HR/Staffing News

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.

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.

Interviews have a big limitation. Everything you learn in an interview comes from the candidate, and as such it’s inherently one dimensional and self-interested. To develop a deeper understanding, you must fill out the picture with third party testimony, or references. References are just as imp...

Is there a "magic" formula for being a GREAT Human Resource Professional? The answer is yes, it is (JGI + TFK + QD + CUX)x C – SUX = GREAT HUMAN RESOURCES. Read more to unlock the code for this formula.

Oregon may be following Hawaii and Washington as states placing limits on the use of credit reports for employment purposes when the Oregon legislature passed a bill and sent it to the governor. The proponents of the bill believe that credit reports are not related to the ability to perform the job, and can be inaccurate and discriminatory. Opponents are concerned that embezzlement will increase and employers risk harmful hiring decisions. Read more about this ongoing issue.

Bill Wall was faced with two choices: take a job he didn’t really find interesting, although he was well-qualified to do it, or continue to try and build up his fledgling Internet design company. In the end he was able to do both by convincing the boss-to-be that he could do the majority of his work virtually and by agreeing to a lesser salary.

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals.

Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to flex to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.

Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that recruiters and human resources are faced with. These have already complicated the employment market, created confusion, and made your job more difficult. There is very little we can do about many of these trends. Others will require you to become more creative and targeted in sourcing. And success in dealing with some may require you to be more persuasive than you have ever been with both your hiring manager and with candidates.

Flexible Working Times

Every one wants to work when they want to, whether that is at night, weekends, or during what we call a “normal” working day. Mothers want time with their children and would like to work when the kids are sleeping or in school. Others are more productive in the wee hours and want to sleep in the daytime. And still others want to vary their schedules depending on their mood or family needs.

Individual contributors who can work alone are most likely to be able to find work with flexible schedules. People who might enjoy such flexibility include data-input people, researchers, web developers, programmers, and others whose work spans time and is done individually.

Some organizations allow flexibility within defined parameters or with prior approval. Only a few are truly open to a varied, unpredictable schedule even if work is done in a timely way and all deadlines are met. My own website is coded and maintained by a person who has a full-time job that gives her flexibility and control over her time.

More firms are offering flexible working times and slowly are focusing on results rather than time as the measures of performance.

It will be tough to convince very good people to work for organizations that do not allow flexible work. Employment branding and messaging should be clear about the time requirements, and you should target an audience where flexibility might not be a critical consideration such younger men and single folks who do not have children or other responsibilities. You can also target baby boomers who have grown up in a business world without flexibility and are comfortable with that.

Multiple Jobs

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines multiple jobholders as people who are either hourly or salary workers who hold two or more jobs, self-employed workers who also hold an hourly or salary job, or unpaid family workers who hold an hourly or salary job as well. Currently official figures indicate that about 5% of Americans fit this category.

Organizations still expect and seek loyalty, even though they have shown their employees little of that when times get tough. Young workers, especially Gen Ys, often do have more than one source of income. They rarely make that public. They know it would be frowned on or even be the reason for getting them fired. There is very little a recruiter can do about this, but if you reject those who you suspect of having multiple jobs you will significantly reduce your candidate pool and the quality of that pool.

Virtual Work

Having employees working from home or from remote work centers is common, and more employers are allowing this due to a variety of converging reasons including the desire to save energy, increased travel times, skill shortages, and a global workforce.

Over the past decade so many companies have encouraged virtual work that it almost expected. People are comfortable working with their laptops and smart phones and have access to Skype accounts and collaborative workspaces. All of these tools make working away from a physical place practical, convenient, and cheap.

There is no doubt that this form of employment will grow rapidly and may make up as much as half the U.S. workforce within a decade.

Generational Mindset

As many have written, there are large differences in attitudes about work and time between the three major generations in the workplace. Baby Boomers (those over 45) are generally traditional and are comfortable with being physically at work, in an organization, and working an 8-hour or longer day.

Gen X (those between 30-45) is also comfortable working in traditional ways, but they are more open to virtual work and demand flexibility for their family.

But Gen Y (those under 30) are the change agents. They do not really want to work for any organization but especially those with layers of hierarchy and reams of policies and procedures. They want flexible, virtual work and are more likely to have multiple jobs. They are the hardest to recruit and the hardest to retain. Yet, they are the future of most organizations as Baby Boomers age and move out.

These are just a handful if the trends that will make your job both more critical to organizational success as well as much harder than ever before. Your only advantage is to be aware and find ways to cope with these trends and the changes they require as soon as you can.

Gail Washington quit her job at a university in Dallas when her boss chose to belittle her, rather than help her solve a problem.

Music Teacher at a Brooklyn preschool must be careful not to say “ladies room” around her politically correct boss for fear the fangs will emerge.

Courtney should have expected problems when she ran into her boss at a party. “Drunk and drugged, Michael passed out into a flower box and broke two of his ribs.”

These are but three of a collection of appalling stories about psycho bosses, unwanted sexual advances, dysfunctional corporate culture, and too-sensitive workers. They appear on the aptly named Jobs of the Damned website. The first two stories are winners of a $200 weekly prize, while Courtney’s tale is on pace to be this week’s winner.

Stories like these pop-up periodically on the Web. Everyone has them.

So, naturally, there are plenty of places to “rate your boss.” A Google search turns up a quarter-million sites where that phrase appears with the first few pages full of places to submit a rating or review. One of the better known is Glassdoor, a site you better check regularly if only to know what your hot prospects already know.

Now, indie publisher Heliotrope Books has decided there’s a market for these stories; enough of a market and enough stories that it has decided to issue a series of books called Jobs of the Damned. The samples above are likely to be among the 200 to appear in the first volume, entitled appropriately, The World’s Worst Bosses.

Heliotrope is collecting these stories via a contest. Each week readers will vote on the best story of the week, which gets $200. Judges will pick the top three stories out of all the submissions. First prize is $2,000.

Before you go writing your own story of a monster boss (mine would be of a CEO who weekly berated his C team in language for which mom would have washed out his mouth with soap), before you go rushing off expecting to win, know that Heliotrope is charging authors $10 for each submission. It’s almost a no-lose proposition for the publisher, which judging from the number of submissions on the website, looks to be almost breaking even on the weekly contest.

There’s no way of knowing how many of the stories are true. Authors can remain anonymous if they choose. Don’t expect, however, that this is the place the disgruntled can get even; no names or other identification is permitted.

There is certainly no shortage of articles written on how to use Twitter, let alone leveraging it for recruiting. 

If you want an ultra-mega-so-huge-you-may-get-lost-in-it Twitter guide check out Mashable’s. If you want something short and concise that will cut right to the heart of how to effectively leverage Twitter for recruiting, read on.

There are various elements of this post that will be of high value to Twitter recruiting n00bs, journeymen, and veterans alike. 

Why Twitter?

Recruiting has always been social – interactions have primarily taken place in person and over the phone. Social media simply enables a third way to communicate: online.

Twitter can be a big deal in recruiting because it enables and facilitates real-time conversations. Facebook does this as well, but the vast majority of people (non-recruiters) use Facebook for communicating  with their friends and family – not so much for professional networking. And while LinkedIn is certainly a social network, LinkedIn’s social functionality isn’t nearly as real-time (e.g., discussions, Q&A).

Essentially, Twitter can be used to do exactly the same thing that recruiters have been doing since the dawn of recruiting - because it enables and facilitates interactive conversations, which are the foundation of relationships.

What Twitter has over in-person and over the phone interaction is that it is less intrusive. Most people would not call or meet with the same potential candidate every day, every other day, or even every week (you would come across as a stalker or stage 5 clinger), but you could have an exchange on Twitter that often with a particular person and no one would think twice about it.

Have a Detailed Bio and a Picture

Having a descriptive bio that allows others to get a sense of who you are and what you do is critical. People search for words specifically in Twitter bios to find others to follow, and they also use bios to determine whether or not to follow you back after you’ve followed them.

Not having a picture is like showing up to a party with a bag over your head. It’s social media – don’t be anti-social. Enough said.

Find and Follow

To have conversations with potential candidates, you actually have to have your target talent pool following you. For recruiters who complain that ”Twitter’s not working for me,” or “I don’t get Twitter” – most of them either don’t have (m)any followers, and/or don’t have anyone in their target talent pool following them.

If you have no followers and you tweet a job opportunity – that’s like going to an empty room and talking about your hiring need – no one is there to hear it!

If you hire mechanical engineers and you don’t have any mechanical engineers following you on Twitter, don’t expect any results – you’re selling to the wrong people!

To get the right people following you, one thing you can do is find people in your target talent pool on Twitter, follow them, and at least some of them will follow you back.

How do you find people on Twitter? Many ways – but here are my top picks:

1. TweepSearch
2. PeopleBrowsr
3. JobShouts Social Search
4. X-Ray Search (e.g., site:twitter.com “bio * * software engineer” “location * chicago”) 

Finding people based on what they do for a living and ideally the general area they live is critical to sourcers and recruiters – and the best way to find this information is to search in bios. All of the above methods do this, while Twitter search does not. Of course, one needs to be particularly thoughtful and creative when searching social media sites, as many people don’t use cookie-cutter terminology that they would in resumes and such.

Remember, when you find and follow someone that doesn’t know you, you can’t expect them to follow you back. The first thing they will do is click on their notification that you followed them and check you out to determine whether or not to follow you back. Typically, no bio/no picture = no follow.

Even with a great bio and an inoffensive picture, they still might not follow you back, because they don’t know you.

The #1 Method for Cultivating a Relevant Following on Twitter

Whenever you speak with a potential candidate, either over the phone or in person, simply ask them if they are on Twitter. If they are, then suggest reciprocal following (you follow them, they follow you).  If they are not on Twitter, suggest that they look into it – and if/when they do, suggest reciprocal following.

Yes, it’s that simple.

People are MUCH more likely to follow you back on Twitter after they’ve interacted with you over the phone and/or in person and have a sense of who you are – you will get a higher conversion rate this way over simply searching for people and following them.

If you talk to 10 potential candidates per day, that would mean 50 opportunities every week to add the right people to your network on Twitter.

Imagine tweeting about a job opportunity for an accountant and you have 300+ accountants in your metro area following you… 

Contribute and be SOCIAL

If you only tweet twice a day and the only things you every tweet are job opportunities, don’t expect a high ROI with your non-social recruiting efforts. Just posting jobs on Twitter isn’t social recruiting.

Sure, you’re a recruiter, and you have job openings, but that should not be the only thing you tweet about. Far from it.

It’s okay to tweet about the weather, your morning commute, the owls you heard hooting in the woods behind your house, last night’s game or the movie you just saw – it’s called “small talk.” Small talk is essentially social lubricant – you’re likely already applying it to every phone conversation and interaction you’re having with your potential candidates, so it’s equally applicable to your online social interactions as well.  Of course, don’t overdo it with the small talk - you also need to provide some value/content that others can use and will find interesting. If all you do is drone on with irrelevant, random thoughts, you will drive away current and potential followers quickly.

Ulitmately, people like helping people they like, and people like people they feel that they know. Your followers can get a better sense of who you are as a person if you actually share something about yourself other than the positions you’re working on. So when you DO have an awesome position you’re trying to fill with the right person, when you tweet about it – if your followers feel they know you, they are MUCH more likely to help you out by either referring people to you or by retweeting your tweet.

Don’t Talk AT People, Talk TO Them

If you see someone tweet something interesting, respond to them. Ask questions of others. Engaging people in two-way conversations is social.

While you can certainly use Twitter to tweet out random thoughts and bits of information into the Twitterverse, you’re only broadcasting - you’re not engaging specific people, which is where the “rubber hits the road” when it comes to recruiting.

Twitter Lists are for Listening

Twitter lists are great, but remember that when you create or follow a list, the people on the list are not necessarily following you back, thus they may not actually “hear” anything you tweet about.

Twitter lists can, however, be useful for finding people in your target talent pool and of course, listening.

Here are my top 2 picks for searching for Lists

1. Listorious
2. X-Ray Searching (e.g., site:twitter.com inurl:engineers list -”This list doesn’t follow any users yet”)

There is at least one app for bulk-following people on Twitter – Twitterator. It can be buggy at times, but I have used it to successfully follow lists of recruiters. 

Final Thoughts

If you don’t have (m)any followers on Twitter who are members of your target talent pool, your Twitter recruiting ROI will likely be nil. Cultivate a targeted and relevant group of followers. 

If there are very few, if any people in your target talent pool using Twitter, Twitter will not be an effective method of talent identification and acquisition for you. Go where the people are.

Be social – be yourself, get to know others, and don’t be just another job opportunity spammer. Contribute, add value, and help others. What goes around comes around.

To that end, when you see a (or are followed by that) recruiter who obviously just started using Twitter, who has no (or a bad) bio, no picture, and/or their first 2 tweets are about job opportunities – please point them to this article to help them use Twitter more effectively for recruiting.

Olympic photo © VANOC_COVAN

You will never become a world-class recruiter if you restrict your learning to benchmarking against other similar corporate recruiting functions. Great recruiters can and do learn many things by studying completely different business functions like sales, marketing, branding, supply chain management, quality control, and customer relationship management. In addition, great recruiters proactively try to learn from non-business industries as well, including universities (top student and sports recruiting), political campaigns, and even cloudsourcing initiatives.

Olympic teams are one of the top five recruiting “centers of excellence” that reside outside of the corporate world. The others include professional sports franchises, entertainment production firms, not-for-profit organizations, and the U.S. military. Even firms considered recruiting superstars like Google, Zappos, DaVita, Deloitte, and Microsoft can learn valuable lessons by studying the recruiting process used by Olympic teams. Obviously these “outside your box” Olympic recruiting strategies and tools must be modified to fit your own business situation, but it takes pure arrogance to automatically assume that great recruiting is restricted to the corporate world.

Narrow-minded People Instantly Dismiss Sports Analogies

Many leaders/managers in HR hate sports analogies; it’s one of the key differentiators between them and other corporate leaders. Maybe it’s because in sports there is such a strong emphasis on competing and delivering results, and softer factors like values, effort, equal treatment, and “giving poor performers another chance” are relegated to the sideline. Senior corporate leaders outside HR realize that success in sports requires more than physical talent. It requires great managers, excellent training, a winning strategy, great tools and technology, and mental toughness. Books written by CEOs routinely include sports analogies, and their speeches are frequently peppered with sports terms like teams, coaching, “crush the opposition,” “give me the ball,” etc. Successful sports heroes and coaches also see the similarity because they frequently write books on leadership targeted exclusively for business consumption.

Olympic recruiters successfully attract the very top performers away from their careers, their families, and even their professional sports team salaries for an opportunity to literally “work for free” in a job with a less than a 5% chance of earning a shiny medal with zero resale value. Whether you like sports analogies or not, the Olympic recruiting model warrants your attention.

Valuable Recruiting Lessons That Anyone Can Learn From the Olympics

The four main lessons that corporate recruiters can learn from the Olympic recruiting include branding, sourcing, assessment, and top grading.

Let’s begin with lessons that can be learned in the area of branding. There are two basic approaches to branding any employer. The first approach is the “what we say” approach. It’s named that because in the vast majority of organizations that employ it the brand position and subsequently all brand messaging is developed by a relatively clueless group of HR committee members who paint the organization as they would like it to exist versus how it actually exists or how it would need to exist to attract the right talent. Organizations practicing “what we say” branding place messages in highly controlled situations including on billboards, paid advertising, glossy brochures, and on corporate websites. The weakness of the “what we say” approach should be obvious…the messages are not credible among the target audience and are dismissed as nothing more than traditional corporate propaganda.

The second approach to branding is the “what others say” approach, where organizations accept that employment brands are developed through direct/indirect experience with the brand, and that the most credible brand messaging is developed and spread by the target audience itself. The Olympic team relies on “others,” namely former Olympians, spreading the word about the prestige of becoming a member of the Olympic team. Their message is spread virally and is not controlled. Just as with any major corporation, some former Olympians share their negative experience. Relying on others to spread your message is cheaper than an advertising-supported approach, but more important, virally spread messages are viewed as more credible, more believable, and more real by the people the brand needs to influence most. (Viral messages are rarely perfect, pristine, PR packaged, fluff pieces!)

The U.S. Olympic Committee has done an exceptional job influencing a brand that positions becoming an Olympian as an opportunity to do “the best work of your life.” As a result, young athletes line up for the chance to become one, often investing every penny earned into training to become even better. Once a team member, they dedicate hours to working hard, often with little or no pay and a miniscule chance of success. A few go on to earn big endorsement deals, but a much larger contingent work hourly jobs with companies like Home Depot to earn a living. In the corporate world, Zappos is a great example of how an employer brand message can be effectively spread using the “what others say” approach.

Olympic Sourcing Excellence

Attracting or sourcing athletes to apply to the Olympic team is also a practice that corporate recruiters should learn from. The Olympic team doesn’t post openings on Monster.com or procure booths at job fairs; instead it uses referrals by current and past team members, and uses sports association teams as farm teams. Olympic recruiters recruit for positions that offer no pay, require hours of intense work, provide few benefits, and offer little chance of reward. (There isn’t much demand for curling champions in the advertising world!)

Olympic recruiters focus on the excitement of the work and the thrill of the competition. They highlight the opportunity to work with and compete against the very best. The pitch is simple: becoming an Olympic athlete isn’t a job, it’s an honor, a privilege, a dream, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In the corporate world, although many know of Google’s free food and perks, it’s actually the excitement and challenge of the work itself that is the most under-sold attribute of the job.

A Candidate Assessment Approach That Everyone Should Copy

The Olympic assessment process for selecting candidates for the team is a process that every corporation should strive to emulate. You can classify the two basic approaches to candidate assessment as either “word-based” assessment or “performance-based” assessment.

Almost all corporate assessment uses the word-based approach. People often use the phrase “anyone can lie with statistics,” but the fact is that most people prefer to misrepresent or lie “with words” as opposed to numbers. The vast majority of corporate assessment processes rely on analyzing words in every stage of the process from resume screening to interview to reference checks. Candidates who successfully use the right words, tell the right stories or give the right examples, are often selected without ever having to prove they are the best performer.

Behavioral interviewing is a commonly used tool that relies heavily on candidates weaving a tale about past reaction to specific circumstances, discounting the multitude of factors that render the circumstances completely incomparable to those the candidate will likely face on the job. Overall, relying so heavily on words to make your assessment probably means that those most skilled in the use of words are likely to get the position, even if the position itself doesn’t require a great deal of wordsmithing.

The Olympic assessment process is superior because its assessments are based solely on performance under actual job conditions. The “job content” or results approach doesn’t care if you are eloquent, if you went to Harvard, if you have 10 years of experience or if your mom is the head coach. You only get on the team if your performance exceeds that of all others. In order to ensure consistent performance over time, some of the Olympic teams even require outstanding performance over a series of events in order to be selected. Because the Olympic assessment approach is clearly laid out in advance (there are no surprises during it), and because it is almost 100% objective, an extremely high percentage of candidates are willing to fully complete the assessment process without complaint.

There are several lessons that the corporate world could learn from this performance-based assessment process, namely:

• Allow zero tolerance for hiring errors. The performance of every new hire must be assessed and a failure analysis must be conducted whenever you hire someone who doesn’t end up performing to team standards.
• Spell out the assessment process so that candidates know what to expect and what is being assessed.
• Use real job content simulations to assess actual probability of performance. Give candidates a real problem that everyone has agreed on in advance as to what constitutes poor, good, or a great performance. The problem should be selected from among those problems that the new hire would face during their first few months. In cases where it’s not possible for safety reasons to put the candidates through an actual problem, verbal simulations should be used to ensure that the candidate can at least “walk you through the complete steps” of an excellent solution. In the corporate world, almost all airlines already assess pilot candidate performance via virtual simulators.

Firms like Toyota and GlobalEnglish make potential hires actually work on problems with a real team. These tryouts serve a dual purpose. They allow the candidate to demonstrate their results, as well as giving the candidate a better opportunity to more accurately know what they are getting into.

“Top Grading” Really Works

In Olympic recruiting and selection the goal is to have 100% top performers in every role.

In the corporate world, “top grading” is the term that many use for this strategy of staffing. A significant number in HR argue against the top grading approach, proposing that it is too expensive, that there are not enough top performers available, or that managing a whole team of top performers is simply too difficult. I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single top performer who doesn’t support a top grading approach where top performers who are also team players are the sole recruiting target. Top performers almost universally want to work alongside and learn from the very best and they see average performers as a distraction from overall team excellence. In the corporate world, Google is the next example of a corporation wanting to put top performers in every role and to drive away average candidates.

Final Thoughts

If you are watching the Winter Olympics, it’s easy to view the games as merely entertainment. However, if you look behind the scenes at the processes that support the teams, you’ll see an extremely sophisticated recruiting approach that rivals any in the corporate world. It’s a long-term process that literally started years ago and that will begin again as soon as the Olympics end. The process is so effective, that in the case of the U.S. team, it will most likely result in the most medals of any team in the world. Their talent acquisition process really is that good and it is certainly worthy of being copied by any corporation that strives to be world-class in recruiting.