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Recruiting campaigns can be broken into two types: individual recruiting and group targeting.

A less-known alternative, the group targeting approach focuses on attracting a specific group of individuals who share something in common (i.e., Hispanic software engineers or fabric patent holders). Group targeting is common in political campaigns and product advertising but is rarely used effectively in corporate recruiting.

Convert Teachers Into Corporate Employees

There are several large groups of employed persons who are routinely interested in a major career change, including nurses, soldiers, and yes, teachers. However, there is no more highly qualified group of potential employees to recruit than teachers.

Before you howl about the social impact of “raiding schools” and hiring away all the teachers, remember that you can opt to limit your recruiting to retiring baby boomers, those recently laid-off, or teachers who have determined they no longer wish to teach.

There are no “hands off” groups in recruiting. It is a recruiter’s job to target everyone who is interested, qualified, and available. Yet corporate recruiters have avoided targeting teachers, which is perhaps the largest group of potential recruits simply ignored.

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One of the few certainties in life is that companies inevitably go through cycles of growth and downturns. Most business professionals understand these cycles and thus prepare for them. It’s hard to find a CFO, an investor, or these days a real estate agent who doesn’t plan ahead for these cycles.

Unfortunately, few individuals in HR can be considered as well-prepared for these cycles. For some reason, HR professionals tend to be optimists who instead constantly talk about the need to be prepared for the upturns.

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The Business Week cover story, “The Future of Work,” for their August 20 edition is must reading for all recruiting and HR leaders. The basic theme of the series of articles focuses on the impact of technology, globalization, demographics, and the relationship between employees and their employers over the next five to 15 years.

Here are the 10 ideas that stood out for me after reading the 22 articles and filtering them through my own perspective:

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Most of us have read about upcoming workforce trends like decreasing employee loyalty, differing generational expectations, and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation, but surprisingly few organizational leaders are fully aware of how those issues will impact them.

Several of the organizations I have worked with in recent years have discovered aspects of their business that could lose more than 70% of their workforce in the next three years alone.

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In Part 1 of this article, I outlined the first six of 13 key factors that differentiate great workforce planning efforts from mediocre workforce planning efforts. Here are the remaining seven points to note.

Factor #7

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Editor’s note: Part two of this article will run tomorrow.

Few would argue that workforce planning is not a hot topic these days. Just five short years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a titled role for workforce planning in corporate America. Yet today, more than 54% of the Fortune 100 have dedicated FTEs to the activity.

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Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, and IBM have had a relatively easy time recruiting top talent over the years. They have had candidates eagerly seeking them out, even in times when the economy was booming and other firms were struggling to fill key positions.

Some would say this was because of their reputation as great companies to work for or because of their good career potential and solid benefits.

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A few months ago I made the case in an ERE article (Hiring the Best is a Team Sport) that corporate recruiting departments should not be organized to compete with third-party recruiters.

Aside from performance-based compensation, there are a few obvious reasons supporting this philosophy:

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The convergence of several factors has likely led to the steady rise in the number of articles, conferences, and consulting calls focused on workforce or talent planning.

There have been more venture-funded start-ups this year than any time since 2001, initial public offering activity is up, and the demand for new college graduates increased by 13% this year (according to U.S. News.com) while these graduates’ interest in corporate jobs declined.

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Perhaps you have had a conversation similar to this:

“Hello, Robyn? It’s Michelle from recruiting. Do we need to revise the staffing forecast for your group, given that it’s August and we’ve already filled more than the 350 positions forecasted for the year?”

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If you want to hire top quality candidates in the shortest period of time at a reasonable cost, you’ll need to organize your team to meet the ever more challenging recruiting demands of your company.

In my opinion, most corporate recruiting departments have been created using the Lone Ranger model. Hiring third-party recruiters and allowing them to play using their own rules is a losing proposition. It’s inefficient, results are unpredictable, and doing this leaves your recruiting efforts at risk if one of your starters leaves. If you want to scale “best practices and best processes,” you have to start with a well-organized team of specialists doing the right things every time.

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In the last few weeks I’ve been contacted by a number of people looking to hire recruiters, and apparently having little luck. I’m also seeing big increases in bonuses offered for employee referrals, and signs of frustration (and desperation) among HR professionals in charge of recruitment. Some of my friends who run search firms are turning away business. If any further proof was needed that for recruiters happy days are here again, then look no further than the ERE conference this past spring. That was the most well-attended one that I can remember and for once no one handed me a resume or described their current situation as being “in transition.” Let the good times roll.

There’s something familiar about this. We have been here before. The late ’90s and all the way up until 2001 was a virtually identical period. Then as now, unemployment was low and recruiters were as popular as Paris Hilton’s video (though for entirely different reasons). But having experienced all this before, are we any smarter now in how we approach recruiting and talent acquisition?

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article by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

The human resources profession is one often perceived by those outside the function as a bureaucratic, compliance-driven, administrative function that is reactive versus proactive and that changes at the speed of a rock. In most organizations, that perception is one well-earned, since most HR processes and policies are developed in response to a significant event and are intended to limit certain behaviors instead of enabling others. HR has become the function known for saying “you can’t do that” as opposed to function known for saying “this is how we can accomplish that.”

However, a few leading organizations are breaking with tradition ó at least when it comes to talent management ó establishing new functional structures that account for current labor market realities, and adding new proactive activities to the stable of HR services. A growing number of organizations are leveraging the visibility currently being placed on the impending talent shortage/crisis by corporate leaders and growing the scope of talent management activities to include formalized processes, programs, and departments focusing on proactive management of the employment brand, retention, and workforce planning.

These groundbreaking organizations are tearing down massive walls that years of political infighting have created between HR functions in order to develop entirely new HR structures where all deliverables are integrated to “strategically” manage the portfolio of talent that the organization can use to call upon to achieve both short- and long-term objectives. No longer does the training and development function devise and offer training programs for skill sets that can more readily be acquired through recruitment at a lower cost. No longer do key employees leave the organization because a bad manager kept them from advancing or learning. No longer do offers made to top candidates get rejected because compensation cannot adequately assess the market value of talent. Sounds too good to be true? It isn’t, but getting there isn’t easy; lots of archaic thinking gets in the way!

Driving Change: Three New Roles Defined While breaking down the barriers between the existing HR functions that impact talent management is in itself a profound success, leading organizations are also formalizing a number of proactive activities that add true strategic power to talent management. By creating a formal workforce planning role, organizations are empowering staffing departments, training departments, and operations departments to take the guesswork out of how it will happen, and they are managing using robust forecasts that scientifically demonstrate the correlation between workforce utilization/composition and organizational capability and capacity. To further support strategic talent management, workforce planning is coming online with two other proactive roles. Employment branding is becoming more mainstream as organizations recognize the need to make themselves more visible and attractive to top talent, and to motivate existing employees. Retention efforts are formalizing not just to stave off the need for hard-to-find replacement talent, but also to support knowledge management and knowledge transfer between several generations of talent. Each of these new roles is outlined here:

Vice President/Director/Manager of Workforce Planning

This role will be responsible for developing systems that ensure that the organization has an adequate supply of talent to support planned business objectives in both existing and new markets. (Note the emphasis here is not to run statistics and create reports, but rather to ensure an adequate supply of talent.) Specific responsibilities for this role include:

• Overseeing the creation and management of all strategic HR goals, management practices, organizational policies, and talent management systems to ensure the organization has the capability and capacity to secure an adequate workforce when needed.

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Let’s play “Recruiting Monopoly.” As you’ll see, there are a number of critical stages in this game that correspond to the recruiting and hiring processes at most companies. You’ll start the game with $500 from the bank. If your hiring processes are really good, you’ll be able to win more than $3,000 (an ROI of 600 percent!). But if your hiring processes aren’t too good, you could go bankrupt before the first person gets hired — and go directly to jail. You’ll have to play the game a second time in order to hire another great person. This could get costly if your hiring processes are consistently a losing proposition. Let’s get started and see how well you do. Remember, you’ve got $500 at the start of the game.

Step 1: The Use of a Workforce Plan

A workforce plan is an annual forecast of hiring needs by position, by quarter. A plan like this gives you a three-to-six-month lead time on using all available sourcing channels to find top people. You earn $200 if you have a workforce plan in place and lose $100 if you don’t have one. Give yourself another $200 if you update this forecast quarterly. Forecast-to-forecast changes provide instant information about what’s going on in your business and what’s going to happen.

Step 2: The Quality of Your Job Requisitions

If you use traditional job descriptions that rely too heavily on skills, academics, and experiences, you lose $50. If you can’t obtain consensus from everyone on the hiring team as to real job needs before you start interviewing candidates, you lose another $50. If you suffer moving-job-spec syndrome, you lose another $50. If managers say they’ll know the person when they see him or her, you lose another $50. If recruiters can’t get enough time with the hiring manager to discuss the job, you lose another $50. You earn $250 if everyone on the hiring team is in agreement about the responsibilities and challenges involved in the job before they interview anyone. Getting consensus upfront is how you obtain consensus at the end. An article on performance profiles might help in this area.

Step 3a: Sourcing and Finding Top Active Candidates

If you’re an employer of choice with great candidates coming to your door without you doing any work, you don’t even need to play this game. For everyone else, if your jobs are easy to find using a Google or Yahoo! search — and don’t require candidates to go to a job board or directly to your website — you earn $100. Give yourself $50 if top candidates can very simply find your jobs at the top of the list just by putting in the city and job title. You earn $50 if your jobs have unique titles combined with compelling copy. You lose $100 if you do not have any of the above. You lose $50 if the first line on the job description is the requisition number. You lose another $50 if the ad copy emphasizes skills and experiences rather than opportunities.

Step 3b: Sourcing and Finding Top Passive and Diversity Candidates

Give yourself $100 if you have the ability to generate the names of top passive and diversity candidates through sources like Internet data-mining, competitive intelligence, or online networking tools such as ZoomInfo and LinkedIn. You lose $200 if you don’t do this step or if you can’t convert these names into a steady stream of great candidates. You win $100 if you can convince most of the people you network with to give you more names of highly qualified referrals. You earn another $100 if you spend more time calling these referrals and getting more referrals than you do working the original cold list of names. An article on networking might be useful.

Step 3c: The Use of Employee Referral Programs to Find Top Candidates

You earn $100 for having a professional and well-marketed employee referral program that consistently delivers strong candidates. Using Jobster qualifies here if everyone on your team uses it regularly. You earn $100 if recruiters personally and proactively solicit the names of top people from your top employees. You lose $200 if you don’t have a well-managed employee referral program in place that generates at least 20 percent of all new hires.

Sourcing Bonus!

Collect $500 if you have a consistent supply of top people for every important position.

Step 4: An Effective Interview and Assessment Process

You lose $100 if every interviewer interviews their own way. You lose $100 if you string a bunch of 30-minute interviews together. You lose $100 if your managers make instant decisions based on first impressions or gut feelings. You lose $100 if one superficial “no” vote can override the collective judgment of two or three other interviewers. You win $100 if all managers use a structured interview of some type and if they are trained and certified. You win $100 if there is some formal written assessment process in place that prevents superficial assessments. You win another $100 if this assessment is used in combination with a formal debriefing session with all interviewers before anyone makes a “yes” or “no” decision. You win $100 if top people come out of the interviewing process and feel they have been thoroughly evaluated. You win another $100 if these same candidates understand the job and specific challenges associated with the job.

Go Directly to Jail! Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.

You lose half of the winnings you’ve accumulated thus far if you have to do searches over again more than 50 percent of the time. If good candidates get rejected for the wrong reasons and you need to find more candidates, you’re wasting your time. One slate of three to four candidates should suffice for any search. Some of the problems here include lack of consensus on real job needs as well as weak interviewing skills. If you have no winnings, stay in jail.

Step 5: Recruit, Negotiate, and Close

You lose $50 if you focus too much on compensation and not enough on the reach of the job and career growth. You lose $50 if more than 50 percent of candidates say “I have to think about it” when you extend an offer. You lose another $50 if you don’t know why you lost the previous $50. You lose $50 if you ask candidates if they’d relocate on the first call. You lose $100 if more than 30 percent of good candidates exclude themselves from consideration at anytime before the offer stage. You lose $50 if you can’t convince candidates they should take the job with just a modest salary increase. You earn $100 if 80 percent of the best candidates you want to attract are willing to stay involved through the whole assessment process. You earn $100 if you close 80 percent of your best candidates who have multiple opportunities with fair offers. An article on negotiating compensation will help here.

Step 6: Post-Offer Challenges

You lose $100 if more than 25 percent of your candidates who have accepted offers either don’t show up, accept counter-offers, or accept offers from other companies. You earn $100 if this happens less than 10 percent of the time. You earn $100 if you have a pre-boarding process in place during the period when the candidate accepts the offer, but before starting. This includes one or two formal meetings or discussions with the hiring manager.

Step 7: Onboarding

You earn $100 if you have an effective on-boarding process in place and lose $100 if you don’t. An effective on-boarding process includes training as necessary, a formal process to ensure that candidates have a clear understanding of job expectations before they start doing the job, and the preparation of some type of development program to ensure on-the-job success.

Step 8: Management and Development

You earn $200 if you have mostly good hires in combination with good managers and a formal staff development program. You lose $200 if managers aren’t as involved as they need to be in ensuring the success of their newly hired team members. Weak management is the primary cause of good hires gone bad.

Step 9: Talent Performance

You lose $500 if too many top people leave too soon for dumb reasons like weak management, inadequate resources, or the work not being consistent with candidates were told it would be. In this case, everything you’ve done has been a pure waste of time. You win $1,000 if most top people perform as predicted during the interview (that is, extremely well), if they are highly motivated, if they work well with others, if they have the potential to grow, and if they attract other top people. After all, this is the whole point of the game.

How Well Did You Do in Recruiting Monopoly?

What’s the ROI of your hiring process — your total winnings divided by the initial $500 as a percent? A properly functioning recruiting and hiring process should have an ROI of at least 100 percent. You’re really in trouble if you went bankrupt. In this case: Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. But who cares? After all, it’s just a game…

I love December for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s a great month for recruiters to do some really important things. For example, it is an excellent time to renew and solidify relationships with hiring managers. It is also a great opportunity to reach out to the candidates you have your sights on in the coming year by making a call to wish them a good holiday season (please don’t do it by e-mail; recruiting is about relationships and relationships are personal). It is also a good time to:

• Take stock of what you have accomplished

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Car manufacturers get daily, even hourly, updates on car sales from dealerships all over the country. This data gets fed into sophisticated supply chain systems that then predict how many cars need to be produced based on sales levels and the popularity of an individual model. This is then translated into component parts, and orders are generated to suppliers. Shipping information is sent to FedEx, UPS, and trucking companies, and accurate data is made available to customers about when products will be available. In fact, these systems are so good that it is a rare day when a product is not on the shelf when you want it, in the color and model you want.

But to get to this point, manufacturers have spent over 50 years developing the systems and approaches that makes this complex system possible. Every formal process you have heard of — from just-in-time manufacturing to Six Sigma — has its origin in trying to achieve the goal of efficiently and cheaply making products available you when and where you want them. This whole system is generally called “supply chain management,” and manufacturing firms have almost perfected today’s supply chains. Suppliers and users have established flexible, just-in-time supply arrangements for all kinds of products. Manufacturers can provide enough lead time to suppliers to ensure that only in the rarest of circumstances (hurricanes, earthquakes, and war) will there be any major disruption in production due to the lack of parts or raw materials. Manufacturers have honed their ability to accurately predict the need for parts, and suppliers have put in place rapid and highly flexible tools and processes to make whatever is needed.

The 21st century will see these same processes applied, albeit with many differences, to the supply of skills and talent. Talent is the new scarce raw material, and organizations are just now beginning to elevate the idea of predicting talent needs and ensuring a talent supply to a more central place in their thinking. IBM, Johnson & Johnson, and a few others firms are well along in putting into place the elements of a labor-based supply chain mindset. A recent article in Harvard Business School Weekly is worth a read to see how IBM is approaching this. Any talent supply chain has to deal with several dynamic forces simultaneously. These include the business cycle, changing organizational structure, evolving corporate strategy, technology dynamics, and regulatory changes. It will take more than just the recruiting function or even human resources to create the systems needed for labor-based supply chain management, but recruiters do have a major role to play. In the end, technology, finance, HR, recruiting, training and development and workforce planning will all need to work together to develop these processes. In this article I will lay the foundation and discuss the basic elements of a labor-based supply chain. In next week’s article, I will talk about some specific things you can do to get started. IBM has perhaps devoted the most public time to talking about this, and they have created an approach that works. This approach forms the basis of what I talk about below. They have been developing a labor management system that takes many of its practices from their success in manufacturing. By correlating success to skills and other selection criteria, constant improvements can be made in productivity and customer satisfaction.

Developing a Skills Taxonomy

A labor-based supply chain starts with developing a list of the skills required to meet your customer’s needs. Academics call these lists “taxonomies.” A skills taxonomy clearly defines what knowledge, abilities, and skills employees need to have. These, in turn, make it easier to assess candidates and current employees to see where there are strategic gaps. Technology can be harnessed to warn you when skills are missing or when, through attrition or retirement, specific skills are going below predetermined levels. For example, suppose that your corporate strategy is to supply financial consulting services to a specific industry. The first step would be to determine which skills are needed to perform that service and which are industry specific.

Once this has been completed, you can take stake stock of your current workforce to see which skills they have and which are missing or in short supply. Any skills that are lacking can be recruited from outside or developed internally, hopefully ahead of a crisis, which often leads to hasty hiring or incomplete development. But without any definition of needs, no assessment at all can be made. This often leads to poor decisions, inefficient practices, or employees being asked to do things they are not really qualified to do or to. Very few organizations have skills taxonomies, and even if they do, they are probably not dynamic or up-to-date — or even used at all. A really useful taxonomy is constantly being updated, correlated with success, and evolving as strategy and competition change. By identifying these skill needs, you can also emphasize to workers where they should spend time in development or where to focus development budgets. As your strategic planners look at opportunities, this taxonomy and skills survey can give them the information they need about how realistic or in what timeframe your organization could compete effectively in those area.

Measuring Success and Tracking Progress

The second step in this process of developing a labor-based supply chain is to put in place measures of employee productivity, performance, and quality. This means that standards have to be developed and measured against on a frequent basis. For service delivery people, the standards may be time, speed, or quality and will probably be a mix of all of these. IBM measures its consultants against all of these, as well as against customer satisfaction. By employing the right technology that tracks these on a regular basis, managers can get early alerts when performance falls below predetermined levels. Performance can be matched against the skills and abilities identified in the taxonomy, and the taxonomies can be updated if a skills are found not to correlate well with success.

For example, two consultants working on similar projects (perhaps even for the same client) may have different levels of productivity and customer satisfaction. By measuring and tracking these differences, and by matching the consultant’s skills to their performance, changes can be made in selection and development criteria. What is emerging is a more quantitative performance management process, based on specifics such as productivity and quality rather than on whether a manager likes you. As talent becomes harder to find and keep, productivity will become a key measure of employee value, as will other quantitative measures. I will address more about how to put something like this is place next week.

Integrating Technology

The third step is to integrate technology into this process wherever possible. Technology can be used to help attract candidates and to take them through the process of screening and assessing capabilities and skills. It can be used to track and measure success, to keep skills inventories, and to use those inventories for screening and matching. Technology can keep employee portfolios and make them available to hiring managers when they are looking for people with particular skills or abilities, and it can correlate skills to success. If technology is not deeply integrated into the human resources function, no significant productivity improvements are likely to be made. There are too many variables and too much information to be examined and related for a human to cope with. A labor-based supply chain is as much a change of mindset as it is an implementation of process and technology. It is about making a statement that human beings and their outputs can be measured and improved, at least to a greater level than we have ever done in the past. Next week I will discuss some specific steps you can take to being putting a version of labor-based supply chain thinking into your function.