HR/Staffing News

A big congratulations to this year’s recipients of the ERE Recruiting Excellence Awards. They’ll be in the good company of past winners such as Starbucks, Deloitte, and Enterprise.

You’ll hear about the winners in multiple venues, including upcoming articles on this website, as well as at this week’s conference in San Diego, this Fall’s conference in Hollywood Florida (October 26-27-28), and in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Best College Recruiting Program

EY

Best Corporate Careers Website

DaVita

Best Employee Referral Program

Aricent

Best Employer Brand

EY

Best Retention Program/Practices

PNC Bank

Most Strategic Use of Technology

KeyBank

Recruiting Department/Function of the Year

Sodexo

Here is the expanded slide deck from my SourceCon 2010 Keynote: Resume Sourcing and Matching – Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition. It contains all of the talking points as text so you are not left guessing as to what I spoke to during the live presentation.

You’ll learn about the intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes (it’s deceptively complex), what artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work, the limits of artificial intelligence, what people can do that semantic search applications cannot, the 5 levels of semantic search,  the 5 levels of talent mining, and what I think is the ideal candidate sourcing solution.

SourceCon 2010: Resume Sourcing and Matching: Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition View more presentations from Glen Cathey. Additionally, you can view the video from the SourceCon event here.

Every day, we are seeing more and more state laws introduced to curb the use of credit reports and in the case of a federal bill sponsored by U.S. Rep Steve Cohen (D. Tennessee), HR 3149 an attempt to ban them altogether from the hiring process.

The New York Times published a great article on how social networks are used by National Football League teams in order to perform background checks on players. In reality the prospect of using these sites to conduct employment background checks is no different than what an ordinary employer considers.

SourceCon is underway and in the spirit of this event dedicated to the art of finding a certain needle in a haystack loaded with other needles, I should probably not tell you who was named the 2010 Grandmaster Sourcer this morning.

Instead, follow these clues: United Kingdom, Sourceress, and laundry, cheese, Star Trek, Tea, and Tweetups.

If that doesn’t get you there, click here for her name. But you should know she followed far tougher clues to win her title. (Not to mention an all-expense paid trip to 2011 SourceCon, a year’s software from Broadlook Technologies, and a cool Cryptex, a lot like the one in The DaVinci Code.

If you want to try your hand at at least the first clue, go to SourceCon.Com. You’d have to be here to actually play, but see what you can do with the first.

So if you think SourceCon is all fun and games, it is. At least it is to almost 200 people here today in San Diego.

“All of us have this tenacity about us,” Geoff Webb was saying as he explained the game that begins many months before the SourceCon conference and culminated with this morning’s announcement. “This is fun stuff for us. It’s what we do.”

Oh yeah. There were also serious workshops. In the main session this morning Glen Cathey advocated for the supremacy of human over machine searching. Humans bring to a task an analytical capability that befuddles even the most sophisticated search programs.

That’s why Cathey, VP of national recruitment with KForce, believes that while keyword searches and ATSs have their place, recruiters need to be able to manually manage searches and, he said, use “NOT” a lot. He suggests starting with the broadest search search — the maximum — and filtering your way (with that NOT operator) down.

Outside the meeting rooms there are plenty of great conversations going on. In the time I’ve been writing this post, I’ve discovered a new trend: social media fatigue. That’s when you get overwhelmed by friending and connecting requests and the need to update your status or respond to another post, or …. What that portends for the future is the subject of an article one former recruiter and corporate leader is currently writing.

There’s also plenty of optimism about hiring, but it’s tinged with hesitancy about the near prospects for recruiting jobs themselves. “Who are you working for?” was a common greeting at lunchtime. Fortunately, it seems most people have an answer.

The recent headlines dealing with background checks demonstrate that to some extent, Americans are conflicted about the whole topic of background checks. The bottom-line is that background screening occurs at the intersection of competing and compelling societal interests.

Productivity change in the nonfarm business sector, 1947-2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re on LinkedIn – congratulations!

So, how big is your network?

Without going into a rant on quality vs. quantity (who says we can’t have BOTH?), let’s take a different angle on the size of your LinkedIn network…at your current company, where do you rank in terms of number of connections?

Do you know off the top of your head? Why not?

If you don’t know where you rank at your current company in terms of LinkedIn network connections, here’s how to find out:

How to Find Out Where You Rank In Your Current Company

Go to LinkedIn advanced search and enter in your company in the company field and select “current.”

Then, change the “sort by” from the default of “relevance” to “connections” and hit “search.”

Voila! Now you know where you stand in your company in terms of LinkedIn network size. When I perform that exercise, I can see I am currently the most connected person in my firm.

It’s actually kind of fun to check on other companies to see who the most connected person is:

For example – Deloitte. No surprise here.

Try it yourself – check out some companies, peers, and competitors and see who the top 10 most connected are. You’ll find it’s not alway who you would expect!

If someone claims to be a social recruiting “expert,” IMHO they had better be #1 in their company, or at the very least not behind anyone NOT in recruiting.

How Do YOU Rank?

So, I ask again – where do you rank in terms of number of connections with regard to other people in your organization?

Are you #1? If yes – nice work! It means you’ve taken an active role in building your LinkedIn network. Of course, it could also simply be that no one else in your organization leverages LinkedIn effectively.

If you’re NOT #1 in your company, why not, and who is?

Free LinkedIn Accounts vs. Premium LinkedIn Accounts

As a reader of my blog, I’m assuming you fit somewhere in the sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition space – and having a decent sized network on LinkedIn allows you to run searches taking full advantage of LinkedIn’s search interface instead of having to resort to the imprecise science of X-Ray searching LinkedIn to view results of people outside of your network.

I say imprecise science because when you attempt to target current titles and/or companies via an X-Ray search of LinkedIn, you’re not actually finding all of the available results. Trust me – you’re not.

Of course, if you have a premium account with LinkedIn or you have access to LinkedIn Recruiter or LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services,  you may be able to see more (even all) search results.

However, that still doesn’t answer the question as to why you don’t have the largest LinkedIn network of connections when compared to your peers in your current organization.

It’s Not a Contest

No – it’s not a contest to see who can build the biggest LinkedIn network, and there is no magic number of connections you need to have. 

However, LinkedIn isn’t Facebook – it’s primarily a professional networking site. You don’t have to be best friends with someone to include them in your network. In fact, many would argue that it’s beneficial to network with people on LinkedIn you don’t know personally because of the simple fact that it expands your network reach and view.

Is connecting with someone you don’t personally know really any different than going to a live, in-person networking event (or seminar, or conference, etc.) and receiving a list of the contact information of everyone who attended, whether you had a chance to mingle with them or not?

Is having the ability to easily reach out to and network with people you don’t know any less “social” than networking only with people you already know?

It could easily be argued that it’s anti-social to not connect with people you haven’t already met, spoken with, or exchanged online messages with.

Not connecting with someone unless you already “know” them just like having a rule that you won’t talk to someone over the phone unless you’ve already met them in person. Who is to judge what connection has to be made first (phone/in-person/email/LinkedIn)?

Final Thoughts

Do you have to be the most connected person in your company when it comes to LinkedIn? Of course not.

However, it’s a worthy excerise to examine why and how someone else in your company has a bigger network than you, especially if they aren’t in some kind of talent identification and acquisition role (doh!).

If you happen to benefit from an employer that affords you premium access to LinkedIn (e.g., LinkedIn Recruiter) – what happens if you leave your current employer and join a company that doesn’t have LinkedIn Recruiter?

For those who only have a free account on LinkedIn – having a large network can mean not having to run an X-Ray search 95% of the time, regardless of location or skillset searched for. Without a premium account, the question may ultimately be what percent of the LinkedIn database do you want to be able to “see” without having to resort to X-Ray searching?

Connecting with people on LinkedIn with relevant skills and experience (i.e., your target talent pool), whether you already ”know” them or not, has obvious benefits.

However, the benefits of connecting with people who don’t have relevant skills and experience (i.e., NOT your target talent pool) aren’t so obvious. In fact – some people would say it doesn’t make sense to connect with people who aren’t in your target talent pool.

Those people obviously don’t understand the nature of LinkedIn’s 3 degrees of separation – which works magic in many cases! Sometimes it takes connecting to the “wrong people” to get connected to the “right people.”

Contemplate.

The candidate looked good on paper, and he did a fine phone interview. But within one minute of the start of our face-to-face meeting, I knew he was not a good fit for my client. We have all been there. It’s impossible to know for sure if a candidate is right until you meet him in person. And whi...

“Job growth is about to begin,” The Conference Board declared Monday. In the second quarter, says Manpower. “We are already seeing evidence,” insists the Association of Executive Search Consultants.

Even coming upon the heels of a robust labor report last week (that fueled a Wall Street mini-rally) these pronouncements probably won’t do much for the pessimists, but for recruiters, consider the collective news a call to reveille.

The Manpower report in particular says the second quarter should see a “modest” increase in hiring, based on the company’s survey of 18,000 employers in the U.S. While 73 percent expect to keep staffing level, 16 percent expect to hire. Only 8 percent expect to cut. (The remaining 3 percent fall into the “don’t know” category.)

“We continue to see encouraging signs in hiring activity in the U.S.,” says Manpower Inc. Chairman and CEO Jeff Joerres.

If you read down in the release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you would have seen that temp jobs took a big jump in February. It’s a good sign. Employers may not be ready to commit, but at least they’re dating.

The leaders of two of the biggest staffing firms in the U.S., Tig Gilliam of Adecco, and Roy Krause, CEO of SFN Group (previously Spherion), expect to see 100,000 temp hires per month before much longer. Gilliam also says Adecco has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of its temps hired on full time.

Like the staffing industry, executive recruiters have seen improvement, though it has been more noticeable outside the U.S. As a whole, the industry took a 32.5 percent year-over-year revenue hit in 2009. But the 4th quarter brought revenue improvement and an increase in search activity.

Globally, Asia/Pacific, Central/South America, and Europe saw increases in executive search activity in the 4th quarter of 2009 versus the same quarter in 2008. Though the quarter was down over the 4th quarter of 2008 by .5 percent in North America (the U.S., represents the biggest share) there were 11.4 percent more searches started than in the third quarter of 2009.

Add these reports to the other reports and data coming in and there’s little doubt that the world economy is improving, with the U.S. trailing, but moving forward nonetheless.

That this is no gangbuster recovery in the U.S. is evident from all the cautious comments and qualified statements. ERE member Keith Halperin has amassed a slew of estimates from well-respected sources suggesting it could take years before the 8.4 million plus unemployed are back to work. Scroll down to the comments to see his data points.

The Conference Board’s various surveys shows that confidence in the recovery is shaky and uncertain, even as its Employment Trends Index rises. Consumer confidence dropped big in February, mostly because of fears about job growth. Meanwhile Monday’s Employment Trends Index posted a sixth monthly gain, and the biggest overall percentage gain for a six month period since 1994.

The February rise to 93.5 from January’s 93.2, modest though it may seem, was enough to lead Gad Levanon, associate director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board, to say, “The continued rise in the ETI suggests that job growth is about to begin.”

Are you attending or thinking about attending SourceCon 2010 in San Diego in March?

I am going to be the keynote speaker for the event, and I will be presenting on Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Cognition when it comes to sourcing and matching resumes.

If you’re curious to know what kinds of things I’ll be addressing during the session, here is a sneak peek:

1. The intrinsic and often overlooked challenges associated with sourcing resumes
2. What artificially intelligent semantic search and match applications claim to do and how they actually work
3. The limits of artificial intelligence
4. What people can do that semantic search applications cannot
5. The 5 levels of semantic search
6. The 5 levels of secondary/e-sourcing
7. What I believe would be the ideal candidate sourcing/talent identification solution

If you’ve ever wondered about the fantastic claims that some of the semantic search application vendors on the market make as to how their solution can mimic a senior recruiter when finding candidates, then you will be very interested in hearing what I have to say about the reality of what they can do.

If you’re a sourcer and you’re concerned that your role/position might eventually be replaced by sourcing software, you will be encouraged by my analysis and supporting arguments that explain why the abilities of creative and investigative sourcers will always be in demand – tomorrow and 50 years from now.

I hope you will be able to attend SourceCon 2010 – I know I’m looking forward to it!

If you’re unable to attend, the good news is that the presentations will likely be streamed. Additionally, I plan on posting my expanded slide deck, including all talking points – so you won’t be stuck staring at some pretty pictures wondering what the heck I talked about.

The Massachusetts Offices of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulations (OCABR) has developed regulations that go into effect March 1, 2010 aimed at safeguarding the personal information of Massachusetts residents by requiring a business to have a information security program to protect private information. How does this affect you?

How are HR professionals handling the giving and seeking of employment references in 2010? This interactive post wants your input!

Check out our podcast below which highlights what the regulations entail, who they affect and how companies can get in compliance.

If you are wonky about economic indicators and labor market stats, this is your lucky week. No fewer than than three reports came out today; one came out Monday; a fifth — the highly anticipated monthly unemployment report — is due out Friday morning.

Today’s reports, considered a harbinger of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ unemployment report, are decidedly positive in that “less bad” way we’ve been seeing since late summer.

The most authoritative of the reports came from the Federal Reserve, which reported in its so-called Beige Book that “economic conditions continued to expand” in February, despite severe snowstorms that held back activity.

The book,  a summary of economic conditions in the 12 Fed districts, said consumer spending increased, though the snowstorms had a limiting effect. Loan activity was “soft,” said the Fed. “Most Districts indicated that banks remained cautious about lending.”

Not surprisingly, the Fed reported an uptick in hiring or a slowdown in layoffs in some of the federal reserve districts, but “labor markets generally remained soft throughout the nation, which resulted in minimal wage pressures.”

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas confirmed the layoff slowdown in its monthly report. The firm said U.S. employers announced in February the fewest job cuts in some three years. Employers announced 42,090 job reductions last month, the least since July 2006, and down 77 percent from the 186,350 of February 2009.

“Employers have shifted away from downsizing and are poised to start adding workers,” CEO John A. Challenger said in today’s release of the numbers. “It may be a couple of more months before hiring begins to surge.”

Surge might be an optimistic term. Most labor economists expect hiring to grow only slowly. That belief got some props Monday from The Conference Board’s Help Wanted OnLine Data Series. The series reports the number of new and total jobs posted online each month. For February, The Conference Board said the number of job postings declined by 66,900. According to the data, 3.957 million jobs were advertised during the sample period in February.

A similar analysis by Monster — the Monster Employment Index — is to be released Thursday.

The ADP National Employment Report, based on the payrolls for the millions of workers ADP processes every month, shows nonfarm, private employment dropped by 20,000 workers in February. Another smallest here; the reduction was the lowest in two years.

The ADP report often varies widely from the official BLS report due to the inclusion of government employment and variances in methodology. In the summary, ADP notes that it expects the BLS report to show a larger workforce reduction than its own because of the adverse weather.

These up and down reports, so widely reported in general consumer media, may in part explain one more survey result. Last week’s release of the Consumer Confidence Index showed a sharp drop in February. The Index dropped 10.5 points from the adjusted January number and is now at 46.0.

Says the report: “Those saying jobs are ‘hard to get’ rose to 47.7 percent from 46.5 percent, while those saying jobs are ‘plentiful’ decreased to 3.6 percent from 4.4 percent.”

What do you love and hate about your job in HR? If I never had to deal with benefits and compliance, I would be a happy HR camper. I would much rather spend my time in areas of HR that allow me to say, "Yes!" "Yes, we can do that." "That's not a problem at all." "Let's see how we can make this work."

I have spent days with clients who are struggling to find a balance between the demand being placed on them and the resources they have. While this is a very old story, it is being written in a new way. Prior to this recession, most organizations were willing to add people — whether contractors or regular — without much issue. The focus was on time to fill and perceived quality, not on cost or sustainability.

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

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

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

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

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

How is Your Recruiting Process?

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

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

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

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

Look at Your Team

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

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

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

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

Look at Your Technology

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

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

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

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

Not only do organizations based in the state of Massachusetts need to draft a policy to protect personal information, but any business that has any employee or consumer customer located in Massachusetts.

I saw a tweet this morning:

Coffee is the second largest item of international commerce in the world. The largest is petrol.

It got me to thinking (as many Twitter remarks do). Both are types of fuel and both can be argued to be drugs. My mind raced across the words to pull some lesson about telephone sourcing from them and settled on the fact that “names” are a raw material that, like oil and coffee beans, can be transformed into a commodity that fuels a staffing process like no other activity I can think of. One of the acronyms attached to the word fuel is “combustion.” Raw names can combust your staffing results.

Many years ago, when I first started sourcing, I’d harp and harp at Bob (my husband) that what TechTrak really needed was a database. It would drive me crazy thinking about these “names” I was uncovering on a daily basis and the growing pile beckoned me, over and over, to think about them, almost unceasingly.

“Think about it, Bob! These are names of people in the world somewhere. These people possess valuable skills (raw material) that others can use. The knowledge in their heads is priceless. It’s a shame to let them just fall away without capturing them (and the information they possess) in some sort of database that can be used for other things…” It kept me awake nights.

“But databases are a lot of work…” he’d remonstrate, looking up from the book he was reading. “Who’s gonna put all that info into a database?” he’d demand, adjusting his easy chair. Then, in 2003, LinkedIn launched with the brilliant idea of putting the world to work and one of my reasons for living (to torment Bob telling him so) was born.

LinkedIn is so simple. It’s just a database that collects names using the voluntary efforts of others — the raw material that sits in the ground until it’s pumped out and transformed into a wildly popular commodity. To do this, however, you have to grasp the enormous potential that lies within the raw material and you have to have the skill to unlock it. Most people don’t have that skill: the ability to communicate.

As hard as it is to understand in this day and age of “communication” in one way we are more isolated than ever.

We are more cut off and disengaged than we ever have been before and the very screen you’re reading this on is one of the main reasons. Many of us are kidding ourselves when we sit down at our desks to “get some work done.” What we’re really doing is plugging into a drug of choice that keeps us at arm’s length from dealing with others on a face-to-face basis and, curiously, from dealing with ourselves. It keeps us from looking at that man in the mirror staring back at us. Look closely now. If the light is just right in your cubicle and you look beyond these written words you’ll see your own reflection in the background of this screen. Look closely. Turn off the light. Let your screen go dark. There you are. Here you’ve been, all along, looking out, watching, mimicking, and waiting. What are you looking for? What are you waiting on all this time?

Do you think redemption lies in here? Knowledge? Riches? Peace? It doesn’t. It lies within each and every one of us and in these days that try our souls each and every one of us has an obligation to examine ourselves in the mirror. What we find may be startling. What we find may be alarming. What we find may be what we’re looking for — a just-in-time application that can save all of us from ourselves.

You see, it’s mostly ourselves that gets in our own ways. Some of us are so full of ourselves that we’re too big to fit through the “OUT” doorway that leads us into the dark unknown, the unfamiliar stairwell — the uncharted hallway. It presents the opportunity to meet up with new challenges, new faces, and new opportunities. It’s not comfortable at first to go through that OUT door but through it go you must if you’re going to reach this thing you’re looking for. This thing called transformation. This thing called change.

Most of us must transform ourselves. We must change our thoughts, our behaviors, and our actions into a way of thinking that doesn’t center on ourselves. We must become outer-focused rather than interior-focused. By developing a “what can I do for him/her/them?” mentality our actions will lead us into opportunities that we never dreamed possible. They will lead us to an abudanza of happiness.

I know I’m on a soapbox here and sounding like a brim-and-firestone preacher but what I’m advocating is an approach that will allow us to connect to others — that will allow us to communicate and engage. Being real, being vulnerable ourselves –  it’s a near-irresistible approach to connecting with others. That other person, that “name” that sits in your database and far away on the other end of the telephone, is likely to be filled with the same hangups and fears you are. When you understand this, it’s not such a task to reach out a helping hand.

Our job today in recruiting (as it has always been) is to connect with other people. With the smorgasbord of “names” so freely available today comes a whole (and not-so-new) other challenge — how do we first contact those persons and what do we say to engage them? After all, we don’t “know” this person. What if they say “BOO!”?

Think about it. Don’t we know them? If you look at each and every person on your list and think about what that person’s daily challenges are likely to be, we humanize a part of the process that goes a long way toward reaching out to those persons. It makes it far easier to approach someone recognizing the core of humanity we all share. I don’t know if it was the deaf and blind Helen Keller who said that it’s our infirmities that make us sweeter but I always think of this sentiment when I think of vulnerability. It’s our foibles that make us lovable. It’s our weaknesses that make us sweet. People generally don’t like us because we’re strong. They like us because we’re human.

Ring Ring.

“Hello, Reynolds here.”

“Hello, Jim. My name is Maureen Sharib and I’m calling about an open Director of Manufacturing Engineering position there in Springfield. Do you have a few minutes to maybe talk to me about it?”

“Huh? I’m not looking for a job. Did someone say I was?” sitting up straight at his desk, tucking his legs down to the floor.

“No, Jim. I know you’re not looking for a job. It’s my job to identify people who have the ability to do a specific job and I identified you as being the Manufacturing Engineering Manager there and I was hoping you might have an interest in talking about another possible opportunity in the area.”

“How’d you get my name?” standing and pushing the office door shut with a soft click.

“I identified a list of companies in the same manufacturing space as the hiring company and called each one to discern who the Manufacturing Engineering Manager is in each. That’s how I found you.”

“Oh. That makes sense. Well, can you tell me a little about the job? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep my options open…”

And that’s how it goes. It’s not brain surgery and it’s a pretty enjoyable process once you get into it. Recognizing that your call is coming from a stranger and being attuned to the call-recipient’s possible reactions doesn’t take a laundry list of comebacks. There are only a few responses that you’ll encounter time and time again and once you start your calling, you’ll find your responses come more and more easily to you with practice. Soon, you’ll be excavating the valuable resources of talent that lies within all those names.

The important thing, though, is to get started. Look at that face in the screen, pick up the phone, take a deep breath, and dial. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll go places you can’t even imagine and uncover riches you never dreamed possible. You’ll be hooked on the drug of success.

Spock of Star Trek fame was famous for pointing out things that were completely illogical, which leads me to believe he would have had a field day examining corporate recruiting practices. Of all the things that we do in corporate recruiting that are difficult to logically justify, my vote for the least logical is use of the “best available talent” model. When most organizations characterize their approach, they leave out “available” and say that they recruit the best talent, but the truth is they often hire what they perceive to be the best among the shallow pool of candidates who happen to be looking for a job when the job becomes vacant or is newly created.

Illustrating the Problem and the Opportunity

Two years ago I co-authored a book entitled Catch Them if You Can with Canadian recruiting leader Greg Ford. Greg had the great idea to educate managers about the critical success factors of top talent sourcing by sharing the lessons all great recruiters eventually learn through a narrative rich with fishing analogies.

For this illustration, assume for a moment that you like to fish (this may be easier for some readers than others), and that you have access to a lake that is open year round and regularly stocked by the local fish agency. Using a logical thought process, you have several factors to consider before you head out, one being when to fish. Four options come to mind:

1. Option One — fish whenever you have enough excess cash to pay the fees associated with fishing.
2. Option Two — fish whenever you are hungry and have a need to eat.
3. Option Three — fish whenever there is an abundant supply of fish in the lake.
4. Option Four — fish whenever there is little competition for the fish available.

The first two options are seriously flawed in that both allow you to invest lots of labor trying to catch a prized fish without considering the probability of the prized fish existing in the lake. Without taking into consideration the stock levels of the lake, no matter how good of a fisherman you are, the best you will do is to catch one of the available fish. There is a good possibility that if you waited till you had saved up money or until you were hungry to go fishing, that there would only be small fish remaining in the lake.

The latter two options on the other hand consider what the first two did not. Factoring supply and competition into the equation would lead all great fishermen to conclude that there are narrow windows of time throughout the year when your chances of catching a prized fish would be significantly greater.

Most corporations make the same strategic error as the casual fisherman; they fish in the labor market solely when they have excess funds or when they are desperate for new labor. Like all practices, there are exceptions and companies like Humana and Slide are demonstrating that the best-time approach can be a superior alternative.

Enough about fishing. Let’s look at the “best available” versus “best time” approach a little deeper as it relates to recruiting …

Is The “Best Time” to Begin Recruiting When You Have Extra Budget?

Few recruiters can recruit for a position that isn’t funded, but on the flip side, just because funding becomes available doesn’t mean it’s a great time to begin recruiting. Unfortunately that is exactly what happens most of the time in most corporations. Many managers use the appearance of extra budget dollars to trigger the start of recruiting without ever considering the relative availability of top talent or when application of the talent makes the most sense given their business plan. Managers are not solely to blame, as few finance functions consider top talent investment opportunities when determining when to loosen the purse strings.

In most cases, recruiting functions begin sourcing the moment a requisition is opened, and managers open requisitions as soon as finance will allow them. This approach to hiring is what I call “coincidence hiring,” because it would a lucky coincidence if top talent were available just as you had a budget surplus for hiring. Just as with fishing, no matter how highly skilled a recruiter you are, you can only land top talent when top talent is in stock, not necessarily when you are ready to fish.

Just Because a Vacancy Arises Doesn’t Mean That It’s the Optimal Time to Begin Recruiting

When someone leaves your organization it’s highly probable you will need to replace them, and most organizations will start doing so as soon as the requisition is approved. Obviously, leaving mission-critical and revenue-generating positions vacant can cost you a lot of money, but so too can filling such a role with a weak hire. A superior approach involves using contingent labor and job stretch to cover necessary workloads until such time as the supply of top talent available reaches acceptable levels.

Corporate Recruiting Must Identify the Time Periods Where There Is an Abundance of Top Talent

It’s not logical to assume that the volume of top talent available remains constant throughout the year. If for example you are looking for a great Santa Claus, chances are if you wait till mid-December the very best will not be available. If you are looking to hire a top-performing NFL quarterback, waiting till after the league-mandated trade deadline passes (and trades of quarterbacks between teams are no longer possible) is likewise not a good idea. Talent pools may expand and contract based on numerous factors including the unemployment rate, seasonal trends, mergers and acquisitions, corporate relocations, and the hiring/retention plans of talent competitors.

Once you realize that both the quality and quantity of available talent fluctuate, it becomes critical that organizations establish formal processes to pluck top talent from targeted labor pools when such pools are most likely to be stocked with top talent. There are several approaches you can use to determine the optimal time to raid the pool, including:

1. Monitor the trends of unsolicited applications via your applicant tracking system and develop a relative quality index to determine how volume and quality fluctuate in your geography, industry, or organization. You can also limit your analysis to a consistent market basket of jobs to make time period comparisons easier.
2. Use the same approach as in No. 1, but use resumes scraped from niche and major job boards as your sample.
3. Open a series of market test searches with select third-party agencies to assess the portion of the labor market that is cautiously looking.

Recruit Top Performers When the Competition Is Low

Organizations should shift their approach so that they recruit whenever top talent is available, and when the competition for that talent is low or nonexistent. This approach is known as “counter-cyclical” recruiting. It’s relatively easy to identify when talent competitors are actively recruiting, as nearly all keep up-to-date lists of open requisitions on their website. Obviously, if they have no openings in a particular job and they are not actively recruiting, you won’t have to fight with them over top talent. U.S.-based organizations can also use labor supply/demand indicators like this one available from Wanted Technologies to determine the relative strength of local labor markets compared to other U.S .markets.

A Supplemental Approach — Continuous Sourcing

Even if you have an extremely wide “sourcing window” (the time period in which you are actively identifying potential candidates), you will still miss top talent who are employed and not active in the job market. Because these individuals might be active in a job search only once every three years, it takes a continuous search process to find them. I recommend all organizations supplement routine sourcing activities with continuous sourcing for mission-critical and key jobs. Continuous sourcing focuses on identifying and hiring exceptional talent regardless of requisition status. Essentially recruiters continuously search for exceptional individuals who are currently employed and add such talent to a “most-wanted” database. Relationship recruiting initiatives then cultivate each prospect and monitor for signs that may indicate interest in a new opportunity. The primary idea behind continuous sourcing is the realization that exceptional talent needs to be recruited whenever “they decide” they are available.

Final Thoughts

Even the lamest of bank robbers knows that you time your caper so that the most money is in the vault and the fewest guards are on duty! The “best time” concept discussed here is a proven concept borrowed from marketing and sales. I hope you agree that it is more logical to time your search for top candidates so that it coincides with the availability of a rich talent pool and slim competition. Unfortunately, in my experience, most recruiting functions operate in isolation, and progressive leaders trying this approach in conservative organizations will face an uphill battle getting recruiters to acknowledge the fact that there are indeed peaks and valleys in top talent availability. Even fewer are likely to buy into the concept of timing recruiting so that it occurs when the competition is light.

The best way I know to convince the skeptics is to conduct a split sample. After a while it will be easy to see that the “best time” approach is superior.