets them apart from their competitors. From my experience I’ve not really seen the impact of their “unique” process in the candidates they’ve submitted. Additionally, most agencies don’t appear to have a thorough understanding of their competition. At some point in almost every vendor meeting someone says that they don’t push paper like “everyone else.” I would encourage vendors to have a much more in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape before they make such broad sweeping indictments of their competitors.

“We Build Relationships.” Every vendor I’ve ever sat down with has said they build meaningful relationships with managers and they “get” our business unlike any other vendor in town. As a result they tell me they have the ability to make a cultural fit for our organization. To this statement I like to ask: “Give me an example as to how you screen for cultural fit.” I’ve been underwhelmed by all responses to this point.

“We Have a Proprietary Database.” I’ve heard this one a million times. Vendor ABC has a database of millions of qualified/ interested candidates at their beck and call to fill contract needs. I don’t doubt they have a long list of former contractors they’ve placed, but in my experience most contractors don’t feel the same level of loyalty to their staffing agency. Most contractors are more interested in the type of work, the end client, and compensation. And before you rebuke, I will concede there are notable exceptions to this point, but overall, it’s correct.

Overall my experience is that candidate screening is indeed not that different; that staffing agencies do not have a special candidate database (why, then do I get the same candidate submitted by different vendors all the time?); and your partnership with me is not that strong. In fact, too many vendors treat me as someone to work around than to work with.

Here are my suggestions.

Talk about your recruiting process: In the end, aren’t we hiring a staffing partner to do something we aren’t/can’t do internally? It drives me nuts to see agencies post client requisitions on job boards. This is NOT a value-added partnership. I can purchase a Careerbuilder posting and screen the candidates who apply. More recently I’ve really pushed vendors to talk in depth about their recruiting process. The responses are truly varied. I will absolutely select a staffing vendor based on the depth of their recruiting process.

What actually makes you different? In 15 seconds tell me why you are a truly different partner (without emphasizing any of the three items I mentioned above) and why I would be insane NOT to work with you as a staffing partner. Give me a truly compelling case. If you can’t, then you aren’t any different than the other 10 agencies that will be calling me this week.

Don’t over-promise: Not a lot more to add to this, but on my side of the fence, this is a continually painful part of vendor interaction. If you can’t fill the role, or it’s not something you’ve worked on before, tell me. I’ll respect your honesty, and in the long run you’ll get more work.

Turnover: I want to deal with the same person each and every time I call. Additionally, I do not want to have to re-train my account rep every six months because you have retention issues. This leads to a second challenge: too many newbies. Most recruiting agencies fill most of their recruiting positions with new college grads and then do not support their development appropriately. In short, these new recruiters don’t know how to recruit OR maintain relationships (reference my previous challenges). As a result, I now ask to meet everyone who will be working with my team to fill external needs. I want to meet the manager, account rep, and recruiters that my managers will be talking with.

We do value relationships (on our terms). My last point, is that I truly do believe staffing agencies can add tremendous value to the talent acquisition landscape of organization. I value true experts who do real recruiting and respect my role in the process and organization.

In the first article in this series I defined six skills that a recruiter must possess in order to effectively recruit passive candidates. Collectively, they’re called the 6Cs. While all are important, some are more critical than others. Here are the results of a recent poll we took of corporate and third-party recruiters asking them to define the most important of the six skills. Here’s the link to the poll so you can participate yourself. You might want to do this before you read the rest of this article. This way your responses won’t be biased.

The top three vote getters in this poll were the need to articulate a Compelling message, the ability to quickly convert your job opening into a Career move, and the Conviction that you won’t give up despite candidate reluctance to move ahead. The least important — at least according to the poll participants — were the need to Control the conversation, the ability to develop deep Connections, and Closing the deal, without money being the primary driver. If you’re a third-party recruiter you know this is upside down. Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important. Without these, Compelling messages, Career opportunities, and Conviction won’t get you any more hires.

I’ll give the corporate recruiters who took the poll a break here since I didn’t define the 6Cs other than using the description shown on the chart. So let me better define and demonstrate why Controlling, Connecting, and Closing are the most important.

Why Control is #1 on the 6Cs Hit Parade

When first approached by a recruiter, passive candidates make a quick decision to engage in a conversation based on a few core pieces of information.

These generally cover factors like job title, company, location, and compensation. However, when candidates actually accept an offer, or even seriously consider one, the factors used to make this assessment are not the same. In this case they focus on job content, growth opportunity, chance to make an impact, the hiring manager’s leadership qualities, the team, and of course, compensation. But even in this case, compensation is somewhere in the middle of the list, rather than at the top. There is where “Control” comes into play and why it’s so important that the recruiter understand it thoroughly (article).

Control allows the recruiter to bridge the gap between the criteria the candidate uses to first engage in a conversation and those used to make a career decision after having a full set of information. It requires a combination of appropriate questioning, the ability to smoothly address concerns, and the ability to instantly shift the conversation from short-term to long-term. This is an essential skill if you want to increase the number of strong prospects in your candidate pool. If you want to either recruit passive candidates or network with them, you must start with a thorough understanding of the 6Cs, but be a master at Control.

Why Closing the Deal Is in the Top 3 of the 6Cs

One could argue that closing is more important than control, and should be the #1 of the 6Cs (article). Consider that if you can’t close the deal, everything else you do is a waste of time, effort, and resources. Let me be perfectly clear on this point. Closing encompasses the actual negotiation with the candidate, getting the person to accept the offer on reasonable terms, and making sure the person considers your offer on all critical short- and long-issues. Making matters more challenging is the idea that the person was not looking for a new opportunity until you called. Under this scenario that person will likely get a counteroffer that’s more competitive than what you’re offering, or worse, the person will immediately start looking and find something else better. Under this scenario, the ability to hold the deal together and close effectively takes center stage.

The fact that only 3% of those taking the poll considered this ability most important dumbfounds me.

Why Connecting Deserves to Be in the Top Three of the 6Cs

Most of you know I do a great deal of work training corporate recruiters to optimize their use of LinkedIn’s talent suite of products through networking (article). What surprises me is that corporate recruiters still think of LinkedIn as a flat list of 120 million names of largely passive candidates. For an external recruiter, it’s a 360° interconnected 3D map of every single person in the U.S. (soon the world). The idea here is that rather than finding your ideal candidate directly, consider instead contacting someone who might know the best candidate, and then provide a referral. For example, I called partners in CPA firms to identify great controllers they’ve worked with in the past. I connected with buyers at major retail chains to find out who the best salespeople they know are. And I’ve contacted product managers to find great engineers they’ve worked with on launching new products. Getting a referral like this is even better, since these people they call you back right away. And even better than that, these people are all fully qualified, since this is how you initially got their name.

So stop calling people you don’t know as a primary means for finding passive candidates. Instead start networking with everyone you do know and have them give you two or three names of the best people who are directly connected to them. If you start doing this on every call, pretty soon you’ll realize that connecting is really how you source passive candidates. (We’re holding a series of webcasts in the next few weeks demonstrating how to take connecting to another level and why you should give your TPRs a hug, rather than banish them.)

The 6Cs are the quintessential skills for any third-party recruiter who expects to survive and thrive in the current economic environment. Corporate recruiters need to think and act like TPRs if they expect to have success finding, recruiting, and hiring passive candidates in any significant quantity. While corporate recruiters might have the ability to deal with passive candidates, I’m not sure they have the hunger for it.

We’re only just digesting 3.0. But what direction are we heading in? Is it a coherent journey? Is there a clear destination/end goal?

4.0. What on earth could that include? How’s this?

• Recruitment transitions from being a “cost center” into a “profit center”’!
• The collapse and insolvency of many recruitment agencies.
• Job boards stuttering and collapsing … and repurposing themselves
• Companies hiring “through the sky” through external referrals and crowdsourcing
• Exclusive/VIP/premium paid in-community content and paid mobile apps
• Gamification shapes recruiting strategies and generates stickiness and virality
• Companies rated globally by crowd opinions

Before anyone screams “unrealistic” or “utter fantasy” or cries B.S., let’s be clear that Recruitment 4.0 moves into the territory of vision. This is some years off. But by calculated hypotheses it is clear there will be a 4.0 and that it is a natural progression of 3.0 and builds sensibly on its foundations.

Let’s recap the different versions of recruiting.

Recruitment 1.0 encompasses traditional recruiting over a huge timeline, including good old-fashioned fax machines, print advertising, (post, spray ,and pray), and Rolodexes moving into traditional ATSs. Recruiters more focused on processes than end results. The basic any-bum-on-any-seat philosophy.

Recruitment 2.0 saw the move onto online and using technology for recruitment purposes, including the advent of online job boards & online CV searches. While the technology moved forward, the traditional methodology of 1.0 was prevalent, including online post, spray, and pray candidate attraction (aka the recruitment lottery of let’s hope the right-ish person looks at the online advertisement, at the right time and feels willing to go to the effort to apply).

Both Recruitment 1.0 and 2.0 were/are fundamentally focused on the active job seekers, (applying to vacancies, on agency books, and those watching job boards like a possessed predator).

Recruitment 3.0 is a huge leap as it moves recruitment out of its comfort zone. The beating heart of 3.0 is the non-active/passive individual and a focus on “best talent” and building predictable talent pipelines. In addition, the philosophy of “everyone is a potential candidate so engage them” is central. 3.0 takes us into building engaged, two-way, free-conversation based, transparent communities. This is anchored by things like employment branding, marketing, and PR. 3.0 is not only concerned with building communities but mapping key competitors and seducing cream-of-the-crop talent with your brand and in-house opportunities.

What is Recruitment 4.0?

Recruitment 3.0 is all consumed and focused on building communities. 4.0 is all about the value of those communities, both real and perceived.

Recruitment has traditionally been a cost center. It sucks money from the profit line like Count Dracula on a feeding frenzy in Transylvania, especially if agency fees are involved, coupled with advertising/job board fees etc. Add this up and it can be an overwhelming drain on resources.

Remember that many of the Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies are addicted to agency hiring and mass job board advertising like an alcoholic drawn to drink. Why highlight the Fortune and FTSE companies? Primarily they should have the advantage and resources to wean off agency addiction, source passive candidates far more easily than small to medium companies, (but funnily enough it is the small- and medium-sized companies who are far more fleet of foot and innovative).

Recruitment 4.0 sees recruiting move from being a cost center (a loss-making division) to being a profit center.

Reflect on that statement.

It’s huge and revolutionary.

Recruitment being a profit center.

“Impossible,” you cry.

Perhaps not if you reflect and apply some visionary foresight.

Recruitment 4.0 is some years off. But not as far as some may think.

Consider the world we live in. Value is defined differently. Companies like Zynga, Facebook, and LinkedIn have massive valuations, well above their profitability margins. Their reach and potential reach and the size of their mass following — an engaged following.

Our generation is living in the information age. The power lies in networks. Networks are data. Data is power. And data is money.

We all want data. Especially recruiters and marketers/salespeople.

So how does a community, (or let’s crudely call it data) = value = monetization = recruitment becoming a profit center?

There are several facets to recruitment moving to a profit center.

1. Reduction of recruiting costs to a minimum, (agency usage close to zero, less need for mass job board advertising, reduction in number of in-house recruiters employed).
2. This depends on building and nurturing a “qualitative” community, a strong employment brand, vibrant social networks, mapped competitors, and putting in place a predictable talent pipeline for key hiring channels.
3. The community itself evolves into a self-service community, where recruitment can be executed by crowdsourcing, and by hiring managers becoming more engaged into pipeline generation and hiring. Everyone can use LinkedIn. Why not hiring managers?
4. Value in the community is identified by both internal and external advertisers/marketers that allows for revenue for recruitment.
5. A sense of increased value is attached to belonging/being part of that community, hence VIP/exclusive areas/content that people are happy to pay for.
6. Gamification principles create more engagement and sense of belonging and stickiness to sites, hence driving potential of more opportunities for monetization.
7. Actual games/cartoons/content that people subscribe to have repeat value.

Let’s look at some of those in a little more depth.

Traditional advertising is failing. The days of successful, targeted TV and print advertising are long behind us.

Ways to communicate, once limited and restricted, are now numerous and disperse.

Looking at TV, the former medium of choice for mass communication, now diminished, as people are now hungry for choice and happily spread their viewing over a diverse and numerous multitude of TV channels. If an advertiser manages to define a great TV slot to advertise to reach their target audience they are thwarted by the fact that people can now record and Tivo, hence skipping ads. TV advertising then is a busted flush.

Print advertising? Again, some national newspapers and magazines are spiraling downward from their heyday readerships. People tend toward reading the latest news online 24/7 or from niche web sites. They don’t want to wait the next day for old news. Print has had to be more salacious and do what it can to get the best scoops to get whatever sales possible. Online, people not only digest news, but have the benefit of posting comments and engaging in discussions.

So traditional messaging vehicles are struggling.

This coincides with a time when recruiter networks are expanding. Combine a recruitment database (with some companies having in excess of ½ million – million names), with social media networks, a targeted mass of names, email addresses, with perceived affinity to a business or product, and a growing realization awakens that this has a marketable value.

A marketing department does not have this scale, (or quality), of information on its database.

Recruiting does.

Now the first step is for recruiting to cross charge its marketing division to advertise to its database and community. Why not? Many marketing departments don’t see or understand the value of recruiting databases. They’re a potential goldmine of information and data … and potential business opportunities.

Taking this a step further, why not allow specific external companies the opportunity to advertise to your community? (Mindful of data protection and ensuring a community buys into contact by third-party advertisers). You remain in charge of the names and not divulging data, but certain advertising is safe to your community and could be revenue-generating for recruiting.

As this thought sinks in, revenue potential opens up.

The Death of Recruitment Agencies

At the same time, savvy companies will be seeing their recruiting costs decreasing.

As companies build their databases of talent, via sourcing, identification through LinkedIn, talent mapping, and coupled with their valued online communities, the need and reliance on recruiting agencies, both contingent and retained, will dramatically lessen.

This will also coincide with less of a need for corporate in-house recruiters. Hiring managers are more than adept at searching on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is greatly expanding its offering and making recruiting easier for everyone. Initiatives like ‘Genome’ from LinkedIn will radically lesson the need for dedicated in-house recruiters in the future. Coupled with your community recruiting on your company’s behalf (crowdsourcing of talent), the need for recruiters will lessen and hence accelerate cost reduction.

The very future of recruitment agencies depends on their ability to adapt to the new realities that companies are waking up to the need to break out of the active candidate pool and identify and attract passive candidates. If we take as an approximation that of the 100% of candidates qualified for your job, only 10% are active with agencies and job boards, then it’s the 90% who are more attractive to companies, and the agencies need to identify, attract, and present those candidates.

Contingent recruitment agencies, especially the large ones, are in the business of competing to be the first to present the CV of that 10% active pool, all trying to Bolt out the blocks. Unless they start to adapt by attracting and mapping out the 90% non-active and building their own communities, their model will face extinction. Now is not the time to rush and buy shares in traditional contingent operators as a long-term investment.

Even worse, the business model of traditional retained search and selection companies, as we reflect on it in this modern age, is founded on the delusions of lunacy. A client pays a 30% fee for first-year guaranteed compensation (or even just basic salary only), split into thirds, a third for commencement of the project and a third for presentation of a shortlist — the risk all loaded on the fee-paying client. Certainly, cost models will change toward loaded placement fees.

The irony is that search firm marketing is based on its peerless reputation as the ultimate Rolodex of all the golden names in the industry. Their network is the goldmine that we are seduced to unlock. If their databases are that peerless and they have done hundreds of similar searches, why then does it take four to five weeks for a shortlist? Perhaps that question is not raised enough.

The zealots will cry that the search agency is peerless in assessment and interviewing. But is that not we do in house? Why am I paying two-thirds of a fee without a placement? It’s even more laughable when the shortlist of contacts is most likely generated by a fresh graduate on $40,000 a year in the back room of the search agency, who then passes all their lead generation to the search consultant.

Alternatively, a growing trend is using a new breed of company that is engaged in market mapping, talent pooling, and recruitment research solutions — hence providing a company with a mapped market of qualified talent, with contact details and candidate profiles that the recruiter then follows up on. Not every company can afford internal sourcers, and this is the next best thing, and significantly cheaper/more cost effective than a full search.

However you cut it, the future is not bright for contingent and retained search and selection unless they adapt to changing new business realities. Not many currently have that foresight as they focus on short-termism. Hopefully agency CEOs have strong managers in their crow’s nest who are prepared to shout “iceberg ahead” before disaster strikes.

Job Boards Faltering

Coupled with the death/decline of agencies will be the faltering and restructuring of the large job boards.

As companies build their own recruitment databases and even more importantly their own communities, they can use creative ways to source talent.

Communities themselves will evolve around certain disciplines/careers/industries and hence negate the use for paid job boards. Why pay for a large job board in the active pool when we can reach passive candidates in a free community?

Job boards will have to look at community-building themselves and earn their revenue through product placement advertising rather than paid-for job advertisements.

Companies have always embraced the concept of internal referrals. Why not the reverse? External referrals — even better through crowdsourcing using their communities.

Naysayers will point to the rewards attributed to internal referrals, generally through monetary bonuses, and hence the difficulty of applying this externally as companies don’t want to pay for talent they would have got anyway.

But recent times have showed the power of recognition and “public reward” through games like Foursquare. People love the status of being the Mayor of a local curry house.

Why not take this principle into recruiting and reward referrals from crowdsourcing: Public recognition and rewards in the community, (badges, leaderboards), on a sliding scale to reach actualization of  ”real” rewards, be it monetary bonus, vacation, or a PC or iPad?

External Referrals through Crowdsourcing

Recruitment can learn a lot from crowdsourcing.

This term was arguably defined by Jeff Howe in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine.

Howe states:

Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.

Howe further drives this home by stating that “it’s only crowdsourcing once a company takes that design, fabricates [it] in mass quantity and sell[s] it.”

In laymen’s language, a company posts a problem online; a vast number of individuals offer their opinions and ideas as to how to solve it; the winning idea is rewarded in some form; and the end result is the company adopting the idea for its own benefit.

Some great examples of the power of crowdsourcing exist on Wikipedia: (the following are all directly quoted from Wikipedia).

• In 2005, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a platform on which crowdsourcing tasks called “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks”) can be created and publicized and people can execute the tasks and be paid for doing so. Dubbed “Artificial Intelligence,” it was named after The Turk, an 18th century chess-playing “machine.”
• Cisco Systems Inc. held an I-Prize contest in which teams using collaborative technologies created innovative business plans. The winners in 2008 were a three-person team, Anna Gossen from Munich, her husband Niels Gossen, and her brother, Sergey Bessonnitsyn, that created a business plan demonstrating how IP technology could be used to increase energy efficiency. More than 2,500 people from 104 countries entered the competition. The winning team won $250,000.
• The Democratic National Committee launched FlipperTV in November 2007 and McCainpedia in May 2008 to crowdsource video gathered by Democratic trackers and research compiled by DNC staff in the hands of the public to do with as they choose — whether for a blog post, to create a YouTube video, etc.
• Facebook has used crowdsourcing since 2008 to create different language versions of its site. The company claims this method offers the advantage of providing site versions that are more compatible with local cultures.
• General Electric organized a multimillion dollar challenge to find new, breakthrough ideas to create cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid technologies, and to accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2020.
• The Vancouver Police Department has put up a website entitled Hockey Riot 2011, informing people about the VPD′s investigations into the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot. It also asks people to contribute any pictures or video that they may have taken during the riot, with the goal of identifying people who may have participated in the rioting. The site also reminds people to not use social media to take justice into their own hands, instead leaving it to the police. As of July 1, 2011, 101 arrests have been made.
• IBM collected more than  37,000 ideas for potential areas for innovation from brainstorming sessions with its customers, employees, and their family members in 2006.
• L’Oreal used viewer-created advertising messages of Current TV to pool new and fresh advertising ideas.
• Pepsi launched a marketing campaign in early 2007 which allowed consumers to design the look of a Pepsi can. The winners would receive a $10,000 prize, and their artwork would be featured on 500 million Pepsi cans around the United States.
• Unilever has recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next TV campaign. Unilever has worked with Lowe on the snack-food brand Peperami since 1993, but has decided to submit its brief out to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.

Ironically, Wikipedia is itself a successful example of crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, as a concept, lends itself perfectly to recruiting.

Posing the question to your community, “We are looking for a dynamic Product Manager, with x/y/z experience … any ideas/recommendations?” will soon become a normal sourcing/name generating activity for recruiters.

The key is how to incentivize/inspire/motivate the crowd to do your recruiting.

LinkedIn gets it. It’s already making headway toward this goal, aiding a company’s ability to use employee networks and matching up people who are connected to our employees who closely match our job specifications.

But what about the wider crowd? That’s where attention will turn next.

Premium Paid Content

Recruitment 3.0 recognized that recruitment is fundamentally boring. People tend to only visit corporate careers pages when they are looking for work. There is no engaging “repeat visit” content that drags them back for more. Many companies are using social media as a replacement job board and listing jobs with hyperlinks back to the job site. It’s hardly the most engaging content.

Recruitment 3.0 involves building “engaged” communities. The key is compelling, rich content, creating a destination that people want to go to on a frequent basis. That is not a list of jobs.

Remember again that recruiting is not about “bums on seats”; it also encompasses nurturing a strong employment brand proposition, attracting and seducing those not familiar with your brand, and taking them on a journey to either apply to work for your company or be an active brand ambassador in your community.

As communities build up in 3.0, underpinned by engaging content, and when those communities reach a critical mass, the next step is starting to grant VIP access and exclusive content to community members. If communities are engaged, they will be, by definition, happy to pay to be part of the VIP area, and we will see the monetization of these communities and a potential revenue stream for recruiters.

Aggregating all your social media feeds — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube content, and your blog — is the first step. This could and should be aggregated both on your corporate careers site and your mobile phone app (for those who want to be part of the community on the move). A one-stop shop for people to engage and follow your company encourages repeat visitors.

This content on the social media sites needs to feel personalized and humanized, giving exclusive access behind the scenes of your company and the individuals behind it.

But what else?

Understand the public pulse. There is no better place than the Apple Store. This shows what content keeps people coming back and is most popular to download. And guess what that is:

• News & Information (knowledge and exclusive access news)
• Games (fun games but also including quizzes)
• Comics & books (The appeal of an ongoing story that people want to follow)
• Photography/photos/videos (uploading and sharing)

This content often focuses on getting people involved, something to do with your friends, and brings that “global community” together.

Each of these is “sticky” and keeps people coming back.

Why can’t recruiters use these same concepts as part of their community building but adapt them for their own companies?

Recruitment Embraces Concepts of Gamification

Gamification is the latest buzzword. What’s funny is that some well-known commentators are rushing to speak about this subject but end up mirroring granddad at the disco trying to throw “cool” shapes to the latest bangin’ tune but instead look rather doddery and completely out of touch.

People love to be entertained. Gaming is huge. Not just “serious” video console games like the Call of Duty’s, FIFAs, and Battlefields, or the PC games like World of Warcraft, but the spread of casual gaming whether on Facebook or on mobile shows the power of people of all ages wanting interactive entertainment.

Gaming educates us about the dynamics of engagement. (Some would take this further to addiction.) What a great game does is ingrain itself into the conscious and subconscious of the player. You think about it and love the roller coaster of emotions that the game takes you through. You may pull an all-nighter, or get up extra early to get in an hour or so before having to venture off to deal with humdrum reality. Escapism is the new drug of the austere Tens.

But what else can we learn? Casual games are the key to the door of mass/mainstream and that elusive community engagement via compelling content that we all seek.

Casual games are those that embrace all demographics, are simple, fun, accessible, and from which users get an instant form of gratification. This is different than “serious games” that are deeper experiences and are perhaps less accessible due to the time invested and the barrier of controllers/complexity of purpose.

Farmville on Facebook is a classic example of community-building and demonstrates some key buttons in engagement theory (in a social context). Farmvile has been such a success for a number of reasons. First, it recognized the unbridled thrill of “gifting.” When you first visit your farm, you don’t go straight to it but to a page with a list of gifts. Many games ask you to spam mail your buddies to play the game. Farmville cleverly goes further by allowing you to send a gift of an animal or plant/crop to your friends. Of course, when we receive gifts, we also like to give them back, starting the spiral of interaction.

Part of this psychology also encourages you to help your friends by reminding them to harvest their fields and to weed their farms. It’s very community-friendly stuff.

These gifts also have a perceived value. The whole point of Farmville is to build a busy and profitable farm and maintain it. But to do this, you need to build and grow the farm, which is time-consuming and takes a while to buy plants, crops, and trees, etc.  But luckily your saving grace is your friends as they help out by sending all these valuable items for your farm. Hence my farm looks better with more content so I will invite more of my friends to play, give them gifts, and expect/request gifts in return.  It’s a clever use of personal psychology and satisfaction of wants.

Farmville also gets that the game has to be accessible and simple. There are no extra levels; you just keep on growing the size and scope of your own farm. The only limitation is money. But having lots of friends gets around that.

Now the clever part kicks in. The game keeps you coming back. Certain crops you plant require harvesting at certain times. Some crops will die if you don’t come back. Strawberries mean you come back every four hours. That locks in an engagement and repeat visit. “I must log back in at 2 p.m. or my crops will die!”

Farmville also cleverly gets the whole concept of one-up-manship and competing to have the bigger farm, the more money, the latest gadgets 00 and that’s where monetization kicks in. Someone can pay to get ahead of their friends, and for many that is a key driver. “I must have the biggest farm and the latest items and be ahead of my mates!”

Hence Farmville teaches us there are three things to making social games huge viral successes: getting users to invite their friends (virality); getting users to return frequently (stickiness); and people competing to win/be ahead of their friends (showing off).

Interestingly, one of the first to understand these dynamics was the Hotel chain Marriott, which has released a Facebook game designed with the goal of introducing potential employees to life in the hospitality industry. MyMarriottHotel gives players the opportunity to “work” in various hotel roles, including hospitality manager. You can start by working in the hotel kitchens and gain points for excellent customer service and profitability. The game is geared to raising awareness among millennials to job opportunities around the world (cleverly available in five languages).

Critically for recruiting, the MyMarriottHotel Facebook game includes at the top of the game a banner shouting “Do It For Real” that hyperlinks to Marriott’s jobs site. Marriott’s goal is to fill 50,000 positions at its hotels around the world, helped by this game raising awareness, (predominantly outside the U.S.).

So what is gamification, and how can it be applied to recruiting?

Gamification is using game mechanics/methodology to inspire engagement in activities that otherwise would be considered boring or routine. Recruitment certainly sits within that definition.

Key concepts of gamification that recruiters can learn from when developing communities and building compelling, repeat visit content, include:

• The key word when engaging in social media and community-building is remembering the key element, often-forgotten, is social
• Keeping activities/content simple, fun, and interactive. When people read your blog/social media, is it light, carries pictures, short, informative, stimulating, or even entertaining to read?
• People want to know what other people are doing, especially their friends. Can people see what their friends have been doing? People love engagement and giving their opinion, be it by rate-this-page, commenting, oropinion polls. These are all interactive elements that engage.
• As people interact, degrees of personalization and humanization help, such as the uploading of avatars and/or people’s pictures. People prefer engaging with “perceptibly real” other people. Avatars aid that.
• Are you encouraging sharing content/activities with your community? Are people rewarded or recognized for sharing content?
• Inspiring members of your community’s “friends” to get involved and get their friends engaged, i.e. virality, sending community growth viral.
• “Gifting.” Can content be shared amongst friends/can someone get something in return?
• Keeps em coming back for more. Certain times of the day/week that the community has to be there. Prizes/giveaways ingrain this activity. Some companies do specific content “reveals” at certain times of the week. Live webcasts also encourage set-time attendance.
• Competition against friends/leader boards. It could be quiz-questions about your company, the most referrals of job seekers, or the most comments made in your blog/social community. Leader boards keep people coming back to chart their progress and see who is on top, and if they are ahead of their friends.
• “Easter Eggs” — those intentionally hidden features that people can’t find. Especially cool for college sections and can be used to encourage people to find about more about your company and unlock exclusive content.
• Enabling unique experiences/personalization. Can people create their own unique user account, personalize their landing pages, and personalize their experiences?
• Progress bars. People are addicted to completion, and progress bars are often used in online shopping as you are guided to place things in the shopping cart and progress to the checkout. Progress bars fit nicely with job application processes of a series of tasks that people will want to complete. “Completism” is a natural human psychological compulsion.
• User-generated content, and games like LittleBigPlanet have showed us that people love creating their own content and sharing that content with the community. Can your community do the same, involving uploads to your blog/corporate careers site?

These concepts can all be applied to corporate career sites, which are purely a repository of information overload and fundamentally dull, and of course to mobile apps. People, bored sitting on the train, plane, and bus, want content to engage them.

Some corporate sites already include games and other challenges — almost always in the Careers section — and some companies have added game elements to the recruitment process.

Some are asking, “Is this expensive? How can a recruiting department make games? But at minimal cost there is a thriving development community and graduates studying at colleges who would love the opportunity and exposure that creating and publishing a game on a corporate site brings them. Development time on games for mobile is minimal but the key is fun (look at games like Doodle Jump and Flick Football, massively popular but simple to develop).

Many recruiters are currently using Empire Avenue as a way of engaging with communities and making new contacts. Some are even using it as a sourcing tool to recruit from. For those who don’t know, Empire Avenue is fundamentally a stock market simulation social network game that encourages users to buy and sell shares of people and websites. Players have their own portfolio in a virtual economy and earn money, called Eaves, by investing in other people. This sees your own net worth rise by encouraging friends and community members to invest in you. What is cool is that when all accounts are linked together, including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and blogs, your net worth rises based on the content you either create or share. What’s cool about this approach is that it combines simplicity with what we do on the web every day: creating and sharing content. Interestingly, Empire Avenue mimics the other sites as it’s also a social network itself. It’s allows opportunities to connect and debate with others by finding affinity groups (“Communities”) within Empire Avenue. Clever engagement mechanisms at play.

Concurrently, Google is also on the move with its Google News Badges. We all read the news, and applying the above theory — let’s call it gamification methodology — Google has created “Google Badges.” Google News users in the U.S. can earn different pins for reading the news, starting with bronze and moving up to Ultimate. There are more than 500 badges available to suit all types of interests, such as “stock market,” “Harry Potter,” and U.S. elections. These “Google Badges” follow closely on the heels of Google launching its own social network, Google+, and is increasingly trying to get people to share content via its network of services in a similar fashion to Facebook.

This will sound very similar to users of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on mobile phones. Users “check-in” at venues using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application, and select from a list of venues that the application locates nearby, e.g. restaurant, library, pub, house, etc. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes “badges.”

The first time a badge is unlocked on Foursquare, be it an easy achievement (like the “Superstar” badge for 50 check-ins), or one that comes as a surprise (“Douchebag Badge,” which is unlocked after checking into venues tagged with “douchebag,” or the “Don’t Stop Believing Badge,” awarded for checking in to three venues tagged “karaoke” in a month), the game keeps people engaged with rewards that makes members want to use the system even more and compete with friends. Especially those who live or work in close vicinity of each other as they compete to be the Mayor of a location.

Why is gamification so important?

Interestingly, to give more credence to this area, Gartner, in research published in April 2011 stated: By 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes. By 2014, a gamified service for consumer goods marketing and customer retention will become as important as Facebook, eBay, or Amazon, and more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application.

That’s a big statement. 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

Many commentators see that naturally fitting in the corporate careers site.

Perhaps gamification will be taken more seriously among current recruitment leaders moving forward.

Global Community Rating of Companies

People trust each other and members of their community far more than they do advertising or company communications. Paul Gillin, author of The New Influencers, talked about the impact of social media. One of his key points was that 78% of consumers trust each other more than they trust advertising — which is why they read blogs and go to chat rooms.

There are many examples to back this up, particularly when we go on vacation. The holiday industry has had to get far more authentic and responsible in its communications. No more fantastic ratings of restaurant food when it is tripe; no more “the beach is in walkable distance” … but only for those who are happy to walk for two hours; and no more “great local entertainment” when it is two people playing spoons. Why is that?

Many people now check out Trip Advisor and read how people have voted/rated their vacation/hotel en masse and then read through some of the commentary. Real. Authentic. Trustworthy. No hidden agendas, just shared experiences.

Companies value their placing on “best companies to work for” and “great places to work” lists. And these are a mix of internal questionnaires of employees’ experience and then a specialist evaluation of policies and internal structures by a panel of experts.

Glassdoor is the closest to a trip advisor for recruitment. Its bias is more U.S.-focused and needs to hit that critical mass to be held in the same esteem.

As we head to 4.0, those principles behind Glassdoor will see job seekers trust the crowd, and companies will value that authenticity far more than traditional manufactured best-places-to-work lists.

Size Doesn’t Matter

Some reading this will rightly raise the question of whether this is all this scalable. Cynics will openly proclaim there will always be a need for local agencies to hire receptionists, builders, joiners, hairdressers, admin assistants, and hosts of other roles. Screams will be heard:

Job boards will never die!

This was all predicted 10 years back and it never happened!

How can a small company generate its own community?

Many criticisms/protection of vested interests will emerge in this debate.

They’re fair points to discuss. Interestingly, when Hard Rock Café wanted to open a new venue in Florence, perhaps the initial reaction of many recruiters was to advise them to go to local “high street” agencies, or place an ad in the local press, even on a job board. The Hard Rock took a different approach and used Facebook to reach out and recruit. It built a community around the new venue opening. Hard Rock needed to hire 120 staff across eight categories from waiting staff, barmen/women, to accounting. It was inundated with responses and was able to interview 600 candidates for the roles and whittle down to the 120 needed for opening.

Whatever the size of a company, all the concepts here are relevant. It may be that a company does not have the time to build its own community but will be able to access other communities and groups, be they local or discipline-specific, such as hairdressers, and crowdsource their vacancies.

Technological, access to information, and communities know no boundaries. That’s the difference the past 10 years have made and why jobs boards and agencies have to adapt, or else.

Conclusion

Recruitment 4.0 is a long way off; yet, many of its concepts are resonating today and being built upon and planned. Some early adopters are even implementing some of the component parts. 4.0 is a natural progression from 3.0. It takes the community concept to the next level.

While some will be initially shocked at the radicalism involved at suggestions of recruitment transitioning into a profit center, crowdsourcing talent, and entertaining/gamification, with a period of reflection it makes sense as a natural strap-on to 3.0 communities.

Many of the recruitment leaders in place today are not ready for 3.0, let alone 4.0. They have been schooled in traditional recruiting techniques that will soon be outdated and detrimental to their business. Many more are worried about process than end results. Where does your leader stand?

Imagine those recruiting leaders who can go to their CEO and demonstrate that they have been able to map out competitors, and identify and build relationships with cream-of-the-crop talent. Leaders who have helped shape and who have put in place engaged communities with positive two-way communication social media channels, thus enhancing employment brand attractiveness, (with a positive spinoff for the consumer/product/service brand), and have hence been able to slash expenditures on recruitment and are now coming up with proposals of how to turn recruitment into a profit center.

Compare that to your current recruiting leader. Are they shaping your future in this direction?

Who do you think your CEO would prefer as a recruiting leader? The one described above or your current one?

There is plenty above to chew on and debate. Agree or disagree, what is certain is that exciting times lie ahead for recruitment.

And before someone asks, will we see an article on Recruitment 5.0 anytime soon? Not from Autodesk. We’ve got to focus on delivering 3.0 and 4.0 with the great team at Autodesk. There’s lots to do and achieve.

If it’s adopted — almost half the state Legislature is listed as sponsors — the bill would impose a number of administrative obligations on staffing firms, and potentially limit some fees while raising costs. It exempts most professional workers, but it would apply to a broad range of workers, including nurses, clerical, blue collar, and similar. Violators could be fined.

Proponents, who were contacted but didn’t respond  are positioning the legislation as a “temp workers right to know bill,” highlighting provisions requiring staffing firms to inform employees for whom they’ll be working, how much they’ll be paid, where they’ll work, and what they’ll be doing.

While on its face benign, other provisions of the bill limit some fees and essentially end temp-to-hire conversion fees. It puts a damper on the practice of shopping good candidates, by prohibiting candidate referrals without job reqs. Out-of-state staffing firms could be closed out of placing workers in Massachusetts unless they had an in-state office.

“There is no such law currently existing in other states,” says Stephen Dwyer, general counsel for the American Staffing Association. “It is more sweeping and more harmful than any, bar none.”

Dwyer and Mark Carlson, president of the Massachusetts Association of Personnel Services, explain that the organizations pushing HB 1393 claim it’s needed to protect day laborers. With many of them immigrants and undocumented, they have sometimes been the victims of unscrupulous employers who pick them at street corners with the promise of a day’s work, but cheat them out of pay.

However, as Dwyer points out, “that’s not the staffing model.” Staffing firms typically vet their candidates in advance, verifying their qualifications before referring them out. While bad apples exist in every barrel, by focusing on staffing firms, Dwyer says the bill “puts the onus on an industry in which the bad operators are outside the industry.”

Indeed, the two examples cited by the proponents involved failure to pay taxes and make workers’ comp payments. Says MassCosh, one of the labor groups pushing the bill, “non-professional temp agencies are creating an underground economy that undercuts hard-working employers, results in the exploitation of workers and steals desperately needed tax revenue from the state’s coffers.”

Though the bill only affects firms doing business in Massachusetts, Dwyer says it has the potential to become law elsewhere. “California could use it as a model,” he says. “It certainly could spread and that’s one of the concerns we have.”

Even without that risk, should the bill become law as written,  it could have repercussions for out-of state firms who place workers in Massachusetts. An Illinois staffing firm, for instance, with a client with operations around the country, might have to forgo Massachusetts placements unless it has or is willing to open an office in that state.

Even if it manages to continue placing workers there, it could see costs rise, since the bill requires staffing firms to pay food and lodging costs should an out-of-state worker arrive and not immediately be put to work.

(Different provisions apply to states that are contiguous to Massachusetts, raising issues about interstate commerce that could end up in federal court.)

Even that seemingly benign disclosure requirement is causing the industry heartburn. It requires as many as 17 different items be disclosed in writing and sent to the employee.

Carlson explained that most of what the bill requires is already part of every firm’s standard operations. Employees obviously have to be told where to report, when, and to whom. What they’ll be doing, how much they’ll be paid, and, the approximate duration of the employment are also passed along, says Carlson.

But with some firms placing dozens of workers  a day — Dwyer said 40,000 temps, on average, are on the job every workday in Massachusetts — “it’s an administrative burden to put everything in writing,” says Carlson, who points out that the industry practice is to handle things by telephone.

“I have a number of people who want to work a day here, a day there,” he says. In some instances, a temp request for a replacement clerical worker or receptionist might last one or two days. The disclosure form would arrive after the job is over.

The cost, too, is an issue. As the number of daily temps placed goes up, so does the work involved in sending each the required disclosure. Passing the cost along to the client isn’t always possible, so, Carlson points out, workers could end up with a lower hourly wage.

With so many of the provisions of the bill having little or nothing to do with curbing abuses of day laborers, Carlson fears that it’s a first step on a slippery slope that could lead to imposing restrictions on the entire employment industry.

“I understand the spirit of the legislation,” he says, “but this is so broad that it pushes us down a slippery slope … The definitions (in the bill) are broadly written, and if they get accepted by everyone, then they can be used in ways to encompass everything we do.”

The Massachusetts Staffing Association, the national organization, and Carlson’s MAPS group are rallying staffing firm owners for a show of force at a hearing June 9th by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Labor and Work Force Development. Carlson says he hopes to have 100 people there to educate the officials on what staffing firms do and how they work.

As for policing the bad apples and protecting the day laborers, the ASA’s Dwyer says laws already on the books in Massachusetts are adequate. They just have to be enforced.

I pose this question because I see a multitude of job postings for “experienced” recruiters with five years of experience. To me, this is an oxymoron. I had extraordinary search training, broke the 100k barrier in my third year, had lots of clients, and I was just beginning to really know what I was doing in year six.

Each year I learned more and got better at my craft. Recruiting is highly complex, when done properly, and it concerns me that companies that wouldn’t consider hiring a sales rep with five years of experinece would hire a recruiter to build a talent process who only has five years of experience. There seems to be a considerable disconnect here and I’d like to try to get to the bottom of it.

Since this is my assertion, I posed this question to a number of recruiters I consider “experienced” to determine if I was barking up the right tree. One of them has six years, one has 10, and the rest have at 15-30 years in the industry. They do retained and contingent work. Here are the three responses I found most interesting and believe they say it all:

• That’s a good question. For me it feels like I am still not an “experienced recruiter.” Mainly because I truly am learning new things and meeting new people every day. But a basic level of experience for me came somewhere in my seventh and eighth year. That’s when I went on my own. From that point on it seems like I am tweaking and learning incrementally with no end in sight to being completely ”experienced.” (He has almost 30 years in the business)
• That is a tough question because there are so many variables. I will say it is a lot tougher and more complicated than most people think.
• Having real impact on the process and recognizing where the hard problems lie and chasing those. The experienced recruiter relishes in addressing and fixing any high-impact problems that exist.

I received one telling response I think may be a contributing factor to my original inquiry. It was from the retained recruiter with six years of experience, the first year and a half of which she worked for a staffing company doing technical recruiting. She was the only one who didn’t have the time for a thoughtful response. I’ve had a few conversations with her and she feels like she knows much more than her responses to me indicate. I think, looking back on my own career, I probably thought I knew “everything” at six years. In hindsight, of course, this was not the case. Maybe the more we know, the more humble we get? Maybe the more experienced we become, we realize how little we actually knew in our past? Maybe the reason for this is that we are more secure in who we are and our craft.

At five years, could I have implemented a talent process? Yes. Would it have been successful and effective? Probably not. My concern is that companies think they can hire recruiters low on experience and training to implement complex processes and to find and attract high-level candidates. It’s imperative that organizations get clear on what they want to accomplish with respect to talent, that this process is aligned throughout the organization, and then hire professional recruiters high on experience. And remember, you get what you pay for.

My mother was my career coach and the classiest woman I have ever known. While most moms in our rural community spent their days at home or as laborers in the glass factory, my mom was an executive who wore nice clothes to work in the nearby town of Weston. She and my father were life-long entrepreneurs who evolved through dairy farming, chicken egg production, and then a commercial insurance agency, which is still in operation since 1958.

Life as a teenager was awkward at times because my schoolmates referred to my mom as a good-looker. They ogled her as she drove our team at breakneck speeds down country roads to basketball games. She was a local beauty queen who got married and had her first of seven children within 14 years after graduating from high school. Rather than attend college she held a series of secretarial positions, including a stint in Washington, D.C. at the height of World War II. Thereafter, she worked in partnership with my father and was the catalyst behind their success.

Dad passed away in 1986, leaving my mother as the sole owner and principle agent of G. J. Garton Insurance. Not long before this happened, my parents recruited my younger brother Josh into the business. They must have done a good job training him since he has grown G. J. Garton Insurance into the largest independent agency in the state. Reps from the biggest U.S. insurance companies often visit my brother to discover his secret. They would never be able to duplicate the residual influence of our mother.

In business, my mother was bold, persistent, persuasive, and impatient. She was a wellspring of good ideas and maintained contacts with movers and shakers across the country. If she thought calling the White House would make a difference, she would make the call and inevitably get help from someone she knew. She was a natural born networker who delighted in helping people while maintaining their dignity.

Not long after Josh moved into the CEO position, my mother decided it was time to do her own thing. I cannot imagine how he dealt with her intensity on a daily basis for as long as he did. At the age of 65, and while hauling around a portable oxygen tank, my mother started a travel agency with the idea of capitalizing on reduced fares for worldwide travel. Not only did she see the world, she built and eventually sold another business. Sadly, the new owners could not keep pace with her indomitable spirit, customer focus, and get-it-done attitude. The business failed soon after transferring ownership.

While much of this drama was taking place, my mother was simultaneously coaching me through college and into my career. I was the first in our family to graduate with a four-year degree and take the corporate route. She encouraged me to leave our hometown for greener pastures. Her advice was simple: You will know what to do.

After graduating from college, I still did not know what to do with a degree in history and political science. There was no Internet at the time so I put over 300 resumes into the mail and received back nearly two hundred rejection letters. Apparently, there was no market for hillbilly historians who were willing to accept any job.

Six months into this shameful and embarrassing disaster, my mother and I were sitting across from each other with the stack of rejection letters between us. This was unfamiliar territory for the both of us, and we were clueless about next steps. Our only connections inside the corporate world were the faceless people who signed the rejection letters. Then it occurred to us, if those people could write those letters, so could I. My writing was just as good as theirs.

My career plan was established. I would become a Rejector rather than a Rejectee, and with this specialized knowledge, I believed it would shield me from future periods of unemployment. I sold everything I owned and made the decision to go back to graduate school and get a master’s in personnel administration. While in school, I accepted a commission-based recruiter position — and this is when I discovered the existence of this job title. The faceless Rejectors were recruiters. This brief experience helped to qualify me for my first corporate recruiter position. From then on, I was committed to become a staffing expert, and my goal was to write a book about my experiences so other people would not have to suffer through prolonged unemployment as I did.

In 1976, I left West Virginia for graduate school in New Mexico. At least twice each week my mother and I were on the telephone, and we maintained this routine until 2009 when she died peacefully in her sleep at age 84. She always said that through me she was vicariously experiencing the corporate career she never had. She encouraged me to stay specialized and said my recruiter skills would eventually come in handy one day. She said I would be able to make a living on a rock with a cell phone. Years later, her words would become a reality.

After graduation, I spent the next 23 years building staffing departments, creating college recruitment programs, introducing cost-per-hire metrics and new recruitment technologies, and eventually led the global staffing functions for both Kraft Foods and the Miller Brewing Company. I had worked on four continents and made it to the top of my chosen field and was fortunate to have won three SHRM/EMA Best in Class Awards for recruitment marketing. Along with our ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, we set the foundation for what would become employer branding in the early to mid 1990s. My colleagues in human resources could never understand my devotion to staffing, which they described as rote and unimportant. From my perspective, there was nothing more important than building my specialized knowledge so I could one day write my book. I was on a mission.

In 2001, after consulting with my maternal coach in West Virginia, I decided it was time to leave the corporate world and concentrate on research and writing. She encouraged me to leverage my recruiting skills to start a business. I figured what the heck. If she can do it, so can I. My first two clients were Kraft and Miller Brewing, and we quickly added SC Johnson, JohnsonDiversey, Johnson Bank, General Mills, Fiskars, and Gerber Legendary Blades. Unfortunately, 9/11 interrupted our plans. This is when I became a certified professional career coach and opened my next business.

My insider’s knowledge as a recruiter proved invaluable to my work as a career coach. I could speak with authority from both sides of the desk. If the market went down, I began coaching. When the market went back up I began recruiting, and I was earning more money than I ever did while on the corporate side. If only I had the courage to follow my mother’s advice sooner. She had started several businesses with no education or related experience while I had a master’s degree and nearly three decades of related experience. With fewer advantages than I had, my mother was able to accomplish more, and still raise seven kids. She was truly amazing.

In the meantime, I was still chipping away at my first book, which finally made the bookstands in 2008. This was about the time my mother experienced several small strokes resulting in her short-term memory loss. She would never be able to read the book I wrote or know it became a best-seller.

Following my mother’s death, I began a speaking career, launched a talk radio program, and published a second book and series of learning resources. I also started a training company to distribute our products through government agencies and academic institutions so jobseekers can avoid the embarrassment of prolonged unemployment.

Our clients thank me, and I thank my mom every day. Happy Mother’s Day, Mrs. Jeanne Vassar Garton. I love you and hope this article pleases you more than a box of candy.

KC Carpenter, a healthcare recruiter and co-founder of K.A. Recruiting in Boston, says the still-in-beta Bullhorn Reach is “great. It’s a huge, huge time saver for us … What would take 10 times as long, we can do with one click.”

If automating postings to social networks and optimizing them for search engines was all the service did, “it would definitely be a site I would pay for,” he says. But Radar, the tool that tips you to the likelihood one of your connections may be starting an active job hunt, is something Carpenter sees a “great for business development.”

Like the updates LinkedIn sends out, Bullhorn Reach keeps tabs on important changes made to their profiles by your connections. You get notified when the algorithms decide that the changes and frequency are suggestive of someone preparing to job hunt.
“That’s the secret sauce,” jokes Bullhorn CEO and co-founder Art Pappas, who won’t disclose the artificial intelligence behind the analysis. However, the program does routinely and quickly what recruiters and sourcers do manually.

Like recruiters, the program looks at updates, their frequency, their nature, and takes into account their timing. It analyzes “aberrations in behavior,” Pappas says, and it gets “smarter” over time.

Kim Hollenshead, a recruiter with publicly-held IT firm VMWare, Bullhorn Reach gives her online presence more currency, because she can update jobs and content quickly, and the landing pages created by its SEO component, makes it all more visible.

Radar, though, gives her “real impact,” she says. “On my front page (the Bullhorn Reach dashboard), I see what things are happening. I can send them a note,” congratulating her contacts on promotions or job changes.

It’s a way, she adds, “to check-in to see what they are doing.”

Reach’s core tools will be familiar to any recruiter who’s used Jobvite, Jobmagic, or one of the higher-end talent acquisition systems.

There’s one-click posting of jobs and content to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There’s an SEO component that creates landing pages, and a basic keyword match to give you a list of network connections who might be a fit for each job. Some limited editorial is available in a library, compiled by bots that seem set to focus on articles about recruiting and staffing. Reposting can be automated, to keep jobs from getting lost in the tweet stream.

“The core of what we are doing is to make sense of social media for recruiters.” For Bullhorn’s market — staffing agencies and 3rd party recruiters — time is money in a very literal sense. Recruiters have limited time to participate in the conversations that are the hallmarks of social media, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to, Pappas says.

“How do I get in the conversation?” is as much a concern for agency recruiters as it is for corporate recruiters, Pappas notes, adding one of the primary design objectives was to make it “zero training.”

No question about that. Bullhorn Reach is about as easy to use as any tool out there. The larger your network, the more efficient it can make you.

Since it is in beta, not everything is yet in place. The Facebook connection is still being finessed. And the article library is available only to 3rd party recruiters. Pappas says the algorithms are also being tweaked and the feature set will be enhanced, based on the feedback the company is getting from users.

photo: Deputado Bruno Covas

As a recruiter (whether retained, contingent, corporate, executive search, or independent), there is “No Acceptable Excuse” for not following up or following through with a candidate.

By failing to do so, your actions are contributing to the further erosion of the reputation of our profession and are fueling the negative perceptions presently associated with recruiters.

Would you ever not follow up with your client or employer? Hell no! After all, the client is generally the proverbial “pot of gold” derived from a successful placement. Would you not give them a status report? What if the client is the hiring manager/decision-maker who expects you to find the right candidate, and you fail to follow up to inquire about their acceptance of a candidate that you presented? What if the client is actually your employer and your future is contingent upon your performance in your role as a recruiter? If you answered NO to any of these questions, why then would it ever be permissible to not follow up with your candidate?

I’ve read numerous articles about lack of follow up by recruiters and have listened to hours of disgruntled deliberation from job seekers and candidates alike who have encountered the likes of those recruiters who practice this irresponsible behavior. I’ve also responded to numerous communications and correspondence with candidates who are asking me why these behaviors are condoned in the industry.

I therefore ask myself why they can’t have the same expectation of follow up that anyone would require from their doctor. Let’s take a look at this process for a second.

It’s Like Physician Follow Up

Being pre-screened, participating in an initial qualifying interview by a recruiter, and/or waiting to hear if you have been accepted for a position can be equated to going into your doctor for an annual physical or check up. S/he conducts a series of Q&A (fact finding), inquires about your history (experience) and overall health (qualifications), conducts some preliminary tests (personality and skill assessments), diagnoses your symptoms (evaluates), sends off the tests for review and analysis (decision maker review), and schedules a follow up appointment if necessary (second interview).

While you are in the office the doctor indicates that s/he has performed specific tests as s/he believes it will help to further explore/rule out potential concerns (qualifying criteria). Your doctor says that s/he will be back to you in about two days to advise you of the test results (client or decision maker ruling).

You’re nervous — consumed with the desire to know the outcome of the test (first interview). You wait desperately to hear if you will need to come back to the doctor’s office for a follow up visit (second interview)! You’re anxiously awaiting the results as promised from your doctor or his/her office. Days and days go by without any communication so you leave several follow up calls and messages. Yet it appears that your doctor’s priorities are not aligned with your personal need for answers or closure. This is your health (career/ future), after all. Don’t you deserve to know the outcome of your efforts from the professional that you selected to deal with?

I like to call this torture “TLS,” or The Limbo Status. Put yourselves in your candidates’ shoes. How would this make you feel? Probably stressed enough to go see your doctor!

When someone applies for a home loan, a new car, a credit card, or countless other scenarios, these organizations and their representatives are expected to follow up with the applicant to advise them if they were approved or failed to qualify. Why then do some recruiters feel they are absolved from this critical and essential responsibility?

In Their Shoes

Don’t believe for a moment that the candidates are not taking note and know which recruiters fall into this category. They know who you are based on their experience working with you! And trust me: they talk amongst themselves just like recruiters do.

Someone once wrote to me asking if there was such thing as a blacklist for candidates. The case presented was a candidate who failed to accept a position that recruiter “A” represented them on and ended up taking a different opportunity from recruiter “B.” Recruiter “A” threatened the candidate, indicating to the candidate that they were placing them on the blacklist! Threatening that no other recruiter would ever represent them going forward because they were on “The LIST!” You’re kidding me, right? Do some recruiters actually use these tactics on their candidates? Has our profession really fallen to this level?

Here’s the danger: The same could hold true for candidates. They could easily (and some already have!) start a blacklist of recruiters who fail to provide common courtesy in the execution of their profession. How many future referrals would be received, how long would a recruiter stay in their role or be in business without respect from the candidate community?

An industry colleague of mine and renowned author of The Savage Truth, Greg Savage, recently coined the following phrase in an article he wrote: “Recruitment — it’s not speed-dating.”

Greg is correct. Candidates do not want to participate in a quick data mining process or sourcing tactic merely to enable achievement of uploading their information for use at a later time. Candidates want to work with recruiters who:

• Have the time to establish a long-term relationship,
• Fully understand their skills,
• Have actual open reqs that may match their skills set, and
• Will follow up with them accordingly.

Candidates expect honesty, integrity, and ethical behavior from those whom they elect to represent them on their job search. Recruiters should not enter into a relationship with candidates under false pretenses. If you don’t have a legitimate opportunity or the candidates skills are not a match, tell them. At minimum, send an email, pick up the phone, or a toss a carrier pigeon into flight with a post-it note strapped to its leg. Something, anything that even remotely resembles following up!

We’re Not All The Same

Let me be very clear that this is not about all recruiters. It represents a small percentage of shingle-hanging “self-appointed recruiters” who, now that their sign is hung and they’ve secured free business cards (ordered from Vistaprint), proclaim to the world, “Hey look at me. I’m a recruiter.”

In my humble opinion, I find that a healthy percentage of these recruiters fall into a few categories. The first are former recruiters who may have only dabbled in or were new to the industry but were downsized and decided to go into business for themselves. The second set of recruiters, for whom I still hold out a good deal of hope, may simply have never been properly taught, coached, or mentored in the critical skills required to be an effective and professional recruiter. Or perhaps they were trained, but have just failed to continue applying those learned skills in their present capacity as an independent. The final and newest group I’m uncovering are those shingle-hangers who aren’t even from the industry, who may have seen an ad on the Internet or a social networking site suggesting that recruiting was an easy fun and a quick money maker. These are the most damaging of all in this performance-critical industry.

Recruiters I’m referring to need to accept the responsibility and take ownership of their profession and the service offering they provide to the candidate community. If they are not willing to do so, perhaps they should consider finding a new career opportunity — one in which they will not be held accountable, one where they will not have any responsibility to build, foster, or maintain relationships, or be required to have those difficult follow-up discussions with their candidates. A new career where they will no longer serve as a detriment to the profession! Perhaps a submarine screen door manufacturer.

The time for this practice to stop is now, the time to start making a difference is NOW!

There are countless unemployed Americans today who are reliant upon your professional expertise, assistance with, and representation for a limited number of available jobs.

Many of these displaced, downsized Americans have not had to actively pursue a new career for a decade or longer. They are no longer well versed in the technology available, have not architected a technically savvy resume, and do not have a clue on where to start in this highly competitive landscape. Candidates should not have the added burden of enduring the lack of professional courtesy from those who are in the profession of helping others find work. They have enough on their mind with trying to secure gainful employment in their field so that they can keep their home and provide for their families.

Change your behavior, change your attitude, and send a resounding message to the candidate community that you are one of the elite recruiting professionals who have taken ownership and responsibility in your trade. Follow up persistently and consistently, and with the belief that for this single moment, you are equally as important as the family physician. Here’s to your health, and to that of the recruiting industry.

Internal functions don’t have to do any of these things. They are entrenched in almost all organizations, and because their function is perceived as incidental to overall organizational performance or success, not much in the way of efficiency is really expected or, unfortunately, rewarded. This means that few recruiting leaders have any incentive to improve their function. In fact, doing so may mean a smaller budget, less headcount, and even less status.

So this leads to the headline question: Do we need an internal function at all? Does it do something that an external provider cannot do? Can it do it at least as cheap or as fast? Can it provide a higher-caliber candidate?

Some thoughts:

1. Internal recruiters who are employees should have one major advantage over any external provider. That is a deep knowledge of the corporate culture and what success criteria are, and also what individual managers are looking for in candidates. The deeper and more scientific this knowledge is, the more it can be repeated, refined, and taught to others. A really outstanding internal function would nurture and develop a core of highly knowledgeable and trained recruiters who would have this knowledge. HP, in the old days, and IBM today, have this kind of built-in DNA that is very hard to replicate. External functions will always have difficulty achieving this level of intimacy with their clients, even when co-located, primarily because their employees have less motivation to invest in gathering this information and may be interchanged frequently. This is one area where length of service and commitment to the culture can pay dividends.
2. To remain competitive with outside providers, an internal function has to be as efficient as or more efficient than an outside provider. This means constantly improving operational excellence, adding appropriate technology, providing detailed market information and coaching to hiring managers, and building a reputation for adding real value through the quality of talent it provides. I have never seen this in any client or organization I have worked in, and I think this is the area of greatest potential return. Internal functions are never very efficient, primarily because leadership is transitory: I am not sure of the average tenure of a recruiting leader, but I would guess it is less than three years. This means there is little to no continuity of planning, no oversight of process improvements, and little opportunity to choose, install, learn and refine technology. Most organizations I have worked with change processes, procedures, and technology with each leader who arrives. Plans that have taken months to create are thrown away overnight. Recruiters know that they can do what they want, for the most part, because there will be no accountability or continuity. This is the area where an external provider, with a profit motive and an efficiency goal, can beat an internal function hands down.
3. Recruiters also need to be retained, trained, and incentivized to perform. External agencies can offer commissions, bonuses, and other rewards for outstanding performance. They can fire inefficient or incapable recruiters quickly. Internal functions are usually tied to traditional reward structures that do not provide the shorter term, efficiency-based rewards that would be more effective. A recruiter can barely perform at all and survive (and even thrive) by courting a few hiring managers or by being a good bureaucrat. And employment laws and internal practices limit when and how a recruiter can be fired, and the process is lengthy. Again, it is essential that internal recruiters be selected carefully based in skills and motivation and offered whatever incentives are available to encourage short and long term performance as well as retention.
4. The emerging prominence of social media should offer internal functions hope. Social media inherently dependent on intimate knowledge about the firm, candid communication, and the ability to take advantage of the networks of current employees. All of these give internal functions an edge.

Yet I am not convinced that this will make much difference. The RPOs and agencies are rapidly adopting social media and are even offering to manage the talent communities of individual firms. Many medium or small firms are not even looking at social media as a recruiting channel, and larger firms have widely divergent opinions and practices.

Effective social media use requires time and dedicated people who can interact with candidates, generate content, provide advice, and screen candidates for individual jobs. These are all strengths that internal recruiters have if they are given the time and charter to do so. Unfortunately again, corporate policy, management’s inability to see the benefits of social media, the fear of litigation, and lack of staff depth usually means this does not happen.

Given the state of recruiting functions today there are few compelling factors to recommend retaining an internal function. I have outlined where they could gain advantage, and a handful are doing these things, but by and large they offer little that would make them indispensible. By negotiating tough performance-based outsourcing agreements and allowing outside recruiters access to hiring managers, firms could eliminate the administrative and benefits costs of retaining employee-recruiters and the function could be reduced to a few liaison folks and vendor managers.

Simon Cowell and Donald Trump would be impressed: Sunglass Hut used viral blogs, video, social media, and more in a three-month-long public contest that this week will result in “hiring” a blogger to work as an independent contractor for a year, making $100,000, with a furnished apartment at the W hotel (pictured) in New York, $1,000 monthly styling allowance, and VIP passes to fashion shows in Milan, Paris, and New York.

“It’s the American Idol for fashion bloggers,” says the headhunter/recruiting consultant Angee Linsey, whose firm did extensive work on the project. “For fashion bloggers, giving one of them the opportunity to actually get paid a lot of money for unprecedented access into the fashion industry, this is their big break. A young woman who has a passion for fashion, blogging about it for Sunglass Hut for a year — who know where it will take them. She’s going to be in the big leagues.”

On the website where much of this went on, there were 165,275 visitors last month, viewing 425,719 pages.

Sunglass Hut decided to do this around August. The internal recruiting department was apparently not involved; instead the project was led by the Sunglass Hut marketing department, though unlike Linsey, the marketing department has been elusive as I did research for this article. Likely, Sunglass Hut sees this effort as a marketing, not recruiting one, which is true. But, interestingly, when the company prepared to launch the blog contest last year, and it realized it ought to hire an outside firm for help, it turned to a recruiting company. Linsey’s search firm, which is based in Seattle and had done something similar before for the Jackson Family Wine company, was brought on board to handle the selection activities. Green Light Global, out of Marin County, near San Francisco, handled the IT work.

Linsey’s role was to create a candidate selection process, and implement it. On October 1, the application process, announced at a September 10 press conference during New York Fashion Week, began. The initial pool of candidates were asked to make a 1-minute video about why they’d be the best person to be the “ultimate blogger.”

The launch got substantial publicity in the fashion world (a “frenzy,” said one blogger). There was a YouTube video that was embedded in various blogs; Facebook updates; mentions on sites like InStyle, and more.

There were 611 applicants and 350 qualified videos — if you sent in a 20-minute long porno, that’s not considered qualified. There were about 192,361 views of the applicant videos.

Linsey screened the videos to see who was most qualified. Her team narrowed that list of 350 down to about 100 best, and phone-screened those 100 candidates. It also narrowed down the pool using online research on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other searches to see what candidates’ online presence was. This was a blogging gig they were aiming for, so if someone had some good blog posts or similar posts out there, that’d help their cause. The bulk of the applicants were women in their twenties.

After the phone screen and the social media evaluation, Linsey presented 50 people to the Sunglass Hut team, providing Sunglass Hut a profile of all 50 on November 17 at the Sunglass Headquarters near Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, while the above was going on, the public voted on its favorite of the 350. Whoever won was guaranteed a spot in the top 10. (That ended up being Kimmy.) Sunglass Hut also offered people $20 coupons during the voting process, and gave people the chance to opt-in to Sunglass Hut promotions; about 11,288 did so, or about a tenth of voters.

Anyhow, at that November 17 meeting, Linsey and Sunglass Hut whittled down the list of 50 candidates to 10.

Being in the top 10 — not just winning — was a big deal, Linsey says. Finalists got calls right after this November 17 meeting letting them know that for the month of December they’d blog at least once a day on topics like fashion, food, music, and more.

Finalists themselves brought more attention to the contest. “Hey Mom, I made it,” one wrote on a blog. ”I received an e-mail from the recruiter an hour after I submitted my application and uploaded my video requesting to interview me via phone  … She called with the good news three weeks later — I was trying desperately hard not to jump off the walls with excitement … ”

During December, finalists had five blog assignments they had to do — like being posed a question about fashion such as “what influence does New York have in the fashion world?” — but could also blog about whatever they wanted. Some posted once a day, others more. There were 549 blog entries in 30 days.

Linsey says, via an email to me about the contestants, that “Of our 165k visits they are responsible for 122,001 of them. They are also responsible for 62,979 interactions on the site, broken down as follows: 2,593 Tweets; 20,374 FB Likes; 33,090 Votes/Ratings; 6,922 comments.”

She got those stats from MegaPlayer, the social media firm handling the blog-off phase of the project.

The top 10 were also flown to New York where each made webisodes and was interviewed by a panel of celebrity judges. The candidates left with personalized suitcases and 10 pairs of designer sunglasses each. And, “yes, they gave me an iPad,” one says. And a flip camera. And a $250 Amex gift card.

This week, probably Tuesday, the winner will be selected. The job was going to start next month, but the date may be moved up; the thought now is to have the winner keep on blogging without delay — about their move to New York, for example — so that the strong momentum built up thus far does not slow.

Among those on the podcast:

• Amit Pal Singh, the operations director at Labor Finders, a large staffing firm with about 200,000 customers
• Erin Peterson, the former VP of global talent acquisition at Hewitt, now leader of the RPO business at Aon Hewitt
• Indrajit Sen (from India), a recruiting/HR leader at Aricent and past ERE Recruiting Excellence Award recipient
• Carrie Corbin, a talent-attraction strategist at AT&T
• Jenifer Lambert, a big-biller recruiter and founder of Talentum